Pawning Off Lisa on the Beaches of Manuel Antonio

A wave of pleasure melted over Lisa and I as the palm-fringed coastline of Quepos swept into view beyond the window of our bus.  But in all honesty, this was moreso because we had had the not-so-good-sense to mix a excruciatingly potent cocktail less than halfway through the three hour journey from Puntarenas and were now both slightly drunken and extremely in need of a restroom.  However, it was also true that we were perfectly delighted to be arriving, and once we had thrown ourselves out of the bus in Quepos and taken care of our business, we were finally able to slow down and count our lucky stars that we were finally here in paradise, it wasn’t raining, and we had plenty of time to soak up some tropical sunlight and sunset cocktails before having to head back to San Jose the following evening for Lisa’s flight.  Need I mention that by this stage in our journey foolish optimism had developed into a necessary self-preserving strategy, but as always turned out to be the most supreme form of self-deception as Costa Rica dropped the floor out from beneath us once again and sent us tumbling head first through its own plan.

Once again I found myself sitting on that same little shuttle through the coastal jungle from Quepos to Manuel Antonio, the bus painfully groaning up the torturous hill before arriving at the ridge.  I had made a few friends here in these parts during my week-long stay with Kevin and Willie, and so as we were passing the familiar yellow restaurant along the roadside, Lisa and I hopped out.  We went in to see Jim, whom I had called from the Quepos bus terminal, and had good-naturedly agreed to assist us in searching for a place to stay for the evening.  After a warm welcome, introductions, and quick recap of Lisa and I’s romp throughout the country, we loaded into Jim’s car and, as Lisa and I didn’t particularly have the vitality or desire to spend the rest of the afternoon searching for hotels, we found ourselves quickly settling into the first little beachside shack of a hotel that we encountered.

I had seen the place upon passing on my previous visit to Manuel Antonio, but hadn’t thought much of it – and for good reason.  Although the management was wonderfully friendly, and the location one minute from the beach was impeccable, the room was little more than a damp closet with a musty bunkbed and a spiggot in the bathroom for showering.  Nevertheless, not desiring to waste one moment, we settled into the room, agreed that we would meet Jim that evening for dinner followed by a night on the town, and then bid him adieu.  There wasn’t much reason to linger about our “inviting” accomodations and Lisa and I were ready to go out and grab life by the horns while things seemed to be going our way, so we quickly changed into our bathing suits (Lisa’s suit even more sumptuous this time than the last – clearly a souvenir from the beaches of Brazil) and headed for the beach.

It was mid-afternoon and the tide was just pulling up to its highest point as Lisa and I emerged from the path through the coastal underbrush.  The waves were poetically languid, rolling curves that crashed almost at the tree line, and being hypnotically allured towards them, we almost instantly had our sandles slipped off and were frolicking in the breakers.  Ah sweet serenity, here we were together on the beaches of paradise.  We splashed sea-foam at one another and flung ourselves mercilessly at the waves for the next two hours and commiserated as to the lack of sunshine (as it was a somewhat hazy yellow afternoon), but thought joyfully as well of tomorrow and the long hours of enviable tan-time that Manuel Antonio would show Lisa before sending her on a plane back to the States.  Around the same time that we were beginning to weary of the taste of salt-water in our mouths and the abrasion of sand against our backsides, we began to hear the first earth-shattering cracks of tropical thunder.  It appeared to be a sign, and upon recovering our sandles, Lisa and I made our way back along the short path to the hotel to get rinsed off and weather the storm.

We had intended to just spend some down-time reading and chatting until the rains petered off, but as the gentle sound of the pattering rain enveloped us, we found ourselves drifting off into a sweet slumber, snuggled up together amidst the lullaby of million crickets.  When I lethargically came too it was already dark outside and I had the nagging feeling that there was something that I was forgetting.  When the blue light of cell phone shone to life, illuminating the time – 9:15pm – I instantly realized that we were supposed to have met Jim for dinner almost two hours earlier!  I shook Lisa awake mercilessly and prodded her until she had had regained lucidity.  But after breaking the news to her, she rationalized that by this point it would do us no good to try to race to the restaurant, as almost every place in town closed its kitchens by ten in the evening, and instead I called Jim to let him know what had happened to to inform him that we would meet him a little later to head out and hit the bars.

