WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO THE HUMAN KITCHEN AND THE SPIDER monkeys and the threat of imminent attack—also known as the Osa Wildlife Sanctuary. Quite honestly, I chose the sanctuary as our first stop because I thought it would be easy. Feed a few baby animals, sweep a couple cages, all on the tropical coast of a secluded rainforest preserve. This was my attempt to wade into the shallow end of the world service pool. But, as we discovered, nothing on the Osa is particularly easy.
To begin with, you really have to want to visit the Osa Peninsula. Statistically, most visitors on a short Costa Rican vacation head north of San José, taking in the Arenal Volcano and enjoying the popular zipline canopy tours just a few hours beyond the capital. But the Osa is for the bold. It’s in the southwestern corner of the country and it’s mostly unbroken rain forest. It’s been described as the most biodiverse place on the planet and it has never been described as easy to get to. You can either fly from San José or you can drive, depending on which side of the time/money seesaw you happen to find yourself on. As a general rule for our trip, whenever two modes of transportation were offered, we almost always chose the cheaper one, which meant we bypassed the fifty-minute Nature Air flight at $114 per person and opted for the nine-hour Autotransportes Blanco bus ride for just $8 a head!
It started at 9:00 A.M. on a Sunday. We’d arrived in San José the night before and spent a forgettable night at the Isla Verde, a cheap city hotel. The next day, we arranged for a special oversized taxi van to take us and our mountain of luggage to the bus station. At the request of the Wildlife Sanctuary, we were traveling with four large and lockable plastic trunks. (Apparently, these were necessary to keep the monkeys from pilfering our possessions with their long prehensile tails—even with tight bars on our cabin windows.) We also had an extra-large Igloo cooler that would serve as our refrigerator during our stay. Add to this our backpacks, carry-on bags, and Traca’s yoga mat, and we made for quite a formidable invading army.
When the van arrived, we loaded up, sped across town, and began a journey that Jackson would describe later that night as “the worst day of my life!” And this was only day one.
First off, the bus station was packed. I mean really packed. People were lined up, hundreds of them, like rabid concert fans waiting for the box office to open. Traca, being our fearless foreign language expert, launched into the crowd to see about tickets, leaving me all but paralyzed in a sea of Spanish speakers. I’ve never been good with foreign languages. Some travelers, like Traca, genuinely seem to enjoy the communication challenge a new language presents. They use hand gestures and big smiles and a few meager vocabulary words to make themselves understood. Other tourists barely seem to notice they’re in a new country at all, continuing to use English, speaking louder and slower whenever they need to get their point across. If only I could be so oblivious. In my case, I do two things when faced with a language I have no working knowledge of: I completely shut my mind off, and I begin to sweat from head to toe. Not the best or most useful ways to express yourself.
So I was standing there, blank and dripping, when a painfully thin Costa Rican man appeared, grabbed two of our trunks, nodded, and started carrying them away. Before I could protest, a young official-looking man with a gold tooth and a white uniform said, “Is okay, is okay,” and patted me on the back. When the Thin Man returned, nodding and grabbing, I watched him carry two more of our packs into the mass of people. Then he came back and hauled the rest of our luggage away piece by piece. In a few minutes, our taxi van was empty and our taxi van driver drove off … exactly as Traca returned with the news.
“We’re at the wrong bus terminal,” she said.
The right bus, she discovered, was roughly thirty minutes away, on the other side of San José, and it left in exactly thirty minutes. With our specially arranged, oversized van long gone, we scrambled for our things, found them stacked neatly near the front of the line, tipped the Thin Man for not robbing us blind, piled into two separate cabs, and raced back across the city. With just minutes to spare, we got our tickets, braved the nastiest bathroom this side of a Panamanian prison, hopped on board a road-weary tour bus, and set off on a ride that would soon inspire Jackson to vow, “You will have to put a gun to my head to ever get me back on that thing.”
The first six hours were actually pretty incredible. Though we were moving slowly, we were passing through breathtakingly beautiful countryside along switchback jungle mountain roads. Actually, “slowly” isn’t really the right word to describe the way we were traveling. We were inching our way over one-lane bridges and creeping up rutted dirt hills. Jackson had to pee so badly at one point, she actually burst into tears—but with mountains on one side and sheer cliffs on the other, we couldn’t get the driver to stop. Logan pretty much chilled, listened to music, tried unsuccessfully to teach me some Spanish. But when the sun set and an intense downpour began, all conversation stopped. As passengers closed their windows to keep dry, the temperature inside the bus began to rise. Soon, humidity surrounded us like a suffocating life-form and the air smelled like body odor mixed with diesel fuel. For the final three hours, our bus bounced from one rain-filled pothole to the next, leaving us numb and staggering for the exit when the driver finally opened the doors.
By the time we arrived in Puerto Jiménez (the largest town on the Osa), it was late and still pouring. Luckily, we found a taxi truck driver, lugged our wet mountain of stuff into the back of his covered truck bed, then squeezed our soaked selves into the cab for the four-hundred-yard drive to our hotel. Naturally, it was closed for the night. Dripping, exhausted, hungry, dumped on the sidewalk, and standing under a leaky canopy in a random Latin American alley—this was not the way I had pictured our adventure getting started.
“We shouldn’t even be here!” Jackson snapped, and she was not comforted in the least when a friendly drunk offered her a cigarette and a swig off his bottle.
In the end, some locals rescued us, carrying our trunks through the rain and dropping them around the block at what appeared to be the only hotel that was still open: the Cabinas Bosque Mar. It wasn’t the cleanest hotel we’ve ever stayed in, but we were grateful for the shelter. Still, the bizarre shower contraption we found in the bathroom deserves special mention. Technically, it was an on-demand hot water system that heats the water in the shower head with electricity. No tank, no waste—but no safety precautions, either. Stepping into the dirty shower stall after a day of sweaty bus travel, we were met with live exposed wires; it looked like a homemade torture device. I later learned that the locals call it a “suicide shower,” and when I heard that, I was glad we all just went to bed filthy.
That night I had a dream.
Traca and I were traveling down a swollen turbulent river, standing—for some reason—on top of a large metal shipping container. As violent brown waves coursed around us, I used a long pole to help guide us through the frenzy. Though it was never mentioned in the dream, somehow I knew everything we owned was in the box beneath our feet.
At one point, the water became so dangerous, I steered us to shore and moved to a small shack to wait for the storm to ease. But as I stood inside the dimly lit shelter and looked out through a window, I saw Traca heading off downriver without me. She was clutching the steering pole, standing on top of the container, riding it into the choppy brown rapids. The waves tossed the long metal box like a toy boat, but there was nothing I could do. Before I could react, Traca slipped into the churning maelstrom and disappeared from sight.
A short time later, in just a blink of dream time, Traca was standing back beside me in the shack, soaking wet, with a small smile on her lips.
“Did you sink it all?” I asked.
“Yes” was all she said.