Costa Rica - part 3

(I'm officially ignoring my crazy sisters' calls to get to the good stuff; I shall systematically plod along with my vacation report.)

On the day it was time to move on, we had arranged for a rental car company to pick us up at our hotel at 9am. The designated time came and went with no rental car showing up, but this is hardly cause for panic in Latin America. Nonetheless, I had the rental company called after 20 minutes to see what was up. They claimed they had expected to pick us up at the airport and didn't know of any arrangements to meet us at our hotel. Furthermore, our vehicle wasn't exactly available yet, but would be in an hour or so.

Well, this happens even in Canada, and really, what can you do? So we hung out while Carrie tried to check out of the hotel; for some reason this took her 45 minutes... perhaps something to do with four of us showing up for free breakfast when the room had only two official occupants. In the end, all was settled, and our rental vehicle arrived a little after 10:30. We piled in and headed to the agency office to do the paperwork.



As also happens in Canada, we didn't get the car we'd been promised. We had reserved a 2012 Nissan X-Trail with manual transmission; we got a 2006 automatic. (In hindsight, the age worked in our favour since any nicks we may have put on it blended in with all the existing ones.) After arguing for a bit, we got the extra driver fee waived. And we were off!

Here's my attempt at a geography lesson. The whole country is shown here, and the purple line that is our route shows how little we actually covered. The country is very rugged, and even though it's maybe 500km at its longest, and the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans are as little as 120km apart, there's no quick way to get anywhere. Even the main highway shown on the map, which is the Pan-American Highway, isn't what you might expect: speed limits vary from 40km/h to 80km/h, and the road is often just a one-lane-each-way country road winding through numerous villages. It's prudent never to expect to average more than 50km/h on any trip.


But I digress. Our road trip starts near the airport at Alajuela, takes the southern route west to the beach, then takes the northern route east (via Liberia and over the lake).


With all the rumours about terrible roads and being stuck behind slow trucks, we weren't sure what to expect. Fortunately the first leg of our journey was on a nice new toll highway toward the coast; four tolls ran us about 75 cents each. And slow trucks didn't matter too much at this point, as there were a number of passing lanes. Not that the absence of passing lanes ever matters; lines on the road mean very little to your average tico.


We made good time as we headed to the Nicoya Peninsula and got close to Tamarindo. Carrie had the small village of Guaitil on her radar, one where handmade pottery is produced and painted by locals.

We stopped at this local establishment, which was a home with an adjoining shop. The dog looked less than well, as did his companion chicken with the bare bum.


The stuff all looked the same to me, but Carrie found something she really liked. They packaged it well, and it has since made it home in one piece!


It was only a short drive from there to Tamarindo. It was also a lot of gravel road with washboards, decidedly the worst part the drive so far. But if one could ignore that, the scenery was beautiful and made us think that this is what we'd expect Africa to look like.