Serendipitous Travel In Costa Rica

 

Serendipitously travelling – a notch below the spiritual journey

I was happily minding my own business tucked away in this little corner of San José, actually very near the Vizquez Gonzalez Park on Avenida 14 and Calle 11 if you should be familiar with this city, when I had a serendipitous Skype chat with Peter “The Swede” that threw off numerous serendipitous by-products in a kind of serendipitous chain reaction. I was actually calling back to base camp in Boca Chica and discovered that Peter had turned up for his annual Dominican rest and recuperation. In good Viking tradition Peter does not hang about and upon learning where I was he immediately offered to run roughshod over (another of those Viking traditions) the formalities of a few hundred miles distance and a whole sea to make the same generous offer he made every year when we met up, “Dinner on me!”

A few days later there he was at the airport (Juan Santamaria International Airport, not actually in San José but in Alajuela one of the component parts of this extensive metropolitan area). I had no idea what, other than dinner, he had up his sleeve, although Vikings are indeed usually pictured without sleeves: I simply imagine it must have got terribly in the way of all the killing. I considered -in the knowledge of one of his other Viking traits (he liked messing about on boats)- it rare that he would be interested in San José (which with the gathering momentum of my geography for dummies has well established that we are most certainly not on any maritime coast here and don’t even have a small lake for a dinghy).

Fortunately for everyone, presumably including himself, Peter has given up the oldest Viking tradition of visiting foreign lands and simply taking, proven by the fact he immediately chalked up another free dinner for me as a payment for meeting him at the airport. On the journey to the airport I reflected on that fascinating world (that we can all enjoy at times) of the person with a little knowledge being way on top of the person without any knowledge; the stark simplicity of a world we can sometimes share with computers where there is an enormous difference between zero and one. From Peter’s viewpoint this was my town and my bus route. Though he did soon begin to see the error of that view when 40 minutes into the bus ride we were still seemingly some way off our target of downtown San José for what I had told him was a 25-minute journey.

Later that evening as I heartily consumed the first of my free dinner tickets (in deference to expediency I refrained from taking them both because it is just not possible to consume heartily twice at the same sitting) we talked of our relative situations and came up with an excellent travel plan of taking a journey together up to Costa Rica’s famously most active volcano Arenal and staying at La Fortuna about a three hour bus journey to the north west of San José.

A couple of days later with bags well and truly packed, and as we admittedly made rather a meal out of toast and coffee in our efforts to wake up before trotting off to the bus stop, we serendipitously learned that one of the other hostelers was just about to set off to the very same town of La Fortuna in his rental car to also visit the volcano.

Richard, the would-be doctor and temporarily resident artist, was at that moment waiting for his car to be delivered. Richard, without any Viking roots whatsoever, was unhesitating in offering us space in his Suzuki Alto, not usually one of their chief selling points but we really couldn’t ask him to upgrade just for our sakes and especially at such short notice, and we promptly sped off in the direction of La Fortuna. Speeding because that is what the San José traffic always does and with the aid of the absolutely indispensable GPS tracking device we could not only speed but keep on the right course that otherwise might have been perilous considering all the speeding that was going on.

In the great natural world of balanced energy (although how is it that the forces of destruction and construction are just so perversely asymmetrical?) for every serendipity I suppose there has to be an anti-serendipity and that came in the form of rainfall coinciding with our timed visit to La Fortuna. We had been warned that the non-appearance of the volcano was a common occurrence and we waited three days through a lot of rain and mist and the volcano barely even revealed its ankles.

As we careened around in our poncho protective gear we had our first experience of the world-renowned Costa Rican rain forest and were delighted to distinctly hear the volcano on one occasion as it belched out a deep rolling gaseous sound mixing perfectly into the swirling atmospheric mist. It was either the volcano or the as yet unseen Costa Rican Yeti but as far as we were concerned whichever it was it steadfastly remained completely and utterly out of sight!

Bridge View on way to La Fortuna

Volcano and lava flow we didn’t see

The ankles of a very active volcano central Costa Rica

Looking through the trees

Can you see the wood for the forest?

Inside in the dry Soda El Rio, La Fortuna

Spacious Suzuki Alto parked at Cabinas Rosimary, La Fortuna

Lots of rain lots of fast flowing rivers

La Fortuna church at the center

Flora and fauna of all kinds in the province of La Alajuela, Costa Rica

A swinging bridge through the forest

Viking Peter – boatless

You can’t hear it but it sounds good too!

Everything grows in its own way

Wet and growing

Trees, trees, trees

Poncho, poncho and flat cap

Pause for bio-thought Doctor Richard between rock and a hard place

A new Costa Rican friend

Comfortable inexpensive lodgings for the travellers

Serendipitously travelling – a notch below the spiritual journey

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