July 17th: Drive to Santa Teresa

To be honest, I didn't think there would be a whole lot to talk about today since it was just a moving day. But today may have been the craziest car trip ever! To start off the day, we had breakfast at our hotel, which I would say was secondary in comparison to Volcano Lodge. We wandered the property a little bit, which again, was beautiful, before we packed up our things and headed into town. We went off in search of a place to do laundry, mostly because the smell of river water on your clothes is not ideal. For the same smelly reason, and because Nick's shoes very literally fell apart, we went off in a hunt for flip flops that were less than $18. Once we found some knockoff Nike's and Nick was no longer wandering the streets barefoot, we picked up our laundry and headed to lunch. Good job on our part for picking a random place that just happened to be delicious. With our early start to the day now made much later, we finally hit the road towards Malpais/Santa Teresa! Back through the very up and down windy roads (at least we knew half of the trip because we were just backtracking). We found our way to the pan-american highway and figured it would be fairly easy from there to get to Puntarenas. To give you a little idea just how difficult it is to drive here, the map (a really good map, one of 4 that we have) only lists about 10 highway numbers for the entire country. The road signs (if and when there are any) have no numbers. So the names of the highways are completely and utterly useless. The people here don't even know the numbers. The few signs that you do ever see (which are often homemade, half falling apart signs) will say one or two city names with an arrow.... city names that have about a 20% chance of being a city that is marked on the map. Roads will often split with no sort of indication where either one goes, and once you pick a direction, you can drive for 20 miles without ever seeing a sign, streetlight, or other road to turn around on. Just keep all of this in mind while I describe our adventure to Otro Lado :)

With about 3 hours of traveling behind us, the sun already setting, we continued along the highway in pursuit of Puntarenas. We continued straight at about 40kph following a sign that said to do so for another 19km. During this stretch, we got caught in a HUGE rainstorm. I started videotaping the storm just because it was so crazy, with lightning flashes going off in the distance. Little did I know it would get SO much better! It didn't take long until we caught up with the storm and were stuck right in the middle of it. THE COOLEST STORM EVER! I have NEVER seen so much lightning in my life. And so close!! It was touching down all around us!

It was so ridiculous that we had to pull over multiple times to try and take photos of it (ones that do no justice to just how incredible it really was)! One of the places we pulled over I was so excited I hopped out of the car and ran over under a tree to try and get pictures without power lines in them, but that didn't last long because Nick came running after me pointing out a sign that said "private property. we have guns" haha.

 Ooing and Awing at the lightning, we continued down our road... sitting in traffic because of a tree that fell in the middle of the road, and then driving another 20min thereafter before I finally saw the name on the side of a restaurant that I recognized from the map. We had gone too far. We apparently missed a non-existant turn off about 30min back. Turning around, and backtracking we got back on the right path towards Puntarenas. Now in complete darkness (at about 6pm) we followed all the way to the bitter end of the road in search of the ferry.

The ferry trip was a whole other adventure in itself. Still pouring rain, in a very sketchy part of town, we went from person to person trying to figure out how the ferry system worked. We were inquired for rides to Santa Teresa, which always feels creepier when people come up and knock on your car window in the middle of a rain/thunder storm late at night. The next ferry wasn't leaving until 8pm... so we had 1.5hours to kill... we also discouragingly found out that our ferry ride would be about 1.5-2hours.... A little concerned about the fact that the worst roads/part of our trip was still on the other end, we called ahead to our hotel to inform them that we would be checking in late. We were told we would arrive at 11:30pm to be exact. The receptionist at the hotel has played this game before.

After what seemed to be a very long ferry ride, some coffee and a cup of hot milk that was supposedly tea, we docked at Paquera and headed out into the darkness with Jimmy. Bumpy dirt roads, very large potholes, very little light or signs of life. Fortunately, there weren't too many roads to choose from on the way to Malpais, but once we got to Santa Teresa, we still had to find our hotel. To give you another idea of what driving/directions are like here, our address for our hotel was "300meters north of soccer field"... as in, literally if you wanted to send us mail here, you would mail it to "300mt N. of soccer field, Santa Teresa, CR" no street names or numbers. But in the dark, we managed to find the sign for our hotel amongst the rest of the signs in the densely hotel populated street (no soccer field in sight by the way). 11:30pm on the dot. We got our key from the night security guard and went straight to bed.