WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION, PART FIVE
Costa Rica: Transit

Costa Rica is not the easiest country to navigate. Buses are cheap, but the extensive networks are privately owned, each company providing wild variations in quality and comfort. The terminals in San Jose are not centralized, so there is no guarantee that the one you show up at is going to offer service to the location you wish to travel. Some routes are overcrowded, such as the one we took originally from San Jose to Tilaran, and few buses are air conditioned, a deficiency that led to me picking road gravel out of my teeth and wiping a layer of dust off my glasses, courtesy of the open window on our trip from Monteverde back to San Jose. Further, the bus drivers are maniacs: apparently convinced that their monstrous vehicles have the maneuverability of mopeds, they dart in and out of traffic, pass in no-passing zones, and take mountain curves like a tilt-a-whirl. Despite these hair-raising exercises, bus journeys can take hours longer than advertised, leaving weary passengers (or, at least, this weary passenger) feeling as if they have been through a clothes dryer.

After our last such excursion (from Monteverde to San Jose), with another one twice as long planned for the next day (from San Jose to Golfito, on the southern Pacifc peninsula), Rob and I unanimously decided to forego the planned bus adventure for the imagined comfort of an airplane trip that lasted only one-eighth as long. The only problem was, there were no tickets to be had for the day we needed to go. Rob made arrangements for the next morning, but that left us with an unexpected free day in San Jose. In our room at the Hotel Santo Tomas, we made the mistake of watching a few moments of CNN, but the announcers were so wild-eyed and maniacal, and the commercials so bent on manufacturing hysteria, that I could bear no more. Having not been exposed to that sort of thing for two weeks, I spent the rest of the afternoon in a haze of anti-American despair, not suspecting how much the next day would have me craving the infrastructure of the good old red, white, and blue.

Our flight to Golfito was at six the next morning, and we woke up at three (the clock in the room was an hour fast; we thought it was four). We commissioned a taxi to take us to the airport, and the driver dropped us in the desolate parking lot of a nondescript building, where we awaited the rising of the sun and the unlocking of the doors, both of which occurred promptly. The first sign of impending doom came when the agent asked Rob and I how much we weighed, and then weighed our bags on a big scale. I thought nothing of this at the time. After an hour, they took our luggage away, and Rob saw the crewman load them on our plane. “We’re on the small plane,” he said. Having arrived in the country on a jet the size of a 767, I thought they all looked small, but not that small. I have flown a lot of commuter airlines in my day.

When our flight was called, I saw a group of people getting on a small plane and went to follow them. “David,” Rob said, “we’re on the small plane.” He gestured toward something I had originally dismissed as a novelty attraction of the sort one operates with coins outside the grocery store. It had stubby wings and propellers and was slightly smaller than my Volkswagen Golf. Having taken a Dramamine after awakening at three in the morning, I once again had descended into a trance and somehow allowed myself to be ushered into the model airplane. Rob and I were told to sit in the back, and we had to climb over two fold-down seats to get there, as if we were entering a coupe (a small coupe). The plane had six seats, one of which was occupied by the pilot. So much for beverage service, and I highly doubted if my threadbare seat cushion doubled as a flotation device.

Entirely too soon, we took off.

It actually turned out to be quite exhilarating, but rising to cruising altitude was a terrifying jaunt only Space Mountain could prepare me for. Clinging to the seat (and to Rob), I wondered if the bus could have been that bad after all. As things smoothed out, however, I became entranced by the scenery. We flew over the green mountains and down the coast, and I could see waves crashing on the unspoiled shore not all that far below. The unpressurized cabin played havoc with my congested sinuses, but other than that, it was an experience I would gladly repeat under the right conditions.

Upon coming in on what was essentially a gravel landing strip carved out of a jungle that seemed eager to reclaim it, we were met by a man sent by our hotel (at that point, I was still expecting something resembling a hotel) to ferry us over. We took a cab to his boat and were soon speeding over the bay and then through a narrow river lined with low-hanging branches. Rob and I smiled at each other, and I couldn’t help but think how far we had come, both in distance and in spirit, from our home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The river opened up into another bay, and we docked on the far side, where our boatman became our chauffer. He ushered us into his pickup truck and drove us past a small clump of shacks (which he called “downtown”). Then we headed down a narrow, rutted, muddy track (which he called a “road”) for a few kilometers until we got to our “hotel” for four days, and I instantly began counting the seconds until our spine-tingling flight back to the capital city.