TAMARINDO, COSTA RICA, July 2008
I FLEW INTO THE CAPITAL, SAN JOSÉ, YET ANOTHER MISTAKE BY a naïve traveler. I rented a car and drove for hours until the pavement ran out. Then I continued on a hard-packed dirt road until I was sure I had gone the wrong way. By this time I was in cattle country, and I was supposed to be heading for the coast. The red-orange dust swirled around me, making me keep the windows closed and limiting my vision to no more than about ten to fifteen yards ahead of me. And then all of a sudden there was an apparition, a barefoot man carrying a surfboard across the road. I hit the brakes.
The dust raced past me, back to front, and then it cleared and there was a bank on my left. An honest-to-God Bank-of-America type bank. And behind that was some mini–shopping mall. There had, indeed, been a surfer crossing my path. He had reached the far side of the road and was walking up a sidewalk with a board under his arm. I looked back to the side from which he had come, looked through trees and what were now wisps of dust, and I could see ocean water.
I drove on.
The city center was basically a fork in the road. Turn left, go slightly uphill, come to restaurants and surf shops and little businesses selling trips to see tortoises, sailboat rides, deep-sea fishing excursions, zipline and rainforest adventures; turn right and head down toward the water, where smaller, older shops sold trinkets, jewelry, Central American fast foods, bathing suits, T-shirts, skirts and wraps and blouses, and where the streets were made of cobblestones and men walked around hawking boxes of Cuban cigars.
I drove until I got slightly south of town, where I came upon a bungalow-like hotel that fronted the beach. For a hundred bucks a night I got a room in the Captain Suizo, directly on Playa Tamarindo. It was July, and the place was barely occupied because it was supposed to be the rainy season, off-season for tourists. Except there was no sign of rain that I could see. All I could see was dust.
The woman who checked me in was thin, with long blond hair that marked her as an exotic in Costa Rica. It turned out she was from Denmark.
“Oh, Copenhagen?”
“No.”
It was that way with the whole process—no further information needed. Stay, don’t stay … one night, two nights, three nights, whatever you wish. I tried to be just as laid back as I told her I had come down from California and, hey, you happen to know an American named Jason who lives in town? Her casualness reached the point of lethargy. No, she didn’t know anyone named Jason. Here was my room key. Go around the back of the building, ground floor, third door. Goodbye.