The humidity of Costa Rica isn’t subtle; it doesn’t creep
upon you, doesn’t belly up to the bar beside you as you sit. It hits; it has
fists that punch the moment one steps outside. It is as subtle as a stripper. I walked out of the San Jose airport towing my
bright orange backpack and was forced to stop a moment to collect my breath,
the air thick with city and heat and sweat and noise. My prearranged taxi
driver mumbled to me in broken English how to get to his beat-up Mitsubishi and
I blindly followed.
20 minutes later my driver dropped me at the inner-city bus
station, where I was to meet my charter out to the coast. He told me that the
brightly-painted castle next to the station used to be a prison. It’s now a
children’s museum. He said this like this shift was symbolic of the whole country.
I ordered a lunch at the bus station mostly through pointing
and nodding; it was carne and rice but I’ve no details apart from that. My
Spanish was slow to come back to me after sitting dusty since high school. I
felt dumb; I’m no good at staying mute. To use the restroom at the bus station
cost 50 coloĊ,
or about ten cents. The bored looking woman at the table took my coin
and handed me a few small squares of single-ply. I was traveling alone and the
floor of the bathroom was slick, and so I found myself squatting over a dirty
toilet, wearing my 30lb backpack and trying not to laugh out loud while my
thighs shook.
The bus wasn’t air conditioned. It was half-full and I took
my pre-assigned seat by an open window, my sweaty back made hotter by the rough
fabric of the seat. We climbed out of the panoply of the city without a word
passing between any of us. The roads narrowed and traffic shifted without signs
or signals. Buses blindly passed each other. Banana farms and endless jungle
lined the two-lane road and everything was verdant and hummed of wings and lust
and sweat and arrogant fertility. I didn’t know where I was and my heartbeat
thumped loudly in my head.
I caught my first glimpse of a road sign three hours later,
after I’d resigned myself to the possibility that I’d missed my stop and my future
included being murdered in the jungle near Panama, and after my fellow
travelers had departed and been replaced by new strangers, one carrying a live
chicken. The lone road sign was bent and dirty and hard to see but provided the
modicum of comfort that I needed. It was such a relief to know I wasn’t lost, I
just wasn’t there yet.
