Behind Pedro's Fish Shack! Of course!
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2007
1
8
11
Trip End
Jan 17, 2007
Nicoya,
Costa Rica
Monday, January 15, 2007
actually up and ready and down to the hotel at an appropriate time, to
get the taxi to the boat into town. It was an awful lot faster to
get to the drop off point by car, even though there was still a ten
minute hike to the beach at the end. We made it into Tamarindo,
only to discover that we had no idea where to catch the bus, and people
kept pointing us further and further into town. When we hit the
edge of town, they started pointing us into the junkyard by Pedro's
Fish. Which was, evidently, the bus station, and where there were
no buses for us to catch. And there would be no more buses for
the rest of the day into San Jose.
Not overly surprised by this development, we stopped at the nearest
place that wasn't Pedro's for breakfast and decided to go souvenir
shopping for awhile. We moved our base of operations to the
town's information center/cheap internet, and took turns watching the
bags. Five hours later, we were shopped out and ready to try the
bus thing again. I knew we couldn't actually make it to San Jose
by this point, but proceeding east in any way was pretty much the new
plan. I was starting to worry about actually making it back to
San Jose two days later to catch the plane. We took the advice of
the info center proprietor and stopped at a local soda across from
Witch's Rock, which had the added bonus of being right next to the bus
stop east out of town. After eating lunch (hot dog and
fries with a blackberry milk for me) about as fast as humanly possible
and dashing over to the stop to be there on time, we ended up sitting
for a good hour in gusts of dust and wind. We were discussing
what to do if a bus going east just never came, when it finally pulled
up.
It was totally packed, but we didn't let that stop us and took up spots
in the aisle, barely inside the door. After about twenty minutes
of balancing precariously and trying not to elbow anyone else in the
head while simultaneously moving our packs every time someone else
needed to squeeze through in the aisle, we snagged seats for the ride
into Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz, the folklore capital of Costa Rica, turned out to be a LOT
smaller than I was expecting - for some reason, I had been thinking
about the size of Liberia. Nope. It did, however,
have an enormous festival that seemed to be celebrating policemen going
on when we got there at dusk. Either that, or it was festival
where the policemen were doing a lot of celebrating. There was no
conversation about staying in Santa Cruz, as our brief walk through
town was not particularly uplifting. It was the most run down
city(?) we'd seen in Costa Rica, with more bars on the windows and
doors than San Jose had. We made it to the bus station, only to
find the bus to Nicoya did not leave from there. That was crazy
talk! Not only that, the directions to get to the Nicoya bus were
altered for the festival. I attracted quite a crowd of taxi
drivers, bus attendants and bus drivers by the time Sarah came over,
whereupon everyone continued trying to explain where the bus station
was, without using street names or maps, since Ticos usually don't. We
were also the only tourists in the bus station, which drew the
attention of the travelers who didn't care about giving us directions,
surrounded as we were by the crowd of transportation
professionals. Finally, they gave up, and someone went to get his
car to take us to the bus station.
Turns out the vehicle he drove was not exactly a "licensed" taxi, but,
seeing as we seemed to have little choice, Sarah and I crammed into the
truck and were carted several blocks away to where the barricades for
the festival were set up, charged two dollars, and given more
directions. Since these were much shorter, we were able to follow
them straight to the bus station, where our bus was in the process of
boarding.
The trip to Nicoya was surprisingly short and fast, but it was still
well past dark when we got there. I had been skimming the
guidebook for any place to stay that had hot water and was within
walking distance of the bus station or lighted town square, but hot
water did not seem to be a big thing in Nicoya. So I settled for
Hotel Yenny/Jenny, which had the benefit of being right across the
street from two of the town's internet points and very close to both
the square and the station.
We got checked into a room, only to find that it was stifling and
neither one of us could make the A/C work. We went down to ask
for another room, only to have the desk clerk look aggrieved and walk
us back upstairs to show us how to flip the circuit breaker to turn on
the A/C. He didn't even bother to refrain from rolling his
eyes.
We headed out to find a quasi-Chinese place for supper (since the
guidebook had pointed out a couple I thought we could find in the
dark). What we ended up with wasn't very good, or very Chinese,
which was odd, considering it was run by actual Chinese people. I
picked the seafood bits and legs out of mine to eat and left pretty
much everything else. After this, it was still only about 7:30
pm, so we went for a stroll around the town center, which was quite
decently planned and pretty. Lots of benches and foliage and a
couple of statues. We stopped for ice cream at the end of the
stroll, and I did my usual pointing and asking for something that
looked interesting (it turned out to be vanilla with chocolate crisps)
and Sarah got a weird neopolitan sherbet with strawberry, lemon, and
bubblegum. We sat and watched a family with two little kids (both
under three) come in and try to order ice cream while their kids kept
trying to climb on the penny-ride machines and fall off on their heads.
Since there really wasn't anything else to do after that, we went back
to the hotel, showered under the trickle of cold water, and went to
bed. At least when there's none to start with, you don't have to
worry about using all of the hot water.
