We left home in the dead early hours of Thursday, Sept 29 – at about 4 am. The first leg of our journey to Costa Rica was a lift into Waterford (Thanks, Aonghus👏) to get the airport bus. The road was dark and eerily quiet without a car or person to be seen until we got into town. The airport bus dropped us on schedule at 07.50 for our Air Canada 10.45 flight. Dublin Airport had an alarming number of holding pens outside the building (which were thankfully empty)but lots of people in high vis vests were shouting instructions (that were hard to understand). It could be very stressful if time was tight🙄 As we only had carry-on luggage, we went straight to security which was very busy but the staff were friendly and efficient…one bag-checker told us that it had been manic all morning.

The 7 hour flight to Toronto was uneventful but quite relaxing although mask wearing was mandatory. We got a hot meal and a snack of a veggie wrap, ‘free’ drinks, pillows and blankets. There was a delay in landing in Toronto because of a coyote on the runway – seriously🤣. After a wait of about 4 hours in Toronto, we boarded our second flight to San Jose in Costa Rica. This was a different story – 5 hours of uncomfortable squashed seats, cold air, no ‘free’ anything, strange creaking from the plane and some turbulence over the Gulf of Mexico from the aftermath of Hurricane Ian✈️💨. We were SO relieved to get off.

It was 10pm local time in San Jose, it wasn’t raining but was warm (about 20 degrees) and muggy with high humidity. With the 7 hour time difference, our jet lagged bodies yawned and only wanted sleep The taxi driver who brought us to our accomodation had been to Europe several times and told us that Costa Rica was the safest country in Central America…..but also the most expensive. The local currency is the colón (plural colónes), very colourful notes with animals and hummingbirds. 1000 colónes convert to about €1.60. But a lot of things are quoted in $US and the euro is worth less than the dollar at the moment. We are still getting our heads around colónes, dollars and Euros but our brains were really fuddled that first night. The price quoted for accommodation and on menues was not the price you actually pay as taxes and service charges are slapped on to that price.

Our accomodation in San Jose was basic but good, a first floor apartment with an inner tranquil courtyard ($40 a night). San Jose is quite small and we spent our first day wandering around in a jet-lagged haze- the streets felt relatively safe and noboby hassled us or tried to sell us anything or practise their English on us. The city is in a depression surrounded by mountains all shrouded in mist. Although it has some lovely buildings – the National Theatre with its murals, the Central Post Office and the ultra modern Legislative Assembly building, it isn’t a particularly beautiful city. There was a more edgy feel about the areas around the Mercado Central (the Market) with congested streets, music blaring and lots of people sleeping rough amougst mounds of rubbish. Many of these were Venezuelan migrants and sometimes entire families existed in an air of resigned desperation. Costa Rica in the wet season is no place to be sleeping on the streets.

We knew that we were near the equator when day and night were the same length, Costa Rica is about 10 degrees north of the equator. Sunrise was shortly after 5am -jet lag meant we were awake for lots of them. The sun went down shortly after 5pm, not that we saw much sun the first couple of days. The first day, we had distant thunder and lightening in the afternoon and a heavy shower in the evening( not too bad for the rainy season) but on the second day, there was a torrential downpour at 11am, it eased for a few minutes and then resumed in earnest – a real deluge ALL day. We pitied the people living rough. We decided to get out of San Jose and asked at the reception desk about getting buses to the Carribean coast and that’s how we met our friend, Yourly.

San Jose has a bewildering number of bus stations and bus companies and no Central Bus Station.Yourly was apalled that we were going to walk to the bus terminal to buy our tickets…too dangerous, she said. She insisted on driving us there. She was about to finish her shift and her husband was waiting outside to collect her so they drove us to 2 different bus terminals before we found the right one. Yourly had a little English, Arthuro had none but this didnt stop him cracking jokes in Spanish all the time. They invited us to Cartago, the old historical capital of Costa Rica so we drove in appalling traffic and torrential rain to ‘beautiful’ Cartago. When we got there, we had a coffee and a beer, saw nothing with the rain and darkness and headed back to San Jose. But all any of us had to say was ‘Cartago…beautiful, bueno’ for everyone to roar laughing! They were determined to show us something so they drove high into the hills outside San Jose to a restaurant with a viewing point and karioke (except the mist and rain shrouded any view) and insisted on buying us dinner. For a few brief minutes before we left the restaurant, the clouds parted, the rain stopped and the twinkling lights of San Jose were spread before us. Yourly and Arthuro dropped us back at our accomadation and warned us to get a taxi to the bus terminal the following morning.

The problem was that we weren’t sure of the name of the bus terminal so the taxi driver took us to the wrong bus terminal, we recognised nothing from the day before. There were queues everywhere, nobody spoke English and we found ourselves stumbling around the ‘dangerous’ area with Yourly’s warnings ringing in our ears and our bags clutched tightly but at least it wasn’t raining. Eventually we stumbled on the correct terminal with about seven mintes to spare before our bus to Porto Vieje departed. We were never more delighted to sit into cramped seats. At least half of the passengers were gringos……most trying to escape the rainy season in San Jose and find some Carribbean sunshine.

The bus to the Carribbean travelled out of San Jose on narrow roads between walls of greenery, enormous trees and ferns, leading on to coffee and banana plantation (Costa Rica is the fourth largest producer of bananas in the world). We reached the coast at Limōn, a large port and then the bus continued south towards Panama, crossing many single-lane iron bridges over brownish rivers in a lush tropical landscape. After 5 hours, we arrived in Puerta Vieje, a small touristy town near lots of beaches where most of the gringos got out. The atmostphere was laid back, (welcome, man) but the sweat was dripping off us in the heat (about 30 degrees) and humidity (about 90%). The overcast weather made my first glimpse of the Caribbean a disappointing shade of dark blue but it was definitely the warmest water we had swam in for a long time.

We had ‘cold water immersion’ at our accomadation where the showers only had cold water.  Our little bedroom was shaded by lush overgrown plants growing outside. In the treetop communal kitchen, we watched birds flitting by…..we even got a fleeting glimpse of a hummingbird.💚. We slept with the noise of the rotating fan masking the call of the birds and the thud of cocunuts falling. We are definitely in the tropics, the gorgeous velvety evenings with the smell of flowers, the clamour of the cicadas and of course, the whiff of sewage. Today, Monday, October 3, the sun has shone all day and the Caribbean in the early morning light looked exactly as I had dreamed it would……and all the sweeter because of the effort in getting here

Until, next time…….😎😘