Costa Rica, Mid-70s

Trip Report
Costa Rica, mid 70s

So, there I was, sitting at the bar minding my own business. The party had broken up earlier and all the good people had gone to bed. It was our last night in Costa Rica and the tour group had gone out for a big dinner celebration complete with a mariachi band. I was having one last beer before heading up to bed. The guy sitting at the end of the bar wasn’t quite ready to call it a night either and we started talking. It turns out neither one of us was particularly fond of the hotel bar so off we went looking for another cantina.

By the third or fourth cantina, Jimmy was eager to try out his Spanish language skills on some of the local women and I went along for the ride. We met a couple of young ladies with limited English and hit it right off. Mixing with the locals often ends up badly and this time was no exception. I missed whatever happened while I was in the can but when I came out Jimmy had his head out the window screaming for the police and the girls were scrambling out the door.
It was getting late by then but Jimmy was still determined to make a night of it. The cab passed through an area where there were a lot of young ladies hanging out on the corners. Jimmy took a wad of bills from his pocket, threw them on the front seat for the cabbie and bailed out of the cab. As we pulled away the cabbie laughed. We were in the District of the Fallen Flower where, as the cab driver explained to me, the women weren’t women but hombres. Jimmy was in for a surprise.

The cab driver and I were getting along OK so we went to a downtown cantina for a nightcap. Between his four words of English and my four words of Spanish we managed to drink beer and tell stories for a few more hours. That’s when I noticed that the sun was up and there were people in suits walking the sidewalks. It was 7:30 in the morning and the bus was picking me up at the hotel at 8:00 for the trip to the airport and home. We hopped back into the cab.
I think the driver was drunk because he was all blurry. I managed to slam my hand in the cab door as we took off from the alley behind the cantina. We pulled into the hotel lot and almost hit the bus that was waiting for the tour group. I said goodbye to my new friend and got out of the cab with blood dripping down my arm from the cuts on my hand. The rest of the group was ready to go. Compared to me they all looked perky, well rested, clean and ready for the trip home.

All of that rushing was for nothing. There was a shortage of airplane fuel at the airport so we sat for hours in the lobby of the hotel. Our rooms had been given to the people who flew in to replace us that morning. We ended up boarding the plane in mid-afternoon and flew south to Panama where we fueled up for the trip north to Vancouver. We were taking the long way home.

I had arrived in Costa Rica two weeks earlier. The plan was to spend a week in San Jose and week on the west coast in the small town of Jaco Playa. The hotel in San Jose was clean enough and there were lots of cantinas within walking distance so I was happy. Tourism was just opening up in Costa Rica and the people we met were friendly and helpful. The city children appeared to be well fed although there were hundreds of them sleeping in the streets and the parks. There was some begging but mostly the children would sing or dance for spare coins.
We took a day trip to the east coast city of Puerto Limon. The train to Limon was an older narrow gauge train that stopped for anybody standing on the side of the tracks, mostly farmers with a sack of coffee beans but occasionally little children who would sell chicklets and chips to the passengers and then get off at the next stop. The trained rolled through windy valleys cut in the low mountains. There was lush, green growth as far as the eyes could see, with coffee and banana farms crowding the railway. We hopped off of the train whenever it stopped in a village and bought cold beer to drink on the train. We would buy it from the cantina closest to the train station and always had difficulty explaining that we needed that many bottles of beer and that they were to go, not to drink in the cantina. I learned the phrase ”No par aqui” on this trip.

Puerto Limon was a depressing place. The town looked like you would expect with narrow streets and pastel colored buildings but the people were sullen and rude. Most of the young men in the port worked as sailors and had seen some of the world and what they saw at home lacked in comparison. We only had a brief ride through the port area and we were off to the airport for the ride back to San Jose.

The plane we were to ride on was a 1941 Curtis that had seen better days. The flooring looked like plywood and the chairs were simply bolted to the flooring. Two oscillating fans on the forward bulkhead provided ventilation. The prop engine on my side of the plane poured out black smoke but the other engine seemed OK and we roared off down the runway. Despite all the noise, the plane could not make liftoff speed so we slowed, turned around and tried again. After three failed takeoff attempts we were informed that we had to disembark so that they could do some maintenance on the plane.

We got off of the plane and stood on the side of the runway as the plane tried to take off once again. This time it was successful and it flew in a large circle, landed and pulled up in front of our group. No mechanic had come near the plane but the Captain declared it fit to fly and we got back on. The plane did lift off on this fourth attempt and we were off to San Jose. By the time we landed in San Jose I could not see out the rear windows on my side of the plane. The last thing I saw out the windows before they were covered in black oil was flames pouring out of the engine.

We heard that the next day’s tour group to Limon had to take the train back from Limon as the plane would not fly, no matter how many times they tried to take off.

I was running out of money right about now. This was way before international access to ATMs and back when American Express Travelers Checks were the vehicle of choice for travelers. I found the local American Express office to buy more travelers checks and was told that they didn’t have any. The office had sent a courier to get some but he hadn’t shown up yet. I asked when he would arrive and that is when I first understood the full impact of the expression “manana” or “tomorrow”. It is like the Arabic expression “ins’ allah”. It means maybe or maybe not, nobody really knows and nobody cares to get more definite. The courier never did show up.

Jaco Playa was a beautiful small village on the west coast of Costa Rica. The beaches were black sand and dense forests backed to the beaches. The hotel was fairly new and had some grass huts down on the beach. We never strayed far from the beach or the hotel for the week we were at Jaco. There simply wasn’t anything to see or do. The eco-tourism boom hadn’t started so Jaco was just a small beach town in the middle of nowhere.

The walls in the hotel rooms did not go all the way down to the floor, nor did they go all the way to the ceiling. There was a six inch gap that allowed the cool ocean breezes to flow through the rooms. The gap also allowed the bugs and critters that fed on the bugs to enter our rooms. I was never woken by mosquitoes but was woken by small lizards scampering along my arms in the night as they looked for their dinner.

During the day we drank by the pool and roasted in the sunshine. Most of the hotel guests ate in the dining room, which was open to the beach view, but I have always been one to avoid hotel dining rooms. In the late afternoon three or four of us who would walk down the beach to a small group of cantinas on the shore. The food was good and cheap, mostly beans and rice with a little meat, and the beer was cold. We would have a few bottles of local beer and eat dinner while watching the sun set into the Pacific. The locals loved us, mostly because we could afford to buy rounds. The nightly walks back to the hotel in the dark were safe. The biggest hazard we faced was stepping on a frog on the beach.

In the bus that took us back to San Jose I sat in front of the then-typical American tourist. They were from New York, very loud and obnoxious. I was also in front of them at the reception desk. The hotel did not have a reservation for me but quickly found me a room. The New Yorkers weren’t so lucky. The desk clerk informed them that their reservation was not on file and the New Yorkers became very loud and insulting, the man pounding his fist on the desk and making demands. Suddenly the clerk could not speak a word of English. The couple from New York demanded to see the manager (el manager-o to them) and when he arrived he could not speak English either. Which is odd because I had met the manager at a cocktail party a couple of weeks ago at the hotel and he had spoken English quite well. He needed to speak English to get his business management degree from Harvard. The couple could not convince anyone in the lobby to translate for them and had to leave the hotel without getting a room. That lesson has always stuck with me when traveling.

That night was our last night in Costa Rica. It was a great trip, I met some friends that I kept up with and visited a few times when we were back in Canada. .