A little context may be in order then. In the last blog entry we had just left the Galápagos Islands, and only a few hours later we finished the first leg of our travels and left South America altogether. It is now our intention to complete the journey on from there and share what happened next. In Central America. Coming up there are tales of volcanoes and waterfalls, life threatening illnesses and attempted kidnappings, new friends and an almost endless variety of landscapes and locations we couldn't possibly have imagined. The first two blogs to get us re-started are a little different as both occur solely on the very first night we arrived. They are a little light on pictures for reasons that will become apparent, but I hope you find them enjoyable nevertheless.
In common with the other entries in this blog, there is little to no artistic license in this piece. Although it was written after the event, conversations and descriptions are recounted as accurately as possible using notes written at the time or shortly afterwards.
George
---
Everything looks more sinister when the sun goes down. The darkened windscreen of the car across the road, driver invisible behind the dipped headlights. The young couple who turn their heads away from the glare of the window and hurry past, and the slack suited man tapping his cigarette out as he leans against his beat-up pick-up in the car park outside. The last is watching us through the thin sheet glass. Fluorescent lights flicker briefly in the office ceiling overhead before returning to their steady cold white. I spare them a glance before I return my attention to the man sitting opposite me behind the counter. He is dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt although the logo of "Greenmotion rentals" sits proudly emblazoned across his chest. He is young, just a shadow of stubble on his cheeks, and although he is friendly he has the vacant mannerisms of someone following routine without thinking. He looks at me with an un-caring blink. "Would you like the full insurance sir?"
Welcome to Central America and Costa Rica. The car rental office we had chosen to pre-book with isn't actually at the airport but about a mile away down the main highway. Ellen and I hurried out of San Jose airport to be met by a representative holding a sign with our names on and were swiftly bundled into a van for the 10 minute journey down to the local industrial estate. The plan is to drive ourselves the two and a half hours from San Jose, Costa Rica's capital, to Manuel Antonio on the South Pacific coast. It saves us almost an entire day of travel which we can spend instead on the beach and it's the same price as the bus if we only stick with the basic insurance. We have several sets of directions saved on Ellen's phone and all of them say that the drive should be relatively easy, but as we stop-start our way to the car lot in the back of a van I can't help but feel a little nervous. The traffic is very heavy, the sky is already dark and I have yet to see a road sign in either direction.
The man taps his pen absently on the desk in front of him. "I would recommend the full insurance sir. It covers you for everything." I look at Ellen and shrug. Outside the night is only getting darker. "It's completely up to you sir. There are a lot of car accidents in Costa Rica though. We had a French couple in here only yesterday who crashed as they left the car park just there." He gestures over my shoulder. "It cost them $1300. Nothing we could do."
A pause.
"Would you like the full insurance sir?"
Oh bugger it.
"Yes. Yes I would."
And that was the only good decision we made that evening.
---
The car looks nice enough as we are led out to it. It is a white Toyota Yaris, manual, five door. It doesn't have a sat-nav but it does have four wheel drive, not that we are likely to need or use it where we are going. And not that a sat-nav would be of much use in a country that uses neither house numbers or street names on a regular basis. The postal system in Costa Rica works on a "directions I got from a bloke in the pub" basis. That is to say that the official address of the hostel we have reserved is - Hostel Plinio, about 2 miles outside of Manuel Antonio town, on the road to the beach, a little way up the hill on the left hand side. Seriously. And I don't know how we would go about typing that in. The man from the rental walks me around the car with a clipboard in hand, marking on all the little scratches and scuffs from previous outings. It's a little pointless from my point of view given that I have now paid out for the full insurance (which doesn't even have an excess, so I won't be paying for anything regardless of the state the car returns in), but I guess there are boxes that need to be ticked somewhere along the line. When he has completed the formalities and handed over the keys we are given a folded street map of San Jose, a hand drawn and briefly explained set of directions on how to get to Manuel Antonio, and then finally we are left alone sitting in the car. Tentatively, as you do for the first time in any car, I move about 10 feet just to get a feel for it. Then I park the car in an adjacent bay and we decide to go to get dinner before we leave for real.
