May 2022
Ten days in May 2022, one manual pickup truck, and a country we were not quite prepared for. Jake had two weeks off between seasons, I had a laptop, a monitor and a reporting deadline, and we had booked our first trip to Central America without doing nearly enough research.
The route went San José, then all the way south to Puerto Pilón near the Panama border, back up into the cloud forest at Monteverde, across to Santa Teresa on the Nicoya Peninsula, and home on a car ferry. This is the whole story. If you just want the practical stuff, it lives in our Costa Rica road trip itinerary and everywhere we stayed.
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Night one: three panics before bed
We left from 15 Park Row on the AirTrain, Jake filming the whole ride because it was his first time flying out of JFK. We landed in San José close to midnight on a Tuesday, Jake’s fancy camera already out. Before we were even through the doors, a police officer stopped him and suggested, kindly but clearly, that he put it away and never leave anything visible in the car.
So I was already a little on edge when we went looking for Avis. The rental was not at the airport. It was a shuttle ride away, which we did not know, so we walked the length of the terminal twice looking for a sign that did not exist while a small man followed us saying “Avis, Avis.” We ignored him, because everyone outside was offering us a cab. He showed us a phone full of contacts named things like “Diego Avis,” which proved nothing. Then the actual Avis shuttle pulled up behind him. He was the Avis guy. We apologized. He was lovely about it.
Panic number two came in the shuttle. Plexiglass between us and the driver, just us in the back, a road sloping down into the dark between barbed-wire fences, for much longer than a shuttle ride should take. Jake finally banged on the divider and asked where we were going. “To the Avis.” The parking lot floodlights came on about three seconds later.
Panic number three was at the counter. Jake had rented a silver Nissan Frontier, manual, which he was thrilled about. The agent told us we had to buy roughly $1,000 of insurance on a car that cost about half that. We had the Amex Platinum and its coverage, but Costa Rica requires a letter from your card company proving it, and we did not have one. It was midnight. We paid.
Thank goodness we had booked one night at the DoubleTree near the airport. I always love a Hilton when we land somewhere new. It’s like going to a Starbucks in a foreign country: you know exactly what you’re getting. Even there the parking lot was out in the boonies, so Jake dropped me at the door and parked alone.
The next morning was a different country. A huge breakfast buffet, me working from the room (it’s only two hours behind New York in May, the best thing about Central America), and Jake at the pool, where he found a giant Jenga. We had burgers by the pool on my lunch break and played a round. Gold status got us a late checkout, which turned out to be a trap.
Puerto Pilón: the cornfield, the treehouse, and Brais
After the airport, Jake had read that we should drive in daylight. We did not leave early enough. The drive south is basically all highway and slow, but it was lovely: aisles and aisles of palm trees, the most beautiful sunset from the road, and dinner in a small town where the woman didn’t really have a menu. She just asked what we wanted and brought us something that tasted like it came out of her own kitchen.
By the grocery store stop it was dark, and a few people followed us around asking for money because we obviously looked American. We grabbed snacks fast and got back in the truck with an hour and a half to go.
This is where we learned the most important lesson of the whole trip: use Waze, not Google Maps. Google sent us off the highway, past a group of men sitting outside a stadium, and onto dirt roads between walls of crops taller than the truck. No streetlights. No signal. No way to tell our host we were lost. We passed the same stadium and the same men so many times. Then the directions told us to turn right up what was plainly an ATV trail. I turned to Jake and said, out loud, if we come upon a cartel in this field, I love you, tell my mom I love her. We did not die. Don’t worry.
We found it eventually. Our host, Brais, was still up, even though everyone in Costa Rica goes to sleep when the sun goes down. His place was almost a treehouse, with a horse farm next door and the ocean somewhere in the dark. We turned on the light in our room and a gecko shot across the wall. He told us not to flush toilet paper, which is normal there, and I have a very funny video of Jake meeting a bidet for the first time.
I went to bed in pants, a sweatshirt and socks so nothing could touch me. Jake made fun of me for it while secretly keeping his flashlight next to the pillow. Then a bug flew straight into his face and he had to spit it out. I enjoyed that very much.
