We flew into San Jose, Costa Rica’s capitol city, and had a few Imperial beers in the hotel’s open-air restaurant next to the pool. “Who Wants To Be A Costa Rican Millionaire” was playing on the restaurant’s overhead televisions. The show was hosted by a Steve Carell look-a-like, and it was difficult to get very excited about the show because a million Costa Rican Colones is worth about $2,500. US, which is pretty tough to retire on these days!
The next morning I looked out of our room’s sliding glass door at the large tropical courtyard with burnt orange walls and lush green plants and trees. It reminded me of Mr. Sosa’s compound from Scarface except no one was being hung by his neck from a helicopter.
Our travel company’s motto was “You are important to us,” but I think something got lost in translation because they were 45 minutes late on our first pick-up. “Pura Vida,” Our driver said upon arrival. You pretty much can’t turn-around in Costa Rica without some Tico saying “Pura Vida.” It means “Pure Life,“ but it’s kind of like “Aloha” in Hawaii where it means “hello“, “good bye”, “it’s all good,” and apparently, “Sorry for being late.”
An hour into our trip to the canopy cloud forest city of Monteverde, Hugo, our driver, stopped at a little Costa Rican cafeteria where it was so hot and muggy inside, the workers take their break out back in a sauna for some relief. We took our lunch trays filled with empanadas and a wide variety of mostly bland Costa Rican cuisine outside. Not too long after we sat down at a concrete picnic bench, a four foot long iguana ran right next to my foot and climbed a chain link fence onto a corrugated metal roof. We stopped eating to take pictures thinking that this was such a rare experience, only to find out later in the trip that seeing an iguana in Costa Rica is about as rare as seeing panhandler at a gas station at home.
The driving service advertises that the driver will point out wildlife and other points of interest along the way. Hugo was a company man for sure! Several times he stopped to point out howler monkeys, a cappuccino monkey, an iguana, and a toucan. He stopped another time at a roadside mango tree with some ripe fruit hanging about twenty feet off of the ground and proceeded to throw a baseball bat sized tree branch at the fruit until he knock one down. It was too late at that point to tell Hugo that I don’t really like mangos, so I tried the stringy, deep orange fruit. The pulpy strains got stuck in-between my teeth to the point that I needed to floss once I got to the hotel.
“Okay, get ready for your Costa Rican massage,” Hugo said as he pulled off of the two lane paved road for the rocky dirt road for the final 45 minute assent to Monteverde. We arrived, a little shaken at Hotel Ficus, which I called Hotel Feces, due to the ultra-loopy curvy cursive lettering on the sign out front.
The next morning Jackson and I experienced the Monteverde Cloud Canopy from Adventura Park with a zip-lining bird’s eye view. They claim that it‘s “The longest zip line in Latin America,” and they‘ve never lied to me before, so let‘s take them at their word, shall we? The zip line is 1600 meters, and if I’d paid attention in elementary school during the metric system lessons, I could have told you how far that was exactly, but since I didn’t, let’s just say it’s long enough to say a couple dozen “Please God don’t let me fall” prayers.
In the middle of the night I came down with a severe ear ache that Advil wasn’t handling. The ear pain was encroaching over my whole face, and soon my jaw and eye socket were aching too. Thankfully, Beth found some nighttime Tylenol cold medicine which finally gave me some relief. The next morning I went to meet some locals at the Monteverde free clinic. The place needed a paint job, but it had a doctor, or at least someone with a white lab coat who was willing to look inside my ear, offer some Spanglish medical advice, and most importantly prescribe me some pain killers!
We left Monteverde for Arenal volcano area, which meant more “Costa Rica massage” followed by a boat trip across Lake Arenal to our hotel. The hotel had a heated swim-up pool bar with a booze-laden tropical drink on the menu called, “Sex Now!”, for people who, apparently, couldn’t hold their urge until they got “on the beach.”
The next day we took a real Jungle Cruise. When you‘ve worked at Disneyland, as I have, and seen the employee’s break area just over the berm of the jungle cruise ride, you get a little cynical about these kind of things, but this ride was the real deal! “Tio” drove our tour boat and pointed out the wild life along our slow-speed two hour cruise. The highlight was probably watching a monkey hang on a branch over the water dipping his tail in the water and then scurrying back to safety to suck the water out of his tail fur. This was all interesting, but I found myself watching an Alaskan honeymooning birdwatcher tourist with his skintight shirt tucked inside his underwear as he took pictures with his large camouflaged camera lense.
Our last night in Arenal we had dinner in the nearby town of La Fortuna, though I called it LaFawnduh, in tribute to Napoleon Dynamite’s sister-in-law. After dinner we wandered around town shopping. I spotted a t-shirt and backpack in souvenir store proudly stating: “Costa Rica, No Army Since 1948”. I thought it was a little like a home owner being proud of not having a security system or door locks, but whatever gives you national pride I guess, Pura Vida!