---
Waiting for a gap in the traffic I feel no larger than a rabbit. There are three lanes of headlights, and noise, and fluid shifting metal reflecting the dull yellow sodium streetlights. The far lane crawls, almost at a standstill as people pull up for a left hand turn, but the other two, nearer, jostle and weave and honk their horns and scream past us with bare inches to spare. There are old rusting cars falling apart at the seems, pick up trucks and 4x4s with headlights blaring from on high, huge articulated lorries and water tankers, motorcycles and tuk-tuks. One car of the grey faceless variety pulls across two lanes to stop diagonally across the middle of the road until the far lane shifts to let it in. The rest of the traffic merely flows around it like a river around a fallen boulder. The horns scream in protest but the headlights never pause. I peer out at the melee from the slip road, trying to see my way around a very poorly planted hedge that blocks half the road from view. A motorcycle roars by inches away, a car swerves over from the middle lane. I wait and I wait for the smallest of gaps and then we take the plunge and are swept into the night.
The driving is totally chaotic. I stick as firmly as I can to the right hand side of the road remembering that Costa Rica, like much of the world, drives the wrong way around. This is where most of the slower traffic is but it is nevertheless like participating in a real life hazard perception test. Push bikes shoot out from tiny side streets with no lights on, delivery vehicles pull to a complete halt in the road and park up so that the rest of the traffic has to pull into the faster lanes to go around them, and there are people everywhere. This is not the motorway I was expecting but the main road through a busy city. There are families coming out of supermarkets and shopping centres, small groups of lads standing on the street corners, hurrying men and women on their way home from work. There is the mechanic fixing a tuk-tuk under the lights of a petrol station forecourt and the large gang of revelers waiting impatiently outside a bar. There are the store owners mending their signs on ladders that overreach the curb, marked out by little cones, and the road workers hidden behind their digger and piles of gravel. And then there are the mystery people. An old man carrying two fishing rods, one over either shoulder, and the woman sitting on the pavement with two large sacks of potatoes. Everywhere you look there is the thronging chaotic swirl of life, lit in neon, and almost all of it spills over into the road in front of me. Ellen is looking at the directions on her phone and trying to correlate them with the hand drawn instructions from the man at the rental company.
"We need to stay on this road, and then we are looking for the large sign of a construction company," she says. "Soon after that we need to turn right onto a slip road signposted to Atenas" We both stare out of our respective windows but the streets are a mass of signs, none of which look like the large sign of a construction company. It doesn't even look like the type of street you would find a construction company on, although in fairness what do we know about the habits and habitats of construction companies in Costa Rica. For a moment I have to focus my attention on the road again as the traffic starts to build up in front of me and I just about manage to hug the curb as other cars honk and shoot past me on the left hand side.
"Crikey they were in a hurry." I try to stick behind the car in front to provide some shelter, slipstreaming my way through the city centre, but then that car pulls left as well and leaves me on my own in the near lane. People pull up behind me and honk their horns, there is solid traffic to my left, and it is only then I see the signs on the tarmac forcing me to turn to the right, off the main road and into the city backstreets.
---
"I don't think I was supposed to turn there. I was forced right." I stare into the rear view mirror, slowing down a bit so that the other cars can pass me, which they do, enthusiastically.
"That's OK, just turn around somewhere up here." Ellen says waving her hand at the windscreen while looking over her shoulder. She is keeping as close a watch on the road as I am as the other cars rapidly leave us behind. I choose the entrance to a small car park to drive around in before waiting again for a break in the traffic going the opposite direction. The shop signs are all unfamiliar, little hardware stores and fast food outlets.
"As long as we don't go too far off our route we should be OK." Says Ellen as I pull out onto the opposite carriageway. "So we just need to turn right back there, back onto the main road." I pull into another line of traffic and we sit and wait in the queue for the lights.
"Does it say no right turn?" Ellen squints out of the window.
"Where?"
"On the lights." I try to watch the cars in front and behind, left and right all at the same time and can just about manage it now that they aren't moving as much.
"Bollocks it does, what do we do?" Says Ellen looking at me as the traffic starts to move. I squint in the mirror at the cars behind.
"I'll have to go straight over and then turn around again." We both look left and right as we cross back over the main road, "I'm not even sure where we would have turned." I say, "It just looks like four lanes of traffic coming towards us. Where's the lane in the other direction gone?"
