No Sloths in Trees

Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013--Side Trip to Alajuela

Our great hotel turned into a disappointment at bedtime last night.  It was stylish, clean, bright, had expensive furniture, but at bedtime we had two negative discoveries.  In my room, the mattress was of cheap quality and was worn out.  It slanted from the middle to each side, and the middle had a support that meant that if I tried to recline crosswise there was a hump in the middle as you have with many pull-out sofa beds.  Wes apparently had a mattress that didn't bother him, but he had sugar ants in his room and in his bed when we returned in the evning.  He had to sleep all night worrying that ants would bite him.

The owner of the hotel made us a very nice breakfast--a plate-sized tortilla made with oatmeal and served with cream cheese and honey, fruit salad, coffee, juice, etc.  But after we ate it, we told him that although we said that we would stay two nights we needed to move onward.  We let him think it was due to planning we had done for our trip (which we had done).  He was just too assertive a person and likely would have tried to solve the problems if we told him the true reasons why.  But there was another concern: the place was overpriced at $80 per night.  Instead, we moved to another hotel two blocks away that was only $32 a night and was decent although it had it own problems.  But problems at $32 a night are easier to take than problems at $80 a night.

We caught a bus to the nearby town of Alajuela and spent the day exploring.  We walked the streets seeing the told buildings, sat in the plazas watching people, etc.  Again, we ate lunch at the local market.  After scoping out all the places, we asked a woman whose plate of food looked good what she was eating and ordered it--beef in a sauce with rice which was tender and tasty and served with small, thin corn tortillas.  We got tamarindo juice to go with it.

Back in Heredia in the late afternoon, we walked to their shopping mall thinking we might see a film.  The only one that appealed to us, The Impossible in 3D and English with Spanish subtitles, had just started about 10 minutes earlier.  Therefore, we just wandered the mall which amazed Wes with its size and the quality of the merchandise--so much bigger and nicer than the mall in Corpus Christi.  From there, we went downtown to see the people at night in the central plaza and for Wes to see the Christmas lights I had seen the night before.

Back at our hotel, we were surprised to learn that the wifi would be shut off for the night at 20:30.  That's why there was no blog entry last night.

Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013--Heredia to San Jose to Cañas

Up early, we caught a bus for San Jose where all the long-distance buses leave.  It took twice as long to get there as it did to come to Heredia because of the rush hour traffic.  But the big problem was that we faced similar problems finding the location of the bus to Cañas as we had faced when trying to find the Heredia bus two days earlier.  The station that was marked in my guidebook no longer handled the buses, so we were directed to a nearby station.  There was a bus leaving there for Cañas, but not for another 3 hours or so.  A man there directed us to another station he called "Pullman."  We went to where he said, and there was no station and no one anywhere comprehended the word "Pullman" in reference to a bus station.  We returned to where we got those directions, and another man told us NEW directions (more blocks each direction) and told us that the station was "Pulmitan."  We arrived there just after 9:00 hoping we hadn't just missed a bus.  Fortunately, one was leaving at 9:30 and we got a seat.

The trip to Cañas took 4 1/2 hours with the sun shining into the unair-conditioned bus on the side where we had our assigned seats.  Somehow, the sun kept moving so that it was always shining on us even as we turned from westward to northwestward.  It was not a comfortable trip, and it had only one 15-minute rest stop.  We finally arrived around 14:30 with a bright and hot sun.

We had already selected a hotel for here, but we didn't know its location.  The guidebook doesn't have a map of the small city (25,000), and the wifi was cut off last night before we could use the computer to search for a map.  We couldn't see the hotel on the highway, so we turned into town.  After about 6 blocks of hot searching, we asked someone who sent us 3 further blocks to the side and then back out to the highway.  When we got to the CañaBrava Inn Hotel, we were so happy to get out of the sun.

We were also happy to see that the hotel was as nice as it sounded in its reviews.  It's a modern business hotel with soundproof walls, a/c, swimming pool, etc.  It's the best value place we have stayed so far on the trip with the room for two costing only $60.  The hotel also has an attached casino.

Cañas is our stop for the night because of its location.  We knew that traveling further today would be strenuous.  Our eventual destination tomorrow is Playa del Coco which is another 2 1/2 hours (plus the time for changing buses along the way) from here on the Nicoya Peninsula.  But Cañas is a bit unique itself.  It is a "western" or "cowboy" town in Costa Rica.  In fact, right across the road from our hotel is a bullring which has bull fights every Saturday.  And coming into town, we saw cowboys on horses working cattle on ranches.  The people here are friendly and helpful.

After cooling down in the room with cola over ice, we went searching for lunch.  It was interesting to note that almost every restaurant seemed to have a combination of Mexican and Central American food.  We eventually decided to eat at a Salvadorean restaurant which had a daily special of beef in sauce, rice, brown beans, beet salad, and slices of avocado.  It came with the traditional Salvadorean hot pickled vegetables (cucumber, carrots, cauliflower) and a drink.  Again, we choose tamarindo juice.

Returning to the hotel, we swam in the pool for 30 minutes or so.  Then we returned to town to sit on the square and watch the people and the skateboarders who were practicing their moves on a concrete stage.  Walking around, we had to be careful where we were.  There are thousands of grackles in the trees and on the power lines.  The sidewalks are covered with their white droppings.

One of the disappointments of this trip for me has been the fact that there are no more sloths in the trees of plazas in Costa Rica.  When Arne and I traveled here 25 years ago, one of the pleasures was watching the sloths slowly moving around in the trees in the main places of the towns.  We have looked for them in various plazas in San Jose, Heredia, and Alajuela without success.  When I asked a man at the hotel about them, he said he could remember them from when he was a small child, but that they haven't been in the trees of the parks for many years.  That's too bad.