We were picked-up the next morning for our longest drive in a midsize black van by Antonio, our sappy-song lovin’ driver, who played four hours of power love ballads from the 1980’s. It might help to preface this story by informing you that I pretty much hate the love ballads of the 1980’s especially anything that came out of the testosterone-lacking, perm-band, Air Supply. We heard “I’m All Out of Love,” and “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” multiple times, and I watched Antonio him in the rearview mirror passionately sing along with each song. He even used one of these songs as his phone’s ring tone. Nearing the end of the ride, and feeling confident that we’d pretty much heard every crappy power love ballad that that decade produced, I was smacked upside the head by the Bonnie Tyler’s torture device known as, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
After a five hour drive, I was so glad to be at our tree house “hotel” near the town of Punta Uva. Punta Uva is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, not far from the Panamanian border, where the dense jungle grows right up to the warm sand. It was a little hot and sticky and I always seemed to be humming, “Welcome to the jungle,” but this would be home for the next four days. We were staying in an open-air tree house built around a cluster of five trees where the only rooms with locking doors are the bedrooms (think Swiss Family Robinson). It’s literally wide-open for any jungle creature to stroll or fly into, and we were about to find out about it.
I’m usually a pretty easy hotel guest, at most I might ask for an extra pillow, but one night before we went to dinner, we stopped and asked the Tree House’s nighttime watchman if he’d come and remove two bats from our bedroom. I thought he’d put on a bee keeper’s suit, and catch them with a butterfly net, but he very casually walked into our bedroom, reached up and grabbed a bat with his bare hand and tossed it out into the night like he was disposing of a cigarette butt.
One night we got caught in a down pour and were completely drenched when we returned to the Tree House. The rain hitting the corrugated metal roof made it sound like we were taking on machine gun fire all night, but it was a pleasant reprieve from the Rainforest Café’s soundtrack that we’d listened to every other night.
Our days there were spent hiking, snorkeling, playing in the waves, and visiting the animal rescue center twice. The kids loved the monkey room where they could pet, play, and cuddle with orphaned monkey babies.
Our last night in Punta Uva the boys wanted to go back to a restaurant we had previously eaten at called Jungle Love (it’s drivin’ me mad, it’s makin’ me crazy) to see their friend Moo, the owner and waiter. When we arrived, Moo was wearing one of those Che Guevara face shirts, which, being a proud capitalist, made me want to leave. Whenever I see people wearing those shirts I always want to say, “Oh Che Guevara today huh, is your Stalin shirt in the wash?” I said nothing, not wanting to debate during dinner or end up with Moo’s “secret sauce” on my tuna steak.
The next morning we were picked up in another van. Every ride so far had been with a different driver, so I was a bit disappointed when I saw that it was Antonio-Romantico. Don’t get me wrong, he was a really nice guy, but how many power love ballads must one traveler endure on a vacation? “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun was his first selection of the trip back to San Jose. This time, not only did he play the songs, but he showed the videos of the songs on a small dashboard television. I hadn’t seen it in probably 25 years, but I laughed out loud at Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” video, where he falls in love with his blind, sculpting student.
The morning we left the Tree House, Beth told me that it could be dangerous to fly with an ear infection, so I started doing some research on-line. I found an advice site where people were telling horror stories of flying with an ear infection. They were using words like: excruciating and phrases such as “it felt like people were sticking knitting needles in my ear.” That’s all I needed to know, so we stopped at a clinica in Puerta Vieja to get checked out. The physicians assistant gave me to okay to fly, and a new prescription for ear drops with painkillers added, Pura Vida!
It was so great to be back in San Jose. Not that San Jose is anything great, it’s not, but I was so happy to be at a hotel room without bridges, roots, tree trunks, and multiple step-ups, all trying their best to trip me. It was nice to not have to sleep under a mosquito net or worry about unwanted visitors in the night.
I usually leave a small tip for the maid when we leave a hotel room, but this time we had nine left over Imperial and Pilsen beer cans, so I built the maid a beer pyramid on the dresser and left a note in front of it that read, “Fiesta! Pura Vida!!”
At the airport, the Costa Rican government bent us over for a $29 per person exit fee to leave their country. We flew home from San Jose to Phoenix (approx 5 hour flight) on US Air’s “Screaming Baby Express”. I had the aisle seat in the second from the back row next to the restrooms. This is a really bad seat! As every full-bladdered passenger waits for their turn at the flying-John, they lean on my seat and then rub their big fat demin shorts-wearing ass against my shoulder to let someone pass. Needless to say, this wasn’t the best flight I’ve ever been on, so I’ll go ahead and add that, contrary to the old “coffee, tea, or me” airlines that exclusively hired nubile stewardesses, US Air seems to specialize in hiring grisly geezer gals as flight attendants, though they do pour a dynamite Ginger ale!