And then the road is buried again between the buildings and I have to retreat momentarily to dodging cyclists as they wheel out of the gloom. "It's a grid system right?" I say, eyes straining to see more in between the streetlights. "So I should be able to go right and right again." I can see Ellen out of the corner of my eye struggling to open up the map of San Jose, a huge intricate weaving of squares with tiny labels almost impossible to read in the flashing light coming in through the windscreen. She doesn't say anything, so I take that as tacit acknowledgement, indicate right to demonstrate the correct turning technique to the locals and carefully edge into an even more backstreet.
Around this corner streetlights are a luxury that the residents can't afford. Ellen is forced to give up on the map completely as we slow to a crawl. I edge into the middle of the road still with a car behind me, to pass parked vans and motorcycles on both sides, all facing the same way. Now in the darkness all the businesses are closed, windows shuttered and barred. The pavements are emptier, the people huddled in doorways. I take the next corner even slower in sudden paranoia about unseen cars shooting across in front of me. The car behind me slows too, no horn, it just follows me steadily keeping its distance. And while it is nice to have found a local not suffering with road rage, the moment I turn the corner I know we are in trouble. The road isn't straight, it curves away to the left with "Una Via" road signs mounted on walls all the way along, and it presents nothing but row after row of darkened windows. There is no sign of the main road and no sign of a busy street cutting across the one we are on. Our route has disappeared and left us to find our own way in the city with still more than two and a half hours of our drive to go and nothing but a map of central San Jose and some hand drawn directions to go on. For the first time, both Ellen and myself start to feel a little scared.
---
It takes two and a half more streets of zigzagging trying to find the main road before both Ellen and I finally admit to ourselves that we are lost. Two and a half streets to get ourselves more turned around than we ever had been. Or was it three and a half streets? The roads all start to look the same in the dark. I pull over when I see the low curb in front of a squat, boarded up building where the pavement is lit by a single security light. It is a small hope that it might figuratively as well as literally shine a light on where we are. The shadow of the rear view mirror is cast long across the back seats as we both stare at the map, trying to find the airport, or the car rental office or any other recognisable landmark.
"What do we do? Shall we ask someone?" Says Ellen. I glance out of the window as two gang members (or people pretending to be gang members) pass the car. "How about those guys?" She says. I shake my head.
"Let me look at the map a bit longer." Ellen and I both bend over the paper, smoothing out the crinkles on our knees, trying to make sense of the road names. But then the decision is taken out of our hands and help comes to us in the form of a different man mouthing at the window.
"Do you need help?" He says. A question to which the answer is a definitive yes, but with several caveats. I quickly give the man a once over glance. He is dressed in overalls and carrying a box full of spanners and screwdrivers. Clearly a workman of some kind on his way home from a job. I wind down the window as he continues speaking. "..shouldn't stop here it's not safe. Where are you going?" His English is good, spoken with confidence in an accent that's American through education.
"We're driving to Manuel Antonio, we got lost coming from the airport." I say, leaning across Ellen to look up at the man through the window.
"Manuel Antonio? That's 3 hours away from here!"
"We know, we just need to get back to the main road." I glance at the directions but Ellen is ahead of me.
"We need Route 1?" She says. The man is shaking his head and looking back and forth along the street, shifting from foot to foot."
"Ok" he says, "go straight along here, one, two, three blocks," he does chopping motions with his hand, "and you will see a busy street. Turn left onto that street and then maybe you can ask someone else around there and they might know what to do. But don't stop for long, the streets here are very dangerous at night."
"Thank you." I say but the man has already walked off. In the mirror he is lit briefly in red and then disappears completely into the darkness.
"Those directions didn't end quite the way I was hoping" I say to Ellen as I wind up the window. She shakes her head.
"He seemed nice though."
---
The 'busy street' is distinguished from the other streets by the return of street lighting, a slight increase in the number of people, and the presence of a sign. '5th Avn'. But looking around it isn't anywhere close to the size or scale of main street we need. For a start it is still only a single lane in either direction (although at least it isn't a one way street), and for another it only runs for ten or so more blocks before it ends at a military checkpoint. Secretly I think both of us had been hoping to recognise something on this road from earlier but no such luck. I pull the car to the side of the road again, this time under a proper streetlight, and let the engine idle. The street is busy I suppose, but run down. It's the kind of street that I would describe off hand as 'not a good neighbourhood' but the truth is I have no idea. Not in Costa Rica. Coupled with a warning about the streets not being safe though, it is enough to make us hesitate before asking for further directions.