Fortunately, once we had gotten ourselves mobilized, Lisa and I did manage to satiate our burning hungers after searching high and low for a restaurant that was still serving, and then headed out to meet Jim and his friends to kick up our heels one last time before Lisa’s return to Atlanta.  It turned out to be a first-rate night of diversion and Lisa and I found ourselves shakin’ it well into the wee hours of the night.  While we were there we even made a few friends, a few of whom, I could never have known at the time, would soon become repeat characters in the drama that is my life.  However, even in our “slightly” tipsy state, we nevertheless kept our eyes focused on the prize, which was to drag our bleary eyed selves out to the white sandy beaches of Manuel Antonio at the crack of dawn and enjoy every last moment of togetherness that we could – oh, and while getting a tan.

Unbelievably, as if to put the frosting on the cake that was our week in Costa Rica together, the most unprecedented and outlandish of all the weeks surprises came right there in our last moments together.  Lathered up in sunscreen, riding on cloud nine, and making our way out to the hike through the monkey infested jungles of the Manuel Antonio National Park to the pristine beaches that awaited us on the other side, Lisa and I suddenly remembered something.  We had heard that occasionally the buses from Quepos to San Jose would tend to fill up on Sundays as the day progressed, and thinking ourselves quite prudent, we decided to see if we could buy our bus tickets for that evening before the crowds.  Although the terminal was way over in Quepos, we figured that we could get the telephone number and see about booking our ticket.  However, bad news awaited us.

A young American girl sat at a tourist stand amidst the breachfront restaurants, and, among other things, showed a sign for transport to San Jose.  We approached her to ask if she might know how we could contact the terminal in Quepos and she obligingly began to look up the number, although informing us that they probably wouldn’t take a reservation over the phone.  However, a few minutes later as she hung up the phone we were left there standing in shock.  Every bus, not only today, but for almost all of Monday was completely booked as well.  Ok, well, no need for alarm, there must certainly be other transport options.  However, it didn’t take long for us to discover that almost all of the other options jumped from the seven dollar fare of the regular bus up to almost seventy dollars for the “luxury” Interbus rates.  Whoa!  That was way out of our budget.  However, after fifteen minutes of fretting and uncertainty, we wondered if that might be the only option.

So we asked her about what times these Interbusses departed for San Jose and she made another call.  Well, time for more surprises, not only were these shuttles outlandishly expensive, but they were also all completely booked that day!  Ok, well at this point we were basically what my friends in Mexico would call chingada.  It looked like it was time for plan B… sadly though, Lisa and I didn’t usually get that far in our planning.  We thanked the sweet girl from the tourist desk for all of her help and then walked aimlessly down the boardwalk debating over what we should do.  Lisa’s flight would be leaving that evening, it was the last one of the day to Atlanta, and to change it would cost her a hundred dollars – almost the entire price of the ticket in the first place.  But there had to be another way!

Then it struck me, a stroke of brilliance!  There must be some random strangers here who were on their way back to the capital, after all, during this time of the year (the gringo low season) almost all of the tourists that were there that weekend were probably from San Jose anyway.  So I set to brainstorming on the best approach strategy and just which strangers had the most benevolent look about them.  And that’s when I spotted them, a group of young gentlemen whom we had seen the night before.  Sadly, we hadn’t been engaged in conversation with them or anything convenient like that, but after a few minutes of deliberation we agreed that without a shadow of a doubt (at least that’s what we told ourselves), they looked at least vaguely familiar.  Feeling their buenas ondas (good vibes), I decided to chance it and Lisa and I made our way over to their table at the edge of a restaurant patio.

You can probably imagine the ensuing conversation as Lisa and I, dressed in our skimpy bathing suits (Lisa), approached them and began asking them for a three hour lift back to the city.  At first they weren’t quite receptive to the idea – shocked might be a better word for it – but for the first time in the entire week we had a marvelous stroke of good luck.  One of the guys had lived in Brazil for a time and spoke Portuguese – and so had Lisa!  That was all it took, just the one connection and we had our foot in the door (hey, I’m from Brazil too, but my Portuguese is a little rusty these days), and within a few more minutes they had agreed to transport us back to the big city.  There was only one more small catch, they were riding in a little four door compact and I suddenly remembered that I had my bike stowed with friends here in Manuel Antonio and had to get it back to San Jose with me.

