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| Costa Rica Honeymoon, Fall 2000: San Jose, Day 16
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Tuesday, November 7, 2000: Back to civilization
We met Jimmy and Crystal at their cabinas, a smallish hotel/hostel thing with several small detached cabins. Suprisingly (given that they paid about a third of what we did for our room, and ours wasn't that expensive), it was pretty nice! Clean, somewhat spacious (although ours had been much bigger), and situated on a horse ranch right on the outskirts of Santa Elena, walking distance to town. Crystal introduced me to the newest addition to the ranch, a tiny colt named Paco.
We got on really well with Jimmy and Crystal, who live in Santa Cruz. Jimmy is a semi-professional surfer and triathlete, while Crystal is a sales rep for a men's clothing line. We had plenty in common (although Jimmy refused to reveal the best secret surf spots in Santa Cruz, darn it!) and had a lot of laughs on the way.
We headed back to the hotel to pack and get ready for our trip home the next morning. Now CNN was saying that it looked like Bush was the election winner. Drat. |
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We packed our bags this morning and bid the Monteverde Lodge farewell. We were set to meet Jimmy and Crystal at 10 a.m. for the drive to San Jose, but had time for a stop at a little cafe called Boston Bagels, where we had breakfast (and Dave found a used book on banking that he just *had* to buy...we've discovered that many of the restaurants here double as shops, which makes sense. Also found a treasure trove of used books in English. Good to know that next time, I don't have to lug "War and Peace" to satisfy my bookworm nature).
Then we hit the road! It actually only took us about 45 minutes to get to a paved road, which was an absolute breeze compared to the road TO Monteverde from Arenal (you go a different route when heading to/from San Jose). The weather was clearing, and we got some absolutely gorgeous views, some clear out to the Pacific Ocean.
As we approached San Jose (nearly three hours later), we stopped for lunch at another soda on the side of the road. Once again, we chowed down on great, simple Tico food...eggs, plantains, rice, beans, etc. I kept sneaking parts of my lunch to a tiny, clearly starving dog who kept wandering into the place. The waiters gave me the stinkeye when I did so, so I started making trips "out to the car" with a tortilla or eggs hidden in a napkin. She was pathetically grateful for the food. Poor little dog.
We stopped at our rental-car place (amusingly, right next to the Best Western where we'd met up with our whitewater rafting guide), dropped off the car (almost $600 for a week's rental, ouch), and all shared a cab to our hotel in San Jose. Jimmy and Crystal hadn't set up a place to stay in San Jose, but when we reached our hotel, the Grano de Oro, it turned out they had rooms available, so they opted to stay there with us. The hotel was lovely--a refurbished mansion that had once been owned by one of the grandest families in San Jose. It was amazing to think it was once a private family home. Our room was spacious, filled with antiques, and had an immaculate bathtub (a nice change from our last few lodgings...while they were clean, they weren't so clean as to invite soaking in a tub. You never knew what kind of creepy-crawly would show up out of the water spout.)
We hung out in our rooms for a while, relaxing and watching the early election returns on CNN Worldwide (and watched them go out on a limb and declare Gore the winner!), then met Jimmy and Crystal for dinner at the hotel's restaurant. We had fruity tropical drinks and a fantastic dinner, although the meals were not as much of a bargain as we'd become used to. Afterward, we walked into downtown San Jose, just to check things out. Turns out that all the things we'd heard from locals about the city being no great shakes were, sadly, true. There wasn't much charm; the streets were crowded with vendors in little kiosks and with carts, while the stores reminded us of 42nd Street in New York: discount T-shirts, cheap underwear, cheap electronics, music stores, and so on. We *did* get a steal on t-shirts at a store that must have stocked 10,000 different types on movable electric racks. We were rather impressed.
We did discover a couple of grand old buildings in San Jose, built around a plaza with a small park. On one side of the plaza was a giant hotel; on the other, the building for the National Theater, which was rather pretty. and the area immediately around was blocked off to traffic and turned into a sort of pedestrian mall. But all in all, we found the city to be fairly charmless, utilitarian, crowded, smelly (diesel fumes), a little scary, and not all that interesting. Which is too bad, because we were prepared to really like it.