Brais, and the week that followed
In daylight the property was magic: hammocks everywhere, banana trees in the backyard, a downstairs kitchen where Brais would cook for you if you asked. He is French, his wife is Spanish, and they met in culinary school before cooking on ships together. They live somewhere so remote that when he asked the post office for his address, they told him he didn’t have one and could pick a street name and a number. So he did.
I worked Thursday and Friday from the hammock while Jake surfed, because Puerto Pilón sits at the tip of a peninsula with one of the longest waves in the country. A rainstorm came through in a flash on Thursday and knocked the internet out for a bit. That evening we drove down the road to a spot some German surfers had told Jake about, watched them surf the sunset, and came home to pizza Brais made while he hosted a yoga retreat’s dinner. We sat at the bar with him and stayed out of the dancing.
On Friday I walked down to watch Jake surf. You climb over fallen palms to get there, the sand is dark, and there’s almost no one around. A local fisherman named Bongo tried hard to sell us a fishing trip for the next day. His boat was more or less a floating piece of plastic. We passed.
The horses, and Rango
That evening we went horseback riding with the neighbor across the road. I had only been on a horse once, I’d had knee surgery in January, and I wore shorts, which I do not recommend to anyone, ever. The horse owner, Rango, speaks zero English. Brais translated the handoff and then we were on our own.
My horse was the dad. Jake’s was the son, and the son wanted to race down the beach, so the dad wanted to race too, and I spent the first stretch holding him back while he drooled with the effort. So Rango took my reins and walked beside me, talking to me in Spanish for half an hour. I took a lot of Spanish in school and I like to think I have a good Spanish face. We understood each other fine.
An hour down the beach, with the light going, Rango stopped us, disappeared into some apartments, and came back with three beers. We sat on a log and he told us about breaking his ankle on a farm and getting helicoptered out of a place he didn’t know helicopters could reach. He has about a million screws in that ankle and is still working. Jake was a little uninterested. I loved every minute.
We rode home by the road in the dark. Rango stopped to talk to a friend for what felt like forever and our horses just kept walking, so we let them, figuring they knew the way. They did. My inner thighs did not recover for days.
Back at the house, Brais was waiting up. We had no cash for dinner in town, so he handed us his own, put it on a tab with the surfboard and the horses, and at the end of the trip we wired him the total. We ate at a cute little place full of expats, Jake bought an Imperial beer T-shirt, and we finished the night with ping pong in the treehouse.
The banana tree
Saturday morning Brais made smoothies from locally grown fruit, then took me, Jake and his two-year-old son Simi around the corner. He was watching a neighbor’s house and the banana tree was ready, so he handed Jake a machete. It is a thick trunk. Jake got through it, Brais yelled “timber,” and the whole tree came down directly on Simi.
Simi crawled out from under the leaves completely unbothered. Not even crying. Brais looked at him and said, “Simi, Jake almost killed you.” Walking home, he leaned down to his son: let’s not tell mom.
We stopped next door at an American expat’s house to pick tea leaves, where Jake got stuck in a long conversation and Brais’s dog, who he shares with the neighbor, refused to come home with us. Then we packed up, carried our bananas to the truck, and left for the mountains in daylight this time.
Monteverde: up into the clouds
We had learned our lesson, so it was Waze the whole way north. Past the palm trees again, lunch in a little town, and back on the road for about two minutes before a cop pulled us over. Everyone in Costa Rica says “pura vida,” including him. He just wanted to see a passport.
Jake’s was in his backpack in the back of the truck. He got out, opened it, and a bottle of wine fell out and cracked on the road. The officer bent to help and then jumped back, because the bag was covered in a marching line of ants. (I had kept my things zipped and off the floor at Brais’s since night one. Jake had not.) Passport checked, “pura vida,” have a nice day. That was the whole stop.
The rest of the drive was Jake asking me to convert kilometers to miles per hour, me unable to take a turn at the wheel because I can’t drive stick, a startling number of cash-only tolls where we never once understood what change we got back, and potholes that got bigger the higher we climbed. And so many cows. Costa Rican cows are skinny.
We got in early afternoon, too early to check in, so we stopped at the bungee place first and Jake signed up for the next morning. Check-in for our cabin was at a separate lodge down the road, and then we found it: floor-to-ceiling windows, a soaking tub we never once used, and a balcony with swinging chairs, right up in the cloud.
My reporting deadline was the next day, so I sat down and worked while Jake talked with his best friend on the balcony. Then we went out to a fine-dining place we had passed on the way in.
