San Jose, Orosi and Quepos

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Suzanne here...

So, onward to the next leg of our trip... Central America. Our plane landed at San Jose Airport just before 5.30am. We planned to have a coffee at the airport and wait for the world to wake up, but there was nothing at arrivals. We headed outside and we´re immediately seized upon by taxi drivers. Admittedly nothing like as full on as Asia, but even so it seemed easier just to avoid them by jumping on a bus straight away. We found the bus stop in front of departures. As we were waiting I noticed that the waist strap had disappeared from my backpack. Annoying, as it´s this strap that distributes the weight onto your hips and away from your shoulders. We´ll just have to see how I get on.

The bus took about 30 minutes to get to downtown San Jose. There was still nothing open so we decided to head to our hostel. As we weren´t sure exactly where it was, just that it was in a suburb (Los Yoses) away from downtown, we took a taxi, only $4. It seems that in Costa Rica there are no real addresses. Places are described in relation to other places they are near. How do people manage?

The hostel wasn´t open (it was only about 6.15 after all) so we wandered off to look for a cafe. I think we´ve mentioned that while camping in New Zealand we tried to do 30 minutes of Spanish each day. We didn´t manage every day, but we had done a fair bit. We are so, so glad of it now. Yes, some people speak English, but a lot of people don´t (and why should they to be fair). I managed to ask someone in reasonable Spanish whether there was a cafe nearby. We even understood 2/3 of her reply! Enough to get us close enough that we stumbled upon it.

After a leisurely coffee and cake we tried the hostel again. It was open, although of course our room was not ready. Normally we´d just have dumped our stuff and headed out but after three heavy nights in LA, and an overnight flight, all we wanted was a kip. We decided to wait. And wait. And wait. They kept saying it wouldn't be long, they were just waiting from someone to move out of that room and into a cheaper one. After a while it transpired that the occupant of the room had actually gone out really early, and was due back at noon to move his stuff. They did offer us another, cheaper, room but the one we´d reserved had a PC in it which we thought would be really useful so we decided to wait. By 1.30pm we´d almost lost the will to live, when the manager came and told us he´d move the other guys stuff. Felt a bit bad about this, but he should have moved his own bloody stuff by then. At last, at about 2pm, we got into the room and crashed out.

Feeling refreshed after our sleep we headed out to for something to eat. We ended up at an Italian, not what we´d planned for our first meal in Costa Rica, but very nice. Then it was on to the Sand Bar. At last, a decent heavy metal bar, and within walking distance of our hostel. Tired as we were from LA and our flight, there was no way we were going to pass this up. Had a great night, singing, albeit a tad out of tune, to the songs we knew.

The following day we had a bit of a lie in then headed into San Jose. We had a bit of a wander and looked around the National museum. It´s a nice enough town, but there are not many unmissable sights. Two nights was certainly long enough. We stopped at a soda (cheap local restaurant) for lunch and for the first time experienced the joy of the casado. A plate of rice, beans, salad, veg and meat for a very reasonable price. It was delicious. Think we´ll be having a lot more of these... In the evening we wandered around Los Yoses and San Pedro before having some dinner and heading back to the Sand Bar. Another night of heavy metal goodness.

David here...

We left Los Yoses at 11:00 and jumped on the first bus to Cartago. This journey was only 40 minutes and we jumped off after asking the driver if it was the right place. We looked around but could not see any reference for buses to Orosi so Suzanne asked a passer-by (in Spanish) where the bus stop was. We recognised enough Spanish to know roughly what the kind lady said and as we walked in the direction indicated we saw the bus and promptly jumped on. After another 40 minutes bus ride we arrived in the small town of Orosi and using the football field as the reference point as nothing in Costa Rica has an actual address, just an indication of where it might be (300m North of Cafe Spoon, for example) we made our way to the Hotel Reventazon, which had good reviews on Hostel World. We got there and chose a room for $30 a night and got settled in, only to find that the toilet didn't flush. Eventually this meant we had to move to another room (one of the $40 a night ones, which included a TV and fridge, at no extra cost). We were given a lovely cup of coffee when we arrived by the 'manager'', Keiko, a volunteer from Japan and she also did our washing for us for free, as a gift from the owner Frank. Keiko over the course of our stay could not do enough for us. Always there to help and bring us coffee whenever we wanted it. She was an absolute angel and made our stay at the hotel very comfortable. The room itself was airy, clean and very comfortable indeed.

