ATVs are the new black – Costa Rica, days 8 & 9 – the finale.
So, I’ve discovered I like going fast and I drive like a madwoman. Plus, I’m capable of doing them both at the same time. On roads that are little more than goat paths and have ever expanding water features as the rivers roll over them. All the while giggling like a mental patient and hoping my thighs don’t stick to the seat. I’m totally okay with all of the above.
Got up bright and early and were picked up by Chino, our super sweet guide (who tried to broker a deal to have me as his fourth wife. I passed, but I did promise to hang out with him next time I’m in Quepos, although something tells me I’m going to “forget” this) and driven out to London, Costa Rica, population, like, 80. It was tiny, but cute, with chickens and dogs wandering the street more than people. We pulled into someone’s driveway (this seemed a little weird until we saw the fifteen ATVs parked there) and, after a quick training course in the fine art of not killing yourself on an ATV, we were off.
It was fantastic. The path was steep and rocky and wet in places, but that just let you really enjoy what an ATV could do. This was supposed to be off-roading, and it satisfied. I thought it had been purpose-built for the psycho tourists like us, but after the fact we learned that this actually was the public road in the area. Fourteen families had no other way in or out of their little isolated village. Wow. We had also brought a change of clothes in case we got muddy and messy as the website had warned, but I discovered quickly that if you went faster (and cheered, that was an important part) then teh water sprayed outwards and kept me all dry.
Midway through we stopped and had an hour walk through a beautiful forest and across a suspension bridge that was nothing more than a bunch of metal ladders trussed together a hundred feet up in the air to a waterfall. This is a perfect place to play and swim, but as it was just the two of us, we opted to just take lots of pictures and dip our feet instead of making the poor guide stand around awkwardly as we splashed in the falls. Then it was back onto the ATVs and retracing our route back to the start. On the way back he knew we were capable drivers, so the speeds were much higher, topping out about 50mph. Sweet. Only once, when I was trying to avoid some horseback tourists, did I confuse the break and the gas and nearly go shooting off into the jungle. Leave it to me to only make a mistake when there’s a crowd of people to see it!
Did not want to give that ATV back. I tried to just drive off, but it just would have taken me too long to drive it all the way back home, and it’s hard to find a good parking space for your ATV in downtown Vancouver, so I left it.
Spent the rest of the day hanging out at the hotel to escape the heat and avoid the torrential downpour that left me epically soaked even under my umbrella when I walked down to the local bodega for supplies. After that, we deserved a nice dinner, so we cabbed it to El Avion and we got to watch the lightning illuminate the sky from our table under a plane.
The last full day in Quepos started early, as we had a 6am pickup for our mangrove tour. They have to start super early to hit the tides at the right times. Luckily, since the sun rises and sets at 5:00 here, your body clock gets you up early anyway to greet the sun and puts you to sleep early, so that wake up call was not too bad. The tour group was us and a French family that spoke almost no English, and on our two and a half hour boat tour we saw a few monkeys, some vultures and a couple of skinny raccoons, but that was pretty much it. Three years ago I had taken the same tour and seen so many animals it was incredible, but today everyone was playing hide and seek from us and they won. It honestly felt like a colossal waste of time. And it finished at 9am, so we still had the whole day to fill.
Like every woman, we went shopping. We got a great deal on a taxi and headed right down to Playa Manuel Antonio, the beach paradise. I’m far too pale to be a beach bunny, and the sun here fries skin in the blink of an eye (half the people walking around are a painful red colour, and that had already happened to me once this trip, so there was no way I was going through that again), but there’s a few cute souvenir shops and a street market where you can get some good tacky tourist shit (I love this stuff!) as long as you barter for it. We got a great carved vase for half the price we would have paid in the stores in Quepos. Of course, today had to be the day it decided not to rain in the afternoon and we tried not to melt as we shopped, took the incredibly cheap public bus back to Quepos, shopped more, and then got all packed up and ready to depart the next morning.
The drive to San Jose was kind of anticlimactic compared to all our other Interbus transfers, as the roads were, well, actual roads the whole way, including an extended stint on a brand new highway. Our driver took advantage of this by driving super fast, which actually didn’t scare me as much as it should have, I loved the speed. Clearly the ATV ride has broken my common sense when it came to speeding in this country. Soon we were back at the Casa Conde, where we discovered our pickup time the next morning for our 10am flight was 515am. Great. So we dropped our bags, had some dinner, watched a tiny bit of TV and went to bed early to prep for our 430am wake up call.
Our airport transfer the next day was even early. He showed up at 5. Luckily, we were ready anyway, but that got us to the airport at 545. Cranky and tired and hungry we checked in for our flight, cleared security and hit the food court for a giant cinnabon breakfast. Normally I wouldn’t eat 1500 calories of sugary goodness for breakfast, but it just seemed to be a fitting send off for our time in Costa Rica. It had been a hot, sweet and sticky(with both sweat and rain) trip, and was thoroughly enjoyable.
Pura Vida!
The building (if you can call it that, it has no walls, so it’s technically more of a roof) is constructed over the fuselage itself, complete with a little bump up for the tail fin, and you eat at tables around the engines and cargo hold. Inside you’ll find the bar (I can just imagine the conversations that occur when people wake up the next morning: ”Dude, I was so wasted last night I thought I was drinking in a plane in the jungle” – “You were drinking in a plane in the jungle, Steve” – “Woah”), and the kitchen is downstairs. In what I think is an ingenious space-saving technique, the kitchen is downstairs, and all the orders are lifted to dining level in a giant dumbwaiter constructed from parts of old, much smaller private planes. Now you’re getting why I love this place, right? The food is good, and not any more expensive than your standard meal at Applebees, but I’m honestly not paying any attention to the food when I’m here. And I have a sneaking suspicion I may be back here again to eat before leaving Quepos.