The cockroach dinner
We got there around nine and were the only people in the restaurant. All the floor-to-ceiling doors were open to the forest, it was beautiful, and the food was genuinely excellent: burrata salad, red wine, really good pasta, dessert. Then the cockroaches came in. Two inches long, and flying.
I was up and dodging them around the table. I filmed one, and I heard the word “cockroach” travel back through the kitchen, and within a minute the staff came around and closed every single door. You’re in a rainforest, I know there will be bugs. It was still a shock to watch them fly indoors. To finish the evening, Jake picked up a huge beetle and threw it at me. The chefs laughed. That was even ruder.
In the night we heard something in the trash outside, and in the morning it was everywhere: a raccoon, we think, into a bag left by the last guests. We had leftover steak and eggs on the balcony in the swinging chairs while Jake flew his drone through the clouds.
The jump
Jake was the third person to jump that morning. It’s the highest bungee in Central America ↗, off a platform slung across a canyon, and he was nervous at the top. A couple in his group talked him into it, and he loved it. I watched from a little platform and felt ill. I did not jump. My knee was my excuse and I’m sticking to it. That couple turned out to be great, and we ended up hanging out with them in Santa Teresa.
Then we went to the Sky Walk and spent the afternoon crossing the hanging bridges. It’s so cool to be in the canopy with all the sounds of the forest around you, and it wasn’t crowded. A little drizzle, never enough for jackets, and a nice lunch at the top before we went back and did nothing for the rest of the day.
One thing we learned leaving: La Fortuna looks close to Monteverde on the map. It is not. There is no road through the mountains, so it’s three to four hours around. We’ll have to come back for the waterfalls.
Santa Teresa and Malpaís: slowing down
Three to four hours of mountains and cows later we pulled into an A-frame about five minutes outside Santa Teresa, in Malpaís. All glass front and back, looking straight into the forest, with hammocks, its own lawn, an outdoor shower, a little outdoor soaking tub we used almost every day, and a beautiful kitchen. Howler monkeys in the trees. A standing rule not to leave food on the back deck. Our host had an ATV delivered right to the house, which is how everyone gets around on that long dirt road.
That first evening we rode into town, browsed the shops, and ended up at Eat Street, an open-air food hall with hammocks. Touristy, and we went back anyway. Burgers, drinks, hammock, bed.
The next morning Jake rented a surfboard and we met our bungee friends at Playa Hermosa. They surfed, I tanned on my first real day off, and afterwards we all went to Hotel Nantipa for dinner and drinks. It was a blast.
Driving home around sunset we pulled over on a whim at Playa Mar Azul, a stretch of tide pools between Santa Teresa and Malpaís, and had the sunset completely to ourselves. Back at the house it was pouring rain, Jake was in the outdoor shower, and I looked over from unloading the ATV and saw the whitest butt I have ever seen. There is video. The moon had competition. The sun there is no joke, by the way. I burned badly that day.
Our last full day was rainy, which felt right after so much moving around. Breakfast in Malpaís at a quiet little place with almost nobody in it, then we took the car into town instead of the ATV and did more shopping. Jake got his Pura Vida hat. Eat Street again, because of course. At sunset we ate near the beachfront hotels and watched hermit crabs wander across the sand.
The last night in a glass house
It thunderstormed all night. The A-frame is glass on the front and the back, and the roof comes down to the ground on the sides, so you feel completely exposed. I heard so many noises outside. Someone, or something, or the monkeys, was right outside the whole night. I was too scared to open my eyes in case I saw something on the other side of the glass, so I just lay there praying for it to be morning.
When I woke up I asked Jake if he’d heard it. He said yes, he had decided to ignore it.
Home by ferry
We took the car ferry from Paquera back toward San José early in the morning instead of driving the long way around. Jake loved watching the big trucks load. Only the driver stays with the car, so I walked on with the regular passengers. The water was calm, and after Jake had driven from San José to the bottom of the country, up into the mountains and across to the coast, he finally got to sit and look at the scenery.
Then the airport, where in May 2022 you still needed a Covid test to fly home. It was $150 each in tents outside the terminal. People in Santa Teresa had told us they were faking theirs. We were too scared of everything in Costa Rica by then, so we paid, and flew home.