Weekend Adventure

Everyone has class on Fridays. They are not as intense as the rest of the week. Usually they focus on Costa Rican culture. They also take surveys and then end with a test to see if they are ready for the next level.

At noon, we board the bus for a four-five hour trek into the north central part of the country to an area called Monteverde, a cloud forest.

First we stop in Nicoya to drop off Lindsay who is taking a bus to the other campus in Heredia, near San Jose the capital. We also pick up our tour guide, Luis, an elementary school English teacher, in his 50s with two college age kids. He lives in Nicoya. We stop at the center square and the old church. It is closed for repairs as a recent earthquake has wreaked havoc with its roof. It is too bad because one can see artifacts from the conquistador era.

We stop for lunch along the way. I suspect these tour guides and drivers have deals with local restaurants along the way. Luckily for the students the place they choose has a new Subway restaurant next door, so half the group heads there. It’s a long slow drive to our destination. From the Panamerican Highway (also called Pacific Coast Highway in the states), it is only 35 kilometers which is roughly 21 miles. It takes us two hours. In one of the guidebooks it is labeled one of the top ten worst roads in Costa Rica. That is saying something. It’s serpentine and narrow with hundred foot drop offs and no guardrails. And it’s dirt. There are more potholes than smooth surface. Not to mention the mud. However, Luis tells us there are plans to pave it and we see some construction trucks.

At the hotel, we check in. Of course there are problems as they don’t give us 9 beds for the girls at first. They expect two to share. I calmly let them know I am not happy and explain to the girls they might have to share a bed. They say they don’t mind but I can read their faces they feel otherwise. As I settle into my room, a knock and another key for another room is given.

We go into the small town of Santa Elena for dinner, a few blocks walk downhill. We eat at a bar called Amigos, huge for Costa Rica standards with a giant dance floor, pool tables in the floor below and the restaurant on the third floor. TVs showing soccer and the NBA playoffs are everywhere throughout. Angelica, a girl at the school who arranges the trips, suggested we try the Chifrones, a pork, rice, beans and spice dish. It is delicious. After dinner a few of us play pool while others go to the local tourist shops to help improve the local economy.

The next morning breakfast is served. Tipico- eggs with rice and beans or American- eggs with ham. Both come with fruit, toast, coffee or juice and is included in the price of the hotel ($35 a room I overhear).

At 7:30 the rest of the group boards a van to go zip lining. Since I have already tried that, I go on another van to go to a local coffee/chocolate/sugar cane farm tour. I am put in a group with a retired couple from India, and a mother with two young children from Sweden. The boy, almost three is a handful. Our guide Junior speaks English well and is knowledgeable about the coffee from around the world. From the coffee part of the tour, we move on to the chocolate and see the cacao beans, crush them, mix them with sugar, black pepper, salt, and vanilla and make a paste that is tasty. We also had red chili and it adds another complexity of flavor. After we move on to the sugar cane portion. We crush stalks in a press, extracting a liquid we capture in a container and mix it with lime. It is sweet times ten. The kids love it but we pay for it later as the boy has a complete meltdown as we are leaving. The woman is embarrassed. The ride back to the hotel is painful for everyone.

I arrive back at the hotel before the others. Brandy, who went with me last year, stayed behind as she wasn’t feeling well and had already done it, sat with me on the deck overlooking the valley. I read. I also spoke with a retired woman from Canada who lives in Costa Rica off and on.

When they arrive, I see a giant bruise on one of the girls, Stephanie, who I was nervous about. She is a big girl and was nervous about going. Apparently she forgot to use her brake (her gloved hand) and crashed into one of the guides. They “taxied” her for the remaining runs.

After we check out, but leave our bags in the lobby to get some lunch before another bus takes us to a boat.
After lunch two of the girls sneak off to get a cake for Stephanie who is celebrating her one year of sobriety. I meet them in the grocery store and it begins to rain. Actually it is a torrential downpour. In the lobby we dry off and give Stephanie her cake and the other girls buy her a necklace. She is moved by the gestures.

Back in the bus, we have another windy drive to Lake Arenal, a man-made lake at the base of the volcano. It was dammed in the seventies for hydro power. The boat ride is in an oversized panga, but at least it has clear plastic sides and we stay relatively dry. The lake smells of sulfur.

After the boat we climb onto another van which takes us to Baldi, a resort of natural hot springs. There are dozens of pools of varying temperatures. Some have swim up bars, but the prices are out of our students range. Not mine! After a couple of hours of this, we have a dinner reservation inside the resort, a buffet. The students and I take advantage of it. The food is really good. Much better than I remember from 2010.

We check into our hotel after stopping at a store to get supplies. The students want to party. I hate the hotel where we stay because it is loud and it is remote. I teach them the card game kill, where each player gets one card. One of the cards is an Ace of Spades. The person who gets that card is the killer, and must wink to kill everyone else. The others must try to guess who the killer is before being killed. Thankfully my room is on the other side where the students are partying. I leave them at ten, but I hear them until midnight.