Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Today was another big travel day. We left Monteverde on a minibus shuttle. Amusingly enough, we stopped in Puntarenas to change to a different minibus, so I got to see Sea Hunter again, much sooner that I'd expected (It's still in port). Our second shuttle dropped us off at the San Jose airport (though on the wrong level. It took us a while to figure out how to get from Departures to Arrivals), where we picked up a rental car and set out for the Caribbean coast.

We got out of San Jose more quickly than I expected. One of the sites I looked at for directions suggested paying a cab to drive ahead of you to lead you to the entrance to the highway out of town, but it only took us one extra circle around a (large, complicated) block after we got into a turn-only lane that wasn't marked as such until it was too late to change out of it. Hooray for online maps and cell phone plans that work internationally.

We drove through a national park full of misty forest, across bridges over muddy rivers, and then down to the Atlantic plains. Apart from the truck traffic around the container port that's being build near Puerto Limón, it was a pleasant drive. We're now in the Caribbean-side town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca (Pacific to Atlantic in one day!).

Puerto Viejo smells great. Lots of tropical flowers and spice plants. The food seems really good, and we have a cute little bungalow at a place just outside of town.