We sit and watch two men in military uniform as they chat to each other at the checkpoint across the crossroads. There are not as many people down this end of the road, just the odd passerby and the guards. One is facing away from us talking to his partner sitting in a little wooden booth with a pointed roof and open sides. He is dressed in full camouflage, peaked cap pulled low on his head. Behind them the road is blocked by a wooden painted barrier with yellow stripes, counter weighted at one side so that it can be raised by one man on his own. Whatever lies beyond it is a mystery, there are no signs and no buildings I can see and the darkness behind the light on the hut is absolute. As the standing guard turns to look at us, with our engine still running and parked across the street, I can just see the machine gun he is carrying close to his chest. Don't imagine the light glinting off it, the gun is painted as black as a shadow.
"I can't find us anywhere on this map." Says Ellen dragging my attention back inside the car. "What street are we on?"
"5th Avn" I lean over and study the map with her for a minute. "Here?" I point to a label, but the road doesn't look right. It's labelled 5th Avn, but it doesn't seem to connect with anything we have seen, and there certainly isn't anything on the map that might require a checkpoint. "Is the airport on here anywhere?"
"Yes it's here." Ellen points way away in the very top left corner of the map, "but the main road running from it doesn't look anything like the one we traveled on. We didn't drive all along all of that before we got into the city."
"No we didn't." I look up again, "we could ask the guards to help?" The one with the machine gun is still eyeing us suspiciously while talking over his shoulder to his partner.
"I don't think so!" Says Ellen giving me a rather alarmed look.
"Well how about on your phone, can you get google maps up?"
"I've been trying, but I don't have any signal at all. I can't even make a call for us to ring up the rental company. Or anyone in fact." She gives me a worried look. And then the decision making is taken out of our hands again.
"Do you need help?" Says a man interrupting my map reading by mouthing through my driver side window. He is standing with his friend looking pointedly at the map spread across our laps. Both of them are dressed smartly, suit trousers and jackets, they look like a couple of friends on their way home from work in an office. I wind my window down.
"Do you speak English?" I say.
"A little."
"We are trying to get to Manuel Antonio, we know it's a long way from here, and we need to get onto Route 1." I say, possibly taking the mans English capabilities a bit for granted.
"Manuel Antonio??" The man retreats to have a rapid conversation in Spanish with his friend. "OK. You are a long way away." He takes a breath. "You are going to need to turn left here, go over two sets of traffic lights and then turn left again," he leans back again as his friend taps him on the back for a few more suggestions in Spanish. "OK. Have you got that?"
I nod. "Yes I think so"
"Ok good. So left, two traffic lights, left again then you will keep going until you see a big mall, supermarket. It's very big you can't miss it. Then after the mall you need to turn right and that will put you back on the main road."
"Can you show us where we are on this map?" I say as I hand it slant-ways through the window. The man takes it and turns it over in his hands, looking at it in confusion.
"This is a map of San Jose. Do you not have a map for here?" There is a long pause as I think carefully about that question, and then about how best to express the rather extreme concerns that it raises. In the end I express myself rather well.
"What?" I say.
"You are in Alajuela. Do you want to go to San Jose? You said you were going to Manuel Antonio? San Jose is a different direction." The man hands me back the map.
"No no we want to go to Manuel Antonio. We thought we were already IN San Jose." I say. "We flew into San Jose airport."
"Yes, but the airport is not in San Jose it's in Alajuela."
"But it's called San Jose Airport." I say in slightly whiny protest. The man just shrugs at me.
"It doesn't matter. Two traffic lights, left and then right after the mall. OK?" He leans back and motions to his friend that they are leaving without really waiting for a reply. "Good luck." He says over his shoulder, and then we are on our own again.
"Great." I say to Ellen. "The rental company have given us a map for a city we are neither in or going to." She nods her head slowly.
"He seemed nice though."
---
It's funny how you can be given simple instructions that you completely understand, only to realise later on that they weren't as clear as you thought. Or it would be funny if we weren't both so stressed out by being lost in a foreign city late at night with no map, no phone. No money apart from a few US dollars left over from Ecuador and still more than 150km to travel to our accommodation.
"Did he say to turn left at the second traffic lights? Or after the second set of traffic lights?" I look at Ellen and there is a long pause.
