Puntarenas still haunting us...

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We woke up and headed towards the beach to find a bite to eat (not to swim because the word is the waters here are polluted). We find a decent place and both order fruit salads, I also order some sort of drink in which I suspect I’ll get a fancy coffee…wrong, wrong, wrong. My ‘fancy coffee’ is layers of crushed ice, powered coffee(?), ice cream, and some condensed milk to finish it off. Our fruit salads are (in this order) red jello, fruit, ice cream, chocolate ice cream, corn flakes, and a cherry. Nothing like an all-star breakfast to begin our day.

With some trouble we find the bus station that sells tickets to Quepos, gather our bags from our “hotel,” and wait for the bus. The bus is nice, we’re happy to be leaving Puntarenas behind. Things are going well, we pass through Jaco. On the far side of Jaco we hit a traffic jam. Seems to be a car accident on a bridge perhaps? After an hour sitting on the bus, sweating, and listening to babies crying, we decide to step off the bus (everyone else was doing it?!). We walk into a store to get some water and chips and salsa, only to walk up to the counter to see the line of cars (the same line the bus is in) moving!!! A little panic sets in, seeing how we’re not on the bus. I run outside to see if I spot our bus (its all yellow, hard to miss) of course I can’t. Carolyn and I run down the line of cars, trying to catch up with the bus (not sure why we decided to do this, it was pretty pointless). Panicking slightly, since our bags are on the bus, and once again-we are not. I wanted to hitchhike (Quepos was only 23 km away) but Carolyn saw a cab so we ran back to the cab, negotiated a fee (still got ripped off) of $20 and we were off. We arrived at the Quepos bus station just in time to see them standing around my backpack, confused as to why no one was claiming the bag. Luckily for us, they actually tagged our bags in Puntarenas, something I’ve never had done before, so the driver knew these bags had to come off-rather than continue down the road. We ran across the parking lot, waving our arms. Everyone was a little confused (actually I think they were mildly entertained at the idea of us being left…).

Unfortunately, our adventure didn’t end there. We still had to catch a bus to Domincal, a small beach town 45 km down the road. We find the right bus, however this driver didn’t let us put our backpacks under the bus, we had to carry them. So we get on the back of the bus, however it’s packed and there are surf boards in the aisles. Carolyn stood in the door way and I attempted to balance in the aisle. The road was ridiculously bumpy and we both struggled to keep our balance. After about 30 minutes of this, some spots opened up and we were able to sit down and take our packs off. The bus ride took around 2 hours, that’s how bad the roads were. It begins pouring rain and we can’t see out the windows to see if we’re at our stop and the bus driver is less than helpful.

By some twist of luck, we managed to get off at the correct spot and walked down a muddy, dark road to our hostel (actually found out later it wasn’t the place I thought, but it worked). The office was closed, but the bar was open (which we found out later was were they conduct all their official business). We had an ocean facing room with our own bathroom for $7.50 a night, not too bad. Carolyn and I treated ourselves to a beer and some dinner and then called it a night, however the rowdy characters didn’t call it a night till about 2:00am, unfortunate for us trying to sleep…The next few days were just filled with lazy hours at the beach and walks into town to check the internet and buy some fruit. A nice little beach town…

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