To say that I planned my trip to Costa Rica is a bit of an overstatement. Yes, we bought our tickets ahead of time…after deciding on Costa Rica for some unknown reason. Part of it for me was that my boyfriend was in the middle of a 6 week trip through South America with his brother, and I felt competitive. Mostly, Kate & I knew that we wanted to lay around on a beach somewhere after our boards, but after talking about it for a while, we also realized that we wanted to go somewhere we could jump off cliffs into water (something we actually did not do, looking back). Enough time has passed since then that I honestly can’t tell you why we chose Costa Rica. But we did, and we found decent rates on StudentUniverse (actually, it cost me the same amount to fly from NYC to San Jose as it will for me to fly from Hartford to Portland, OR in August), and we figured all the other details would fall into place later.
And they did, kind of. We rented a car in advance, we booked our first night’s hotel in advance…aaaaand that’s about it. Up until we got on the plane on June 25, our itinerary was essentially: 1) land at SJO airport 2) meet car rental guy 3) get on the road to Puntarenas, where we had a hotel booked 4) take the ferry to Nicoya Peninsula the next morning 5) ???. It wasn’t concerning. Kate and I both took our USMLE Step 1 boards on Friday, June 24, finishing at around 4:30 PM. By 10 PM we were at my parents’ house. By 5 AM the next morning we were up and headed to Laguardia. The night before I’d checked and double checked my bag for efficiency. I prided myself on how little I’d packed for this trip, a feat for a person who has been known to bring 2 different pairs of boots — leather platform, not leather hiking — on a summer camping trip. I’d fit everything in Ryan’s badass hiking backpack and felt super awesome about myself. I decided to bring my iPhone, figuring I could use it as a computer to get WiFi, should we encounter any (more on that later), and to leave my driver’s license at home, since it would just be another thing I could lose. I was so proud of myself.
I was so goddamn proud of myself and apparently didn’t have the obvious thought that you’re probably having right now, namely, “Wait, but didn’t you just say that, like, literally the ONLY thing you planned in advance was a car rental?” Yes. I myself realized this somewhere over North Carolina, which sent me into a silent frenzy, scouring our guidebooks for info on car rental policies (both of them said very clearly in no uncertain terms that a license from my country of origin would be required, and also that I could have my car confiscated and have myself thrown in Costa Rican prison to rot for months with little assistance from the US consulate). We landed in Miami and I did various freakout things such as 1) repeatedly tell Kate that I was fine and was not freaking out 2) call my parents and ask them to photograph my license and email me pictures (this turned out to be genius) 3) drink a margarita really quickly 4) start planning a trip around Costa Rica where we took buses everywhere.
Here’s the thing: Kate had her valid driver’s license with her. Here’s the other thing: Kate doesn’t drive stick, and pretty much only manual transmission 4×4′s are available in Costa Rica (at least the only kind our rental company offered). We were in a situation where we had a valid driver who didn’t know how to operate the vehicle and a non-valid driver who had been looking forward to driving around dirt roads in 2nd gear for weeks now. We decided to do the rational and mature thing: completely avoid the topic until the car rental guy brought it up, and then act like total idiot girls once he did. Even still, there was a brief, horrifying moment where it seemed like they weren’t going to rent to us at all, in which case we really would have been SOL and stranded in San Jose, the dirty and dangerous capital city in which we had booked ZERO time. Instead, they graciously accepted my credit card and advised me of the speed limits and road rules, and told me that if I should get pulled over for any reason, I should start to cry on the spot (for the record, I am very good at this), tell the cop that I’d had my purse, containing my license, stolen in San Jose, and then offer him a bribe. This, paired with the fact that I am a dumb, blue-eyed, sunburned gringa, would probably be enough to keep me out of Costa Rican jail.
It never came to that (spoiler alert), but driving was nerve-wracking enough to make us wonder a few times. The speed limits in Costa Rica are ridiculously low – the road we took from San Jose to Puntarenas that first afternoon/evening had a maximum speed of 60 kph (about 37 miles per hour), and for the most part, people followed it. Even the major highways were usually 1 lane per direction, with an occasional 2nd lane for merging or exiting. The most hair-raising thing happened the further we got from the capitol, which is that people walk and ride their bikes, usually without any sort of reflective material, on the highway…in the wrong direction. It started to rain, and then to pour, and then to torrentially downpour as we were pulling into Puntarenas, where we somehow found our hotel based on a vague Google map recollection in my head. We parked in a secure lot, which was a huge relief, since at this point I pretty much assumed anything that could go wrong with the car would, and also that literally every person we met, including the woman who changed our money at the airport (enormous mistake, more on that in another post), told us never to leave anything in the car, EVER. We entered our eccentrically painted room and collapsed almost as abruptly as I’m ending this post. It was real. This was all happening!
I’m glad you didn’t end up in Costa Rican jail!