La Fortuna, Costa Rica, 2004-05-08

The glossy brochures, of which there are many here, offer a tour at US$33 to take you up and down a river that sounds an awful lot like the one I took from San Carlos, Nicaragua, to Los Chiles, Costa Rica, for about US$6. Of course, I had quite a bit of waiting to do. 5 hours in San Carlos just to get my passport stamped. Another hour just to go 15km (that was the pretty river trip though – I saw some mighty fine crocses).

My impression of Costa Rica is that is it in relative terms extremely well-off. Average people drive new cars, there’s no one wearing random hand-me-down shirts from the Salvation Army. I haven’t seen one restaurant with a dirt floor. Best of all, the bus that pulled in to take me away from Los Chiles was not only not an ex-school bus, but it was a brand new A/C double-decker! The level of wealth and development reminds me quite a bit of southern Brazil, actually.

Still, no matter how hard you try, this is still Central America. It took about 2 hours for one mentally impaired immigration officer to process about 20 people ahead of me in line, while at one point 5-count-them-5 other employees sat around doing absolutely nothing. Later, to make up for the wowness of the first bus, my second bus was old and crowded, and got the famous flat tire in the middle of nowhere right as it started to rain.

In the bus’s defense, it does start to rain about every ten minutes here this time of year.

Leave a Reply


Warning: Undefined variable $user_ID in /usr/share/nginx/vhosts/skory.us/html/skorea/wp-content/themes/newspaper-10/comments.php on line 68

You must be logged in to post a comment.