Tuesday
There is always something. The first time we embarked on a backpacking adventure, just Dave and myself, it was the very first bus we planned to take from home to the train station for the airport service, the bus we’d caught umpteen dozen times before. Maybe the driver was new and didn’t know the stops. Certainly, he didn’t even make eye contact as his near-empty bus sailed straight past the bus stop and the passengers waiting patiently to get on: us with our big rucksacks and a lady with her young child in a large, unmissable pushchair. We were left gaping open-mouthed at the fast-disappearing tail end of the bus, wondering if this was a sign of things to come.
On our second round-the-world trip, with our 2- and 3-year-old children in tow, well, let’s just say that trying to set off is a story in its own right. Maybe I’ll write about it in a later blog.
This time, our third world backpacking trip, with the children now aged 9 and 11, there was a completely new delight in store. Just 30 minutes before we were due to leave home for the airport to spend several months away, we received an e-mail informing us that our outward flight from Heathrow to Miami had been cancelled. Not to worry, the e-mail announced that we had already been re-scheduled onto a new flight ... for the following day ... by which time we would have missed our connecting flight to Costa Rica.
Instead of last-minute bag packing and hibernating of the house, Dave had to make a series of urgent phone calls to try to argue us onto an alternative flight between Heathrow and Miami, still leaving today. This was successful, but it would now be a more lengthy, indirect flight stopping en route at a place in the USA we’d never heard of, Raleigh Durham. The online check-in and seat assignment we’d done last night was wasted, and now we wouldn’t even have seats together for the 9 hour flight to Raleigh Durham. Most problematic, however, was the fact that the new flight was leaving 2 hours earlier than the old flight. Forget having an organised, early check-in and relaxed start to our travels, could we even get to the airport in time to make the flight?
Luckily, we had booked to travel to the airport by coach, quite a time-consuming way to travel. If we instead took an airport taxi, we could get there much quicker and hopefully make it onto the new flight. Our luck held: I rang our amazing local taxi firm and they were able to organise us an airport taxi at just 20 minutes’ notice and race us to the airport.
The rest of the outward journey to Miami was straightforward. We had pre-booked our hotel room for the night, arrived there 18 hours, 2 flights and 2 taxis after leaving home, and fell straight into bed, exhausted, at nearly 4 a.m. UK time.
Wednesday
After a good night’s sleep lasting a full 8 hours, hot showers and a huge buffet breakfast that was included in the room price, we felt refreshed for the next leg of our journey. Surprisingly, the flight to Costa Rica had at least two dogs in the cabin, but both were very quiet and superbly behaved. I wouldn’t even have noticed them if the girls hadn’t pointed them out. Getting through Costa Rican immigration took an age, but we were finally on our way to our first hostel in San Jose, the capital. Unusually for us, we had pre-booked a taxi, so that made it really easy. Dave got the girls some lunch, whilst I repacked all our bags into backpacking mode (rucksacks) instead of flight mode (4 cabin bags, 1 payable hold bag, and all that liquids and sharps palaver that makes it oh-so-easy for the security guys and oh-such-a-pain for the rest of us). We popped out to buy food and I cooked a simple tea in the shared kitchen, then we all dropped into bed as exhausted as yesterday.
Thursday
I woke at 4 a.m. local time, but drowsed in bed for an hour or so, listening to strange, warbling birdsong and the sound of San Jose waking up. In Central (and South) America, it is generally considered that an hour or two pre-dawn is the socially acceptable time to start leaning on your car or lorry horn every few seconds.
I had a real sense of anticipation, being back in Latin America with its concrete, noise, grime and beauty. Here, toilet paper goes in the bin instead of the toilet (ill-designed plumbing), the shower heads have exposed electrical wiring that you don’t touch for fear of electrocution, the drivers are impatient, the pavements have huge, dangerous rain gutters and very deep potholes, and the streets often stink of pee. Yet you’ll suddenly come across an architecturally stunning building rubbing shoulders with the flat-roofed, concrete monstrosities all around or spot a lofty volcano through the gap between two ugly buildings or come across a little grove of sweet-smelling eucalyptus after wading through a litter-filled roadside patch of dry, coarse grass. That’s what I love about Latin America: the continual juxtaposition of the beautiful, the functional and the crass, everything rough around the edges, the cities’ bowels on show.
When everyone was up and we’d packed some lunch, we walked a little over a mile to the bus station, then took a couple of buses out to Zoo Ave, where we spent a pleasant afternoon seeing the rescued birds, including the toucan with the top half of its beak missing that has a prosthetic beak applied every few weeks (it was on one of its few beakless days today), and other animals. We had a great view of an incredibly cute two-toed sloth, uncaged about 1.5 m across from us, and the large iguanas wandering freely around were amazing, especially when they climbed up to the most spindly of tree tops and started fighting. One fell off as I watched but, luckily, caught onto a branch a little way below. Even so, it still had me gasping. We enjoyed looking at black turtles in the pond. Our eldest, May, was so intent on them that she stepped right onto the tail of a huge, primeval-looking iguana, which gave them both the shock of their lives! She then became very scared of the golden silk spiders which had spun webs all around the forest edge, and we decided it was time to head home.
Unfortunately, the traffic entering San Jose was so busy that the second bus took 75 minutes to make the 16 km (10 mile) journey back to the bus station. There was a dedicated bus lane ... filled bumper to bumper with cars. We were too tired to cook, but found a cheap place for a standard, local meal of rice, chips, meat, salad and homemade juice.
Despite being exhausted, Dave and I spent an hour trawling through the user-unfriendly government website to book tickets to visit Volcan Poas tomorrow, just outside San Jose, apparently the only way to get tickets unless you book a very expensive, all-inclusive tour. This volcano last erupted 20 months ago and had only been re-opened to visitors for 3 months, so, on balance, the aggravation of getting online tickets seemed worthwhile. We would soon know.
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