Road Trip

After a week in San Jose I flew back to Quepos to meet up with my uncle Luis for a road trip to the Osa Peninsula. We rented a 4x4 and headed south Saturday morning with no particular endpoint and the aim of stopping wherever looked interesting. The stretch of road from Quepos to Dominical is only about 40km long but it takes about an hour and half to negotiate because it’s littered with water filled potholes/craters. According to Lonely Planet, the municipality of Quepos has deliberately avoided paving the road to discourage tourists from leaving Quepos to go to Dominical, the closest tourist destination. It’s actually a fun of a drive though (unless you’re hung over or have internal bleeding), kind of like a video game, especially when you’ve taken out car insurance and aren’t worried about the long-term effects on the vehicle.

In addition to the quality of the roads, the precariousness of what are euphemistically referred to as bridges in that area significantly slow the journey down. To start with, there’s the narrowness of some of the bridges. Then there’s the fact that a majority of them simply consist of metal planks strewn across an incongruous surface. This doesn’t deter 18 wheel trucks from inching along at a snail’s pace and paralyzing traffic. I guess the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota (gratuitous plug for my friend’s op-ed on the tragedy: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4461) shows that crappy bridges aren’t limited to the developing world though.

Once you get to Dominical though it’s smooth sailing along a picturesque winding road that parallels the coastline like the pacific coast highway in California. We stopped at Punta Uva, Dominical, and a bunch of other random beaches, each one beautiful in its own way. After crossing into the Osa Peninsula, we ended up driving to Puerto Jiminez and staying in an eco-lodge. The hotel consisted of elevated cabins in the middle of the rain forest with no walls, just mosquito screens and no electricity, just candles. It was like sleeping outside with all of the sounds of the forest. We had dinner and promptly passed out, waking up to the sounds of howler monkeys and a torrential deluge in the morning. The trip back to Quepos took 6 hours and took us through some more spectacular scenery.

¡Pura Vida!

A link to a map showing Quepos and Puerto Jimenz: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://costa-rica-guide.com/Costa-Rica-Map-large.jpg&imgrefurl=http://costa-rica-guide.com/fr_maps.htm&h=1222&w=1280&sz=225&tbnid=Lt2HnAYr-CNUSM:&tbnh=143&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmap%2Bof%2Bcosta%2Brica%26um%3D1&start=2&sa=X&oi=images&ct=image&cd=2