The Waiting Game
Monday morning and we drove back to San Jose and dropped off the hire car. According to google maps, the accommodation and the embassy weren't that far away, not the first time google maps has been wrong. The hire company called us a cab and said it'd be $30 and about half an hour. Also not the first time in this life we've experienced a cabbie who was wrong. Several phone calls, wrong turns, u turns and a fuming Jorje later we eventually found our digs, also not where google maps had them but it was ok. The room was good, the shower worked and the manager lovely, even accommodating us despite Jorje booking the room for July instead of June. Oops
We were about a 30min walk down a big hill to the embassy and shopping malls and about 10mins from restaurants and a supermarket. We killed off the afternoon in the shopping mall and ate Haagen Das until we exploded then rolled back up the big hill.
We got ready for an early night as we were booked to spend Tuesday white water rafting. A last minute email check
at 9pm found that the day had been cancelled due to weather, this after us rescheduling 4 times already around the passport dilemma. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise though. The rafting company has offices in San Jose and the Caribbean coast so the original plan was to get picked up in San Jose, raft for the day and travel onwards towards Panama. That plan had been forfeited due to the missing passport and so plan B was to just to kill another day in San Jose and then get the nine hour bus transfer into Panama on Thursday. As it worked out, the rafting was $90 with pick up and drop off, whilst the transfer bus to the coast was $75, so for an extra $15 bucks we got the rafting. Now we rebooked for Thursday and our travel plan reinstated, ended saving us $45 each in travel costs, assuming the passport arrived Wednesday of course.
We slept in on Tuesday, had a lazy breakfast at Starbucks, Juanita unimpressed with the coffee after sampling previously sampling Costa Rica's finest, and made future travel plans. Hung out at the mall for a while and had dinner at a local pub and took a bottle of wine home to watch a movie in bed, lazy arses but we kind of needed it.
Wednesday was passport day, hopefully, again we slept in and trundled towards to the mall down the big hill. Had some breakfast and hit the mall, Juanita picking up some shiny new threads. Around lunchtime the email came that the passport had finally arrived. Hooray ! We walked over to the embassy and signed on the line, said thank you a hundred times and we were free again ! We ran up the hill ( not really ) to finalise all of our travel plans for Panama and Columbia ( now that I had a passport number ) and got packed and went out for a Mexican dinner to celebrate, for tomorrow we were back on track, well, raft.
We got picked up at the Intercontinental Hotel, by the mall,
at 6am for white water rafting. That meant a half an hour walk down the hill with all our gear starting
at 5:15am. We were soaking wet before we got on the bus but huge smiles all round as we were on our way. It took about 3 hours in the rain to get to the camp where breakfast and the river awaited. Sadly the river we were due to raft on was overflowing because of the rain and too dangerous to go out on. We were offered another river at a discounted rate $70, bargain, and jumped in boat. It didn't have the excitement or scenery and gorges of the original plan but we still had a fun few hours on the water, spotting sloths and monkeys on our way, Juanita managing to fall overboard and Jorje jumping overboard to float down the river for a stretch instead of raft. Some funny footage on the camera to be shown later. We showered and changed and lunched and boarded the bus to the Caribbean coast. An awesome day. Plus with the discount we figured we were 5 bucks up on the transfer cost alone, and we got to float down the river, truly a great way to travel.
We arrived at our cute little hostel in Puerto Viejo, checkout the scenery and strolled down the beach. Puerto Viejo is a rasta surfy town, we pulled up a couch at a beach bar, locals sang reggae tunes and smoked weed, we sipped cocktails and watched the sun go down, tough gig. We stumbled off to dinner, had another cocktail and made it home to bed..... By
7:30. Haha. It had been a long long day but we were smiles all round. Tomorrow Panama awaited !
