Our Frontier
plane lifted off at 6 pm for Denver on the way to Costa Rica. That’s right.
Phoenix north to Denver to CR. A two-hour layover later we headed south and
arrived in Costa Rica at 5 AM Tuesday morning after a #$%& night’s sleep.
Customs was
fast and easy, no body cavity searches, no grimy hombres with elaborate
mustachios and bandeleros across their chests. I have had my passport for 9
years, and here in Costa Rico, it finally got the rubber stamp.
Outside as
warned in the many travel guides we studied, a swarm of hungry looking men
wanted to help us carry our bags or take us to a taxi. We avoided cars with no
hubcaps that looked they had been painted with a roller and got into a bright
orange, official aeroporto taxi.
Getting to the
Melrost B & B was not the problem I thought it might be in a city that has
neither street names nor numbers. Our driver asked us where the Melrost was. We
told him it was in Costa Rica. He got on his walkie talkie and after some back
and forth with the dispatcher seemed to know where he was going.
He led us
through bustling but crumbling neighborhoods, obviously repaired, patched and
repatched, painted and repainted many times since the 1950’s when I assume
these structures were built. Block walls are topped with barbed wire, and
windows and parking areas everywhere are protected with iron bars. We emerged
into a quiet cozy neighborhood whose narrow streets are bordered in tropical
vegetation. Here was our B & B.
We were shown
to our room and crashed. That first night a torrential rain storm pounded on
the roof and a crack of lightening knocked out the lights. We didn’t care. We
had bed to sleep in instead of an airplane seat.