Once settled in, we wandered round the town and then had a nice casado at Soda Luz. The town consists of a main street and 2 other streets running parallel, so it did not take us long to wander round the whole town. We popped to the supermarket and then sat reading for a few hours on the hotel balcony with a couple of beers. That evening we went to Los Nido (The Nest) on the main street for steak, which was very nice before reading again and then going to bed. The next day we went on a tour of the Finca Christina Organic coffee farm which Frank had organised for us. We spent 2 hours learning all about how coffee is grown, looked after and finally harvested and processed. It was very interesting and the shot of espresso at the end of the tour was divine. We will have to investigate getting some coffee from them when we get home. Before the coffee tour we ate at Soda Ranchos for lunch and had another great casado, so that evening we just had cheese sandwiches back at the hotel room, we are on a budget after all.

On our final day in Orosi we went to look for the hot springs just out of town, however it was raining quite heavily. After a couple of hours of fruitless searching we gave up and headed back to the hotel where we relaxed on the balcony again before heading off into town for something to eat. We looked at a couple of places which proved to be far more expensive than Los Nido so we ended up going back there and having another good meal. We really enjoyed our time in Orosi, which was a quiet, friendly little town which we found to be very relaxing. We were well looked after in our hotel and left feeling refreshed and raring to go with the next stage of the trip.

We set off and caught a bus back to Cartago and then to San Jose. We did this with very little problems, especially as in Cartago a gentleman pointed us in the right direction for the San Jose buses. San Jose has a number of bus terminals dotted around the centre and you need to know which is the right one for your destination. We walked to the main terminal in town, the Coca Cola, and spotted a bus bay with our next destination on it, Quepos. We bought tickets from the relevant ticket booth (each destination in each terminal has it´s own ticket booth, just to confuse matters a little further), just in time for the next bus as it turned out and hopped on the bus for the 3 hour journey to Quepos. We hadn´t booked anywhere in advance for this leg so walked around a bit before deciding on the Hotel Malinche. The room was clean enough but a lot smaller than Orosi, but it was cheap and we quickly got settled in. We headed out into the town to take a look around and to swap some books at a 2nd hand bookshop just round the corner from our hotel and then went to a bar for a pre-meal drink. We went to a Mexican in town for our evening meal, Dos Locos, which proved to be expensive and a little disappointing, not what we were looking for really. We then went to another bar and ordered Nachos and Guacamole as we were still peckish, which proved to be the right thing to do as the Guacamole was so fresh and tasty.

While in this bar we witnessed an American who was extremely drunk start to give the owner grief. There wasn´t actually any fisticuffs but the drunk American was quite abusive. This kind of sums up Quepos really. It is quite touristy however does have a real undercurrent of menace to it. In fact, it´s, well, a bit rough. There are drunk locals on every street corner and crazy old men shouting at everything or pretending to direct traffic. It was such a change from the lovely, peaceful town of Orosi and came as a bit of a shock. Still, we managed to have a good time.

The next day we went out by local bus to Manual Antonio to spend some time on the beach. This was extremely touristy and quite busy, even for the rainy season. There were touts everywhere so we ended up sitting on the beach reading before walking part of the way back to Quepos in the baking heat, uphill. Why would we do this I hear you say when local buses are so cheap? We had seen an advert for a Mexican restaurant earlier and had spotted the establishment from the bus on the way to the beach. They promised authentic Mexican food, so we decided to give it a whirl. The place was called Sanchos and it was cheap and delicious, the Wet Burrito being an absolute highlight. We then jumped on a bus back to Quepos, went to the beach, which was a little depressing as there were more loony's about and the place was covered in litter, so we went back to our hotel to relax for a bit. That night we went out to La Cubanita, a little family run Soda in the back streets of town. We both had a casado, which was very nice and a fresh Mango juice, which was delicious. After that, we didn't fancy going to a bar so we ended up back at the hotel and going to bed early as we had a bus to catch the next morning at 09:30 to San Jose.

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