Costa Rica

Thursday February 18. Drove south to the border at Peñas Blancas. As we descended to the flat lands I sorely missed the (relatively) cool mountain air. The highway had excellent pavement and decent signage, except in Managua where we really needed it to find the correct turns for the main highway. We were rescued again by maps.me. At least the detour was interesting, right past the US and

Lago Nicaragua

Brasilian embassies. Down along Lago Nicaragua there was a very strong, hot crosswind and lots of wind turbines.

The border crossing was straight forward on the Nicaraguan side, but confusing on the Costa Rican side: we had to rely on asking directions to find migracion and the aduana. The aduana actually had three checkpoints—one inspector in the parking lot, one clerk at the initial check point, and one in the main office--plus fumigation, police check, and insurance. Two more complications: the police guy sent us back to get further processing, and the customs guy personally walked out to talk to the police guy to tell him we had done everything correctly. And the final checker discovered a clerical error in the paperwork for the car, misrecording the license plate number as AX2 instead of AXZ, so we had to go back and get the clerk to correct it and reissue the permit. The usual two plus hours.

Evening was coming on and we were low on gas. Mike wanted to head for the nearest gas station, but Sharman insisted on stopping at a nearby camping place she found on ioverlander. It was lovely! The owner of the place is German. The cabanas were filled with nature tourists from Germany, while the camping area had one couple from Oregon riding to the south end of Argentina on BMW motorbikes (!) and another couple from South Korea who were bicycling from Seattle to Argentina!! They left Seattle ten months ago and rode down the coast. After Argentina they plan to bicycle Africa.

Sharman was glad to have a (not very) cold shower, but Mike is holding out for hot water.

Friday February 19. We saw more birds and animals in 20 minutes than in the previous six weeks. There was a sloth hanging out in the tree over the driveway and birds and a monkey by the river. It would have been lovely to linger, but we had miles to go and promises to keep: our email revealed that our third note on our house barge in Seattle is in default because the check we mailed before we left was never received. Sigh. We will try to take care of this from San Jose.

We miss Nicaragua already. The pavement here is worse and there were two police checkpoints in ten kilometers. Plus lots of road construction delays.

San Jose was the easiest city to navigate yet. It is a grid, with streets running east-west and avenues running north-south, and a Calle Central and an Avenida Central running down the middle. Instead of N, S, E, W, they put even numbered streets on one side and odd numbered on the other; same with

Museo del Arte Costaricense

avenues. First stop in San Jose was the tourism office: they gave us maps and helped us find the VW service center. We went there, but they didn’t have the part we need; it would take two weeks to ship it from the US. We decided to stop by the art museum, which was fabulous, but we got kicked out at 4pm before we were done. Then we made a bad decision: we opted to drive out of town instead of looking for an internet café and Claro (phone) store. It took us an hour and a half to drive 10 km. Besides being slow, it was hot and hard on the car, which has a compromised fan. Nothing pleasant about it. But there was nowhere we wanted to stop, so we persevered until we got out of the urban area and into the mountains. In the dark, as the fog was rolling in, on a winding mountain road, with no place to stop… Not safe or easy driving conditions. We finally found a gas station and considered parking for the night in front of the police station next door, but were told there was a hotel 20km down the road. When we got there, it was off the road down a steep dirt drive, so we passed that up too. Finally we found the turnoff for a national park ranger station with enough room to park and a cafeteria across the road, so we were happy with that. And the fried cheese was good!

Saturday February 20. It was cold in the mountains! I’d guess the overnight low as in the 40s, with a light drizzle sometime in the night. We got up and drove off without breakfast, down to the town of San Ignacio de El General. It was hot in the valley! It must have been in the 90s. We parked at the central plaza and walked to find the Claro (phone) store to buy a sim card for Central America and the US. Mike’s iphone was locked, he couldn’t remember the password for his old Motorola Razor phone, and so we ended up buying a new Samsung for $25. We went to a café for a chocolate and to call Jim. Jim was on top of it: he’d found the missing check—it had been sent to an old address, returned, and was sitting in our stack of mail—and had made arrangements to deliver it to Callie on Monday morning. Everything was taken care of!

The 12v plug for our refrigerator was burned out. Mike was sent to six different hardware, auto parts and electronics stores in succession before he found one. We also tried to find the park office that the guide book said would be there to make our reservations at the base camp for Chirripó, but the guide book is out of date and the office out of existence. Three people over 24 hours tried calling the reservation line for us, but got no answer. A helpful hotel clerk said the hut is all booked, and we should ask the guy at Hotel Uran at the trailhead to see if he could help us. So we drove 20km up the hill to Chirripó National Park.

We stopped at the park headquarters in San Gerardo and waited in line to ask about reservations and pay our entrance fee. The ranger said the hut was booked up until March, there is no provision for taking the place of no-shows, no camping is allowed in the park, and the quota of day hike permits were all taken as well, so no entrance pass. We proceeded to Hotel Uran and booked a room. The guy

The road in front of Hotel Uran

at the desk was pretty harried and offered no help on our ambition to climb Cerro Chirripó. We hiked 3km up the trail outside the park boundary and chatted up hikers coming down. One guy told us of a climber who had started in the evening, hiked all night, sumited at sunrise and hiked out again. So that was our plan.

Sunday February 21. We spent the morning relaxing and taking advantage of the hotel amenities while we had them. The room was low end, but the shared bath was high end, and the restaurant veranda was pleasnt. For the afternoon we walked up to the Cloud Bridge conservation area, a private nonprofit that works on reforestation, education and research. Tey also offer trails to hike and waterfalls to visit. We had met Genevive (and Charles and Beth) at dinner the night before, and Sharman decided opportunistically to record some interviews for a possible future writing project. We interviewed Frank, the general manager, Linda the resident artist, and of course Genevieve Giddy. We sat on her porch on the hillside drinking fresh hibiscus ice tea, watched the birds, and talked about Cloud Bridge, cloud forests and climate change.

Back at the hotel, we arranged to leave the car in their lot another night, ate a high carb dinner, loaded our day packs with warm clothes, food and water, and headed up the trail about 7:30pm.