"After I think." Another long pause.
"Right."
The first left after the second set of traffic lights is not a main one. It's another cramped one way street, although at least this one seems to be going in the right direction. As we pass into the town again I am on the lookout for anything recognisable, but in particular I am on the look out for a large mall which I cannot possibly miss. The crossroads drift past, one after another. Some are quiet, most have people standing and talking on the corners. Street corners seem to be the meeting place of choice in this city, and as cliched as it is it can be quite intimidating. I tell myself that everyone we have met so far has been friendly, but it doesn't make me feel any better. There are gangs of young men, standing around on every single crossroads watching the cars as they pass. Every instinct in my body tells me that we need to get out of the area as quickly as possible but we can do little when there are cars in front and behind and the streets are crowded with people. Even so, as we stop start our way past yet another group I make a point of trying to stop as little as possible.
"That says Mercado." I say suddenly as a sign flickers green on the side of the building up ahead. "That means market right? Do you reckon that's what he meant?"
"I don't know."
"It's pretty big." I catch myself biting my own lip. "There seems to be a right turn after it, should I take it?"
"I don't know." Ellen doesn't sound convinced.
"The car in front of me is turning right, everyone seems to be turning right in fact." I am reminding myself fiercely of the private detective Dirk Gently, a Douglas Adams creation who always navigates by following other people who look like they know where they're going. It doesn't usually work out well.
"What do you think?" Ellen says. "It's another one way street."
"I don't know, but I'm taking the turning."
---
The bright yellow M of a McDonald's floats over us serenely as we idle finally out of the town and down a street of a different character. The pavements have grass at their edges and the shops have been replaced by low residential housing. The one way street only lasted for two blocks and then it widened out, quieted down and now we are the only car on the road.
"Well this doesn't look like the main road." Says Ellen. "I don't think that was the mall we couldn't miss."
"On the other hand, we didn't miss it?" I counter. Ellen just looks at me. She doesn't have to say anything else. It is very apparent to both of us that this is not the right road. "OK fine its not the time for jokes. I'll turn around again I guess."
The bright yellow M of a McDonald's floats over us serenely as we idle back into the town. Our nerves are just about getting the better of us now. We have been driving around the back streets of a city we didn't know existed for a little over an hour and we are no closer to finding the way out. The decision to drive to Manuel Antonio seems foolish at best, and at worst...well we haven't found that out yet, and we hope not to.
"We're going to have to pull over again." I say to Ellen. "I don't know how to get back onto the road we were on before, we're going to have to ask someone else." I start peering through the driver side window for a suitable stopping point.
"Third time lucky?" Says Ellen.
On our right there is the faintly flickering sign of a petrol station. The lights in the building are off but there are still cars in the forecourt and an attendant at the pumps. I pull up and park the car in a space to the side in between a motorcycle and some metal poles. "Let's hope so."
I grab our hand drawn directions and Ellen's print outs and together we walk towards the cars. The one at the pumps is a large family saloon, red and beaten up. It looks well used to put it kindly. I can see it packed full of people, two children in the back with someone who looks like their grandmother and the parents at the front. Clearly local, but also clearly a family car. I breathe a little easier as I address the attendant.
"Excuse me, could you help us we're lost." The attendant waves us away with a gesture that says 'I don't understand you go away.' I glance at Ellen, but then we are once again saved by the kindness of the locals.
"Do you need help?" Says the man in the drivers seat, I speak English a bit."
---
Route 1, when it came, was relief on a scale I have rarely experienced. From the petrol station, (after we had explained our situation once again - we were getting quite adept at it by now) it only took five minutes more to get there. Largely because this time we dispensed with directions entirely and the gentleman agreed to drive in front of us all the way to the junction. Sometimes travelling doesn't go as expected, and as we followed the tail lights of a family of five down the twisting one way streets of Alajuela I thought to myself that maybe these moments are the bits that make travelling important. The bits that teach you never to give up, to be independent and to take and deal with problems as they come. The bits that teach you that wherever you are on the planet, people are fundamentally good, and honest, and willing to help. At the end of the day it's only when your travels go wrong that you learn these things.
OK. So maybe I didn't think all of that at the time. At the time I was more worried about the 3 hours of driving we still had to go. But I wish I had of thought that, because it would have calmed me down a bit 20 minutes later when things really started to go bad.
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