To the Beach!

Saturday - July 8, 2006

After a week’s wandering, I’m back in Monteverde, with a number of interesting adventures to recount… As promised last Saturday, I set out with Dan Pugh, and older student in my course from Maryland (he’s actually the same age as I am) with the ultimate intent of getting to Nicaragua. Our first setback turned out to be the car itself, not the documents. On Friday before I left the Institute I heard from Russell my car broker who informed me that the mechanics had run into a bit more work than they had expected on my car and it would not be done until Monday, hopefully about midday. C’est la vie. It really didn’t matter that much in the big scheme of things anyway, especially in light of the “permiso” issues, etc…

So we hatched our back-up plan- first to Playa Naranjo for a weekend of sun & warm after a week of damp weather in Monteverde. We took the public bus to Puntarenas at 6:00am, which was the usual- unbelievably cheap ($2.00), but hot, crowded, & slow. The same trip by car would take a little over an hour, whereas we spent more than 3 hours! In the city of Puntarenas itself, the bus acted like a local public bus, picking up and dropping passengers at every stop. We finally decided this was how the driver supplemented his income—no tickets were issued for these folks, and no receipts provided, and all the cash (most were charged only about a quarter) just went onto a small box on the dashboard. Seeing as dozens people took advantage of this opportunity, it could definitely add up to at least a pretty good pool of beer money at the end of the day!

We reached the station at about 9:15, and set out on foot for the ferry terminal, about a mile or so away. Puntarenas is a very old city, among the oldest of the Spanish colonial ports on the Pacific coast of the Americas and dating to the early 16^th century, but unfortunately without a very good eye, you would never know it from what you see today. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by Puntarenas. It has been variously described to me by other travelers as ugly, disgusting, dirty, and smelling of dead fish. Well, the slight fishy smell notwithstanding (hey- it’s on the water and commercial fishing is the main industry, so what do you expect!), it really wasn’t that bad. The town is laid out in a traditional Spanish grid along a long narrow peninsula that is essentially a big sand spit. It is only about 4 blocks wide, and the ocean side has a gorgeous view to the west with the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula in the distance. The buildings are mostly one & two story structures and many show traces of their Spanish colonial heritage. Like San Jose, however, there isn’t much emphasis on building maintenance so many places look a bit neglected. The city has suffered economically in the last couple decades since a new container port was built down the coast a ways, but still, there is a prosperous bustle about the place that seems to suggest things are now rebounding.

We reached the ferry terminal about 9:45 to find our ferry was just about to leave at 10:00. The schedules on line had all said 10:30, so we had walked fairly leisurely—now we rushed and managed to get tickets and board with a few minutes to spare. The ferry was a pretty seaworthy looking vessel of about 150’ length or so and able to carry about 30 or 40 cars, plus a couple hundred pedestrian passengers. Judging from the various labels on fixtures, and even an old interpretive display that had yet to be updated, this ship was a secondhand acquisition from Germany where it looked like it once plied the Baltic or North Sea. The ferry was even less expensive than the bus- only $1.50, and only took an hour to cross the gulf to the Nicoya Peninsula and Playa Naranjo. Playa (beach) Naranjo is a small, sleepy town on the gulf coast, consisting of 3 or 4 hotels, a couple of restaurants, the ferry terminal, a gas station, and a bunch of small fincas (farms) owned by both locals and gringos. Once the primary destination from Puntarenas, Playa Naranjo is now a bit of a backwater, ever since a second ferry began operating to the town of Paquero farther to the south (and closer to the popular Pacific beaches). Locals all talk of an economic resurgence as plans are afoot to build a big marina, but nothing seems to be happening too rapidly yet…

Dan and I headed up the road on foot for a hotel we had heard about from some other travelers – the Oasis del Pacifica. Located just south of the ferry, the “Oasis” looked just that! Set in a grove of coconut palms along a gently curving crescent of sand, with thatched roof shade structures scattered around a pool, etc. -- just what we needed after all the news about the car, etc. Dan and I spent much of the next two days resting around the pool, reading, or walking along the beach. The hotel also had a bunch of resident parrots, several of which would look for handouts from the guests as well as try to start a conversation with repeated chants of “hola, hola!” One bird, named Charlie had quite a vocal repertoire when one of the hotel employees would get him going, rattling off strings of Spanish that left my vocabulary in the dust. The again, based on the tendency toward off-color words & phrases many parrots seem to know, maybe I’m just not familiar with part of the Spanish language yet! Just as well…

While having breakfast on Sunday morning, we ran into two different local characters at our hotel, One, Larry, had run into a number of my students the previous weekend and actually drove them back to Monteverde after they missed the last ferry out. Larry is the quintessential gringo beach bum/real estate speculator. He lives periodically in Florida, here in Playa Naranjo, and in Jaco (another beach town farther down the coast on the mainland). The second person was a German ex-patriot named Horst. Horst is one of the most fascinating people I’ve met in a long time… he is a former academic, with PhD’s in both Philosophy and Physics! He was a student of both Werner Heisenberg and Martin Heidegger in the 1960’s, and is a former professor at the Max Plank Institute. He’s spent the past 20 years in Canada working in real estate development and owns a bottled water company in Vancouver. You never know who you’ll run into. After discovering I was a landscape architect, Horst invited us up to see his house, which was a fantastic 5,000sf place with 360 degree views from a hilltop above the town. As it turns out, he has been in the house about a year, and while the interior of the home is just about complete, he needs designs for the gardens. With luck, it will be a first paying commission here ;-)

On Monday morning, Dan & I packed up and headed out to catch the 7:30am ferry. In this direction, it turns out the ferry runs 30 minutes behind the posted schedule! Schedules are kind of optional on Tico time. We caught the bus to San Jose at 10:00, and pulled into the main bus station at just before noon. This was an express bus, and much nicer and quicker- and still cost just $2.00! After taking a cab to Auto’s Kim, we were pleasantly surprised to find our car almost ready! We ate lunch while they wrapped things up, and got back to find the in-house mechanics had just completed a total engine overhaul, including all new pistons & rings on our 2.5 liter diesel. It certainly sounded much smoother, and not even a hint of smoke came from the exhaust. All the other little things seem to be fixed too. They mounted the new license plates while I ran down the street and made a copy of the ignition keys at a local lock shop, and we were ready to go. Unfortunately, it was already too late to deal with the “permiso salida del pais” issue, so we headed out toward Liberia figuring we would figure that can of worms out in the morning. Tomorrow, on to Nicaragua!