As it were, due to this one confounding variable, a short while later I found myself not sitting alongside Lisa and our three new friends on the way to San Jose, but instead giving her a big hug and wishing her a bon voyage as I gift wrapped her and sent her packing with three complete Costa Rican strangers.  It crept up on me rather unexpectedly, but there I was, left standing on the roadside, alone once again, and suddenly a pang of sadness crept over me.  I wasn’t too worried about Lisa, the young gentlemen had seemed completely harmless, but I was sad to see her go, and it wasn’t quite the departure that either of us had envisioned.  Not feeling much enthusiasm to head out to the beach alone and not sure of what to do, I decided that instead I would head over to Kurt and Linda’s bungalow (my Manuel Antonio ex-pat buddies who were sheltering my bike for me) and see if perhaps they were around and could lift me out of my somber state of mind.  As I made my way in their direction, it began to completely settle in that now everyone was gone and I was indeed by myself again, but as I began to come to terms with my renewed state of solitude, I also began to feel the pulse of energy and excitement for the journey before me and found myself ready to jump headfirst into it – only this time with a painfully drawn out detour in San Jose.

Romantic Evenings in Puntarenas and Alluvial Memories from Monteverde

Oh sweet reprieve!  At long last Lisa and I were able to pull the nails from our skulls that the busfull of Costa Rican children had hammered into our skulls during the fifty stop, twenty hour ride (or at least thats what it felt like) from Alajuela to Puntarenas.  Clearly we had no idea what we were getting into as we had eagerly hopped onto the next bus heading Northwest after finding out that we had missed our Monteverde directo.  Lisa and I had nearly done one another the favor of slitting each other’s wrists during the ride out (did I mention that sitting in vehicles for long hours is my weak spot?) and were just so glad to be off the bus and one step closer to our next destination, way up high in the verdant Costa Rican mountains.  But as our eyes adjusted to the flat, sandy, sketchy looking streets of Puntarenas, we couldn’t help but wonder just how near to those green mountains we actually were and if perhaps we had just jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Furthermore, the question of just how far awry our luck had fallen, and just what other surprises lay in wait for us during this chapter of our journey, loomed ominously before our curious minds.

Bahh!  But Lisa and I were no pessimists!  Realists? Yes.  Satyrists?  Yes.  But we were two of a kind and we were well equipped to roll with the punches and laugh at the tragic irony of our situations, then forge onward in search of some new predicament in which to place ourselves.  Fortunately for us, the next predicament lay only several paces before us.  Dropped unceremoniously on a street corner, in a rough part of town, well after recommended gringo strolling hours, we quickly began to make all kinds of new friends.  A dark-skinned, haggard and slavish character almost broke into a run to greet us upon spotting us on the far street corner.  Although he didn’t particularly look threatening, he did seem to have aquired a rather pungent smell from the streets of Puntarenas as well as a well practiced used-car-salesman quality about him.

Upon reaching us he instantly brandished a worn and greasy deck of business cards for nearby “hotels” (which were apparently arm-pits of purgatory) and then buzzed around us like a bee on honey.  We tried to dismiss the tawdry character as he desperately tried to wow us with his endless knowledge of the who’s who of the apparently complex world of Puntarenas hoteliers, but as Lisa and I cast one last knowing look at one another, we knew that it was useless.  So the three of us set off together, skipping down the yellow brick road past hookers, trannys, drunken sailors, beggars and crack addicts – and at least one thing was clearly apparent, we certainly weren’t in Kansas anymore (although perhaps it could have been Atlanta).

An hour later, after having narrowly escaped what was probably the ripest of settings for getting mugged of all of my journey through the Americas (Lisa and I lugging her rolly through the darkened streets of seedy Puntarenas), and after having visited some of the most repulsive, windowless, prison-cell barred “hotels” of Puntarenas, we finally lost our new friend and stumbled upon a rather warm and inviting guest house.  You can imagine the level of delirious hilarity that we were in as we collapsed on top of the bed in our cozy room, reeling from the day’s unusual trials and still sticky from the sultry coastal air.  Finally we got to showering, braved the streets of Punatarenas by night once more, and scurried discreetly down the street for some cheap late-night chinese food.

