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DAYS 0 - 3: San Jose & La Fortuna

Posted by Erik Frey Thu, 17 Mar 2005 03:06:00 GMT

The beginning.

day 0

I showed up at Hostel Pangea a little shell-shocked. I’d walked in, paid $9 for a bed, and I had no clue what to do or where to go next. So I reacted automatically – I put my bags down in my room, made some polite conversation with my rommates, and walked right back outside.

Once outside, I realized I still didn’t know what to do. My watch reported 7:00, and I decided 7:00 was a time for one to eat dinner, so I walked around looking for a casado. It was only as I sat down with jamon con queso, started eating, and saw the street life in front of me that I stopped and took a breath. Immediately after I took another breath.

day 1

Last night I met a guy named Jean. I walked into my dorm in the early evening and found him reading a book with his headlamp. In contrast to my slightly frantic state, he seemed almost unnaturally at ease. He was an old pro, having partied his way all around Costa Rica for more than a month. I spent some time with him in downtown San Jose that evening, but came back much earlier than him. He stumbled into the dorm sometime before dawn.

Today I walked down to the center of town and had many opportunities to work on my Spanish. Every single person I spoke to on the street was not only helpful with directions, but incredibly polite. I managed to find a travel agency and bumble my way through purchasing a ticket for censored next month.

Afterwards, I spent some time people-watching at the Plaza De Cultura, sort of a large cobblestone square with Costa Rica’s capitol buildings as the backdrop. Women were hawking birdseed, and children were running around the square throwing seed to hundreds of pigeons that swirled around the ground like a feathery fog. At one point, a little girl ran up to me and dropped a handfull of seed at my feet. The fog cooed and swirled beneath me. The sun was setting and I felt at peace.

day 2

The bus trip started out like the rest of my San Jose experience – hot, crowded, and noisy. The scenery changed from city to suburban, to rural, to mountains and rainforest with this incredibly thick fog that rolled and misted and blocked out the sun. It was cool, almost cold, and the mist that billowed in through the windows made my face damp. The jungle was rich and dense, and as we pushed into it I could almost feel the weight of the city sloughing off my shoulders.

During the ride, I sat next to a little girl with a beat up cardboard box in her lap. A few minutes after she sat down, I heard a strange warbly yelp. I looked around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then I heard it again, this time a long, tremulous whine. I followed the sound to the little girl’s box. She had her hands on the top of the box and the lid was bouncing up and down. Soon after, a furry puppy head poked out and looked right at me.

We descended again into a valley that flattened out into sunny banana plantations, and finally arrived in the small town of La Fortuna. I got out and looked around. I was once again in completely unfamiliar surroundings with no idea what to do, but this time much more at ease.

Strange how as soon you stop caring so much about your situation, opportunities appear. Minutes after arriving, I saw Bryan, a guy I hung out with in San Jose, walking across the street. He greeted me excitedly and started showing me around La Fortuna. My first priority was to find a place to stay, and I ended up at Gringo Pete’s, a fantastic hostel run by a loud but gregarious expat from Washington State. The hostel was chock-full of interesting, friendly travellers.

• Here I met Dan, Emily and Adrilyn. Dan filled my head with an incredible amount of advice regarding Costa Rica, and the three of us made plans to hike Calle Chato the next day.

• An old French woman told us stories about beating her chest and hollering like a gorilla to scare off would-be muggers

• Later that night, a bat flew in through the window and whooshed around our heads before flying back out.

Had it not been for Dan, I may have found La Fortuna only a charming mountain town nestled among mountains and rainforest, instead of a truly excellent and wholly fulfilling destination. Dan showed me some of the great places to eat in town just blocks off the main tourist strip – really my kind of food, too. You can get a casada (the Costa Rican version of a huge plate full of down-home cooking) for 1000 colones, the equivalent of about two dollars. He also introduced me to all the good local snack food, like Chiky’s cookies and these sinfully good icecream sandwiches called Trits.

In the evenings, the locals set up a bingo joint in the central square, and you can stroll along at your leisure, munching ice-cream or grabbing groceries, as you hear the faint call of the old lady calling into the speakerphone, “veinte y ocho! veinte y ocho! ... quince!”

day 3

Today, the four of us hiked out to Cerro Chato, a lake in the crater of a dormant volcano. Right next to it was Volcan Arenal, very much not dormant, and from the top of our hike we could see the smoke billowing off lava flows coming down just kilometers away.

A dog took interest in us on our way up the hike and ended up serving as an overly enthusiastic guide. He’d run up the trail and then run back to us, tail wagging, trying to get us to hurry up. The view from the top of the crater was stunning, and to make things even better, Dan and I scrambled our way down into the crater and skipped stones on a small beach at the edge of the lake.

On our way back down, we stopped at a hammock shop where a few laid-back Ticos showed us how to make a hammock and taught us some local slang. And who did I see lounging on the floor inside but none other than our guide dog! We learned his name is Flaco (Spanish for ‘skinny’), and the propieters all laughed when we told them he’d run up and down with us on our hike, saying “So that’s why you’ve been so lazy all afternoon, eh Flaco?”

After that we hitchhiked on the back of a friendly fellow’s pickup truck to some waterfalls where a lively mix of locals and travellers were doing wild stunts, swinging from ropes off a cliff and landing in the water far below. After the long muddy hike, diving into the pool there was ridiculously refreshing. From there we walked back into town and had another good dinner. I had my first jugo de mora (kind of a juice made from raspberry) since my last trip to South America, and they are just as good as I remember. We came back to Gringo Pete’s full of food and pleasantly exhausted. I had no problems falling asleep.