Pictures from Playa del Coco, Poás, and Guayabo HERE. (The new pictures start at number 34, just after the ziplining.)
It seems that I don’t like to start trips anymore unless they’re a semi-spontaneous, half-planned, mad dash for the bus station. This weekend was no different. Poppy and I left the house a grand total of 35 minutes after I arrived home from work. My bad memory of the bus schedule made sure we arrived to the terminal sweaty and out of breath a full hour before the next bus was scheduled to leave. Since we hadn’t decided what the weekend would look like, we took our time to lay out an activity plan for the following 48 hours which we proceeded to destroy for two days as we changed our minds and readjusted.
The 4 ½ hour ride to San José landed us in downtown just after midnight. NOT the time to be wandering around San José. Poppy and I are both pretty bold independent travelers and we were both instantly nervous and extremely uncomfortable in the city. Our ever-faster steps carried us the five blocks to the “hotel” where we’d planned to stay. I put “hotel” in quotes because, whatever schema you might have of a hotel room, this is a million times worse. Unlike the nice hostels for a couple dollars a night, this was…interesting to say the least. Our tiny room had windows that opened directly into the lobby of the hotel and which couldn’t be latched so anyone could reach into our room any time they wanted. All the noise of slamming doors and loud conversations was right in our room. It was across the street from some sort of kareoke bar that was open ‘till all hours of the night and a block away from the hospital (I’m assuming that’s where all those sirens were headed). The “hotel” overlooked the main San José bus terminal and every time a bus would pull in, the whole room would shake and the windows would rattle. The cockroaches looked pretty friendly though. The “bathroom” consisted of 4 stalls opening in towards a single sink. The labels read “Women’s Toilet,” “Men’s Toilet,” “Women’s shower,” “Men’s Shower.” Poppy and I reached a mutual agreement that we wouldn’t shower on our trip because we felt like we’d come out of the shower dirtier than we went in. I slept with my purse tied to my arm, cuddled like a teddy bear. On top of all of that, on our second night, we were woken up at 3:00 am by a man shouting “¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!” (“Fire! Fire!”). I woke Poppy up so we could run out if needed, but nothing happened and we tiredly went back to sleep.
After such a charming introduction to the city, it was no wonder that our first order of business was leaving. For such an ugly city (my apologies to anybody who likes it), it’s located in a beautiful area of the country. Green mountains and cloud forests cut up sharply around the outskirts of the city. After a wonderful Costa Rican breakfast of gallo pinto, we caught a couple of buses headed to Volcán Poás (Poas Volcano). The short walk from the visitor center to the crater lookout smelled increasingly of sulfur and other unpleasant gases. But when we reached the top, we had a great view down into the crater. The billowing steam and gas pouring out of the top partially obscured our view of a turquoise-green acidic lake nested in the center of the crater. To the right, had there not been so many clouds, we could have seen the Carribbean coast. And to the left, the encroaching mists separated layers of mountains of the cloud forests. The strata inside the crater ran from red to brown to grey to black and back again. When the clouds started getting too thick, we took a second trail to the other lake on the volcano and looked out until it too was made invisible by the descending clouds. As we started back, the heavens opened and we were drenched by gallons of water, the thick tree cover only providing moderate shelter. When the rain stopped half an hour later, Poppy suggested that we go back up to the crater overlook. What an awesome idea. Some of the clouds had cleared and the wind changed drastically. We had a way better view into the crater and got to see parts of it that had before been clouded with gases.
After a couple more hours cutting through the mountain roads on our bus, we were back our favorite city (not). We were surprised to find everything closed at 5:30 pm on a Saturday, even in downtown in the capital. We resorted to American fast food before heading back to the “hotel.” Party animals that we are, we were asleep by 9.
Sunday was a slightly more complicated trek to see the most important archeological monument in Costa Rica. A couple taxis and a bus ride later, we’d arrived at the Monumento Nacional Arqueológico Guayabo (Guayabo National Archeological Monument). While all I saw was a bunch of piles of rocks, Poppy was super excited about the ruins. The Guayabo people were apparently known for their civil engineering of aqueducts and roads. Beyond that, the park ranger said to check out their Facebook page (That’s one I haven’t heard before). We did get to enjoy the walk through the dense cloud forest spotting a couple bright flowers and a lot of ginormous leaves and ferns.
Our ride back cut us super close to missing our bus back from San José to Liberia. We had a great cab driver who got us about 25 blocks in just over 5 minutes arriving at 4:02 for a bus that was supposed to leave at 4:00. I bypassed the ticket office and ran straight at the front of the [now moving] bus determined to get OUT of San José. Fortunately, the driver was gracious enough to stop and even to let us on the bus. Feeling I had cheated death in some small way, I grinned the whole way back to Liberia. I still can’t believe we actually caught the bus.