The following morning we were up at the crack of dawn and arrived well before the departure time (for a change) for our bus to Monteverde.  As we sat on the benches by the terminal listening to the gently lapping waves on the stretch of golden sandy beach behind us, watching children playing by the surf and the sun rising slowly on the horizon, we ruefully agreed on just how much we were going to miss Puntarenas – then broke down into ironic laughter.  When the bus arrived and we had stowed our luggage and climbed aboard, I sat somewhat anxiously dreading yet another bus ride, but reassuringly remembered that on the map it appeared that we were not entirely very far from Monteverde.  Yet to my unpleasant surprise, I discovered that our “collectivo” would in fact loop all the way around the far side of our destination, passing through other remote and indistinct Costa Rican villages before pointing for the mountains.

Now, although I do make it all sound perhaps more unpleasant than it was (which is really just the fault of my vehicular claustrophobia), I must admit that the drive through the Costa Rican countryside, under frilly, dancing canopies and over deliciously spiraling green mountains into the heavens, was in fact one of the most scenic of all Costa Rica.  However, not to disappoint us, lady destiny unleashed the showers only as we were finally reaching our destinations after our four hour journey.  Well this was most certainly convenient, here we were in a minute mountain village where almost all activities were relegated to the great outdoors, we had less than twenty-four hours to revel in the rumored natural beauty, and there was a steady, persistent deluge hovering right over us.  In just the brief moments that it took us to sprint from one side of the street to the other, were conveniently a hostel was located, we managed to become completely drenched, and after checking-in, headed for a nice hot shower.

When we reconvened in our comfy bunk-beaded room overlooking the overcast street outside, Lisa and I had a dilemma to face.  We were here, our precious little hours were slipping away, and the rain showed no sign of repenting.  Finally, after Lisa had presented her pitiful plea, I put on my happy face, agreed that she undoubtedly suggested the most practical and logical plan, and we headed downstairs to catch the van to the Santa Elena Reserve.  For the next three hours, as we trudged through the rainforest, saturated through to our underwear, we both tried desperately to put on excitedly enthusiastic facades, as we squinted our eyes dramatically and stopped to pretend to listen carefully for sightings of rare cloud-jungle fauna.  Nevertheless, as I tried to keep my positive attitude, and did truly enjoy the outlandish adventure, I couldn’t help but let my little ribbons of comedic sarcasm slip through as I schlepped along in my squelching, waterlogged sneakers, once or twice prodding Lisa as to why they called it a rain forest.

However, once we were again back in the lodge, warm-showered, in dry outfits, reclining on our bunks, we did agree that we had made the right decision and had both really enjoyed our “moist” hike.  It had been even more of an adventure as we had tip-toed precariously on top of narrow logs over lakes which had formed in our path, sloshed downhill through tiny raging rivers that flowed along the trail, and had enjoyed the lush jungle  scenery, sparkling amidst the billions of tiny waterdropplets that coated the thick foliage.  We also couldn’t help but to look back at our race through the last half an hour of the hike, as we had almost literally gone at a run along the path, wondering if we would actually make it back to our transport before its scheduled departure time, and dreading being stranded in the drenched forest for another three hours until the following one would arrive.

Lisa and I were thoroughly knackered by the time that we had ventured out for a quick bite and the search for our breakfast yogurt (during which I had to put my foot down that we most certainly would not be buying plain yogurt – I’m more of a strawberry kind of guy), and retired back to our welcoming little hostel bedroom.  Now, if we thought that we had gotten up early on the other days of our journey in order to catch departing buses, none of it quite compared to the following morning, as we dawned at four-forty-five to board our outbound to the coast at five in the morning… but thankfully set sail from outside our window.  Ironically, almost exactly twenty-four hours after having left the charismatic town of Puntarenas, Lisa found ourselves once again pulling in.  This time we had a two hour layover before catching the next ride down to the central Pacific coast and hoped that that would be more than enough time to truly explore the well hidden beauty of the slightly rough-edged town.  And, as our two hours dwindled away and we found ourselves once again sitting on that same bench with the sounds of the gently lapping waves drifting on the breeze, I only hoped that the romantic image of Manuel Antonio which I had painted for Lisa over the past few days would indeed meet her expectations and that we would finally find ourselves completely relaxed and luxuriating in the lap of paradise.