Costa Rica

A mission friend of mine, Bracken Longhurst, called me over a year ago and we talked about going on a trip. A big trip. I thought South Africa could be cool. It didn’t work out as planned. However, once I acquired this job at Frontier it was simple. Costa Rica had to be the place because it is by far the coolest place Frontier flies. I had also talked to my dear friend Jared Webb about a possible future trip to Costa Rica. We decided to combine forces and the four of us (including Bracken’s wife, Skye) went. Allie found a way to back out due to “work duties”.

We arrived at 5 am on the 8th of May 2009 after a sleepless flight. All of us were tired but we got our rental car and headed out on the trail. The trail turned out to be unmarked, full of switchbacks, narrow, mountainous, and had sharp drop offs on the side. Despite the obvious differences between our (USA) wonderful roads and their terrible planning, the drive was beautiful and jungly. We went to the Arenal Volcano, which was about sixty miles away but took us four hours because of the trail. That turned out to be about ten times better than our way back. A volcano may sound cool, but it’s really just a mountain, especially when clouds are covering the top. We stayed for a brief time and headed for the coast.

Arenal Volcano


I got tired of driving really quickly, and even though we hadn’t put Bracken on as an alternate driver he started driving anyway. Literally ten minutes into this portion of the drive, the police did a random pull over. Bracken pretended to not speak Spanish so Jared and I followed suit. After pretending not to understand, yet understanding every word, we got out of it with a ten-dollar ticket that we decided not to pay. I drove the rest of the way.

That first day, which seemed like six months, ended in a coastal town called Jaco after a scary drive at night through the rain. The fish tacos we ate made up for it though. Delicious! The next morning was the beginning of our beach day. The waves at Jaco Beach were big enough to body surf, which we did for an hour until Bracken screamed to me “there’s like a three foot fish right by you”. Trying to run against a current is like being stuck in a dream when you feel like you are running your fastest but not moving. I tried hard to swim/run back when I saw what I thought was a huge swarm of fish about two feet away. Once we reached the shore we found out what was really swarming us. Stingrays. Dozens of them. Bracken, Skye, and Jared continued to watch the rays in shallow water while I sat at a distance thinking of the Croc Hunter.

Jaco Beach from a distance:


I feared stepping on a ray, so we headed a few kilometers away to Playa Hermosa. It was breathtakingly beautiful, less crowded, and cheaper. Not to mention the waves were huge. We played in the waves until the sun set, and decided that we just loved it there.

Surfers on Playa Hermosa:


From Hermosa Beach we cruised on down to the Manuel Antonio National Park, which is full of wildlife. Earlier in the trip we had seen rays, wild parrots, iguanas, and crocodiles. Inside the park, which is just dense jungle that leads to a beautiful beach, we saw all types of crabs, more iguanas, a weird rodent thing the size of a dog, a 4 foot snake that I almost stepped on, a toucan, sloths, and a family of monkeys that we watched in the trees for about fifteen minutes. It was a definite highlight to an already great trip. The main drag at Manuel Antonio is a little tourist spot that provides a gorgeous public beach in which we played in the waves with our friends from South Jordan that we happened upon while we were there.

A monkey at Manuel Antonio:


A sloth:


The beach at Manuel Antonio:


Earlier that day we had scheduled a little waterfall jaunt with a character named Jairo who we thought worked at the hotel that we were staying at. We were to meet at ten am the next morning for a couple hour tour that he completely sold us on for fifteen bucks each. We prepaid. Jairo didn’t show up the next morning and the Asian hotel owner, whose Spanish sounded as good as my mother’s, claimed that Jairo didn’t even work there, even though he was the one who showed us the room. Someone went and found Jairo, he came to talk to us with a worried look on his face, and we demanded our money back. He said he had it in the bank, which we all knew was a lie, and that he’d return in an hour. Our money was down the tubes, spent on drugs, and there was nothing we could do about it. That moment was frustrating not because we had lost fifteen dollars each but because we should have known better. Jairo never came back, but Jared and I actually found him curled up in a ball at the far end of the beach huddled under a rock. We decided to not beat the crap out of him, as we pitied him and we don’t have a reputation of being street toughs.

A quick note: The food in Costa Rica was pretty good but mostly bland. They have gallo pinto (mixed black beans and rice) and casados (a plate of typical food like black beans, rice, a meat of your choice, fried plantains, and some sort of salad). The fish tacos were the highlight by a long shot.

After some time on the beach, we decided it would be best to head to San Jose because our flight left early in the morning. We went back the same way we came and decided to get another glimpse of the crocodiles at Tarcoles Bridge. We parked the car about thirty feet from the police station, walked up the bridge about a hundred yards away,
and began to view the twenty plus crocs below. It was very cool.

Two of the crocs at Tarcoles Bridge:


After about fifteen minutes, we returned to the car. I opened up the back to put my camera bag in and all of the suitcases except for mine were missing and glass was everywhere. In the short time that we were on that bridge someone smashed the rear passenger window, grabbed what they could in a short time, and disappeared into the jungle. I’m assuming they left my bag because it was the farthest away from that side and they had very little time to do the burglary. They got away with Bracken and Skye’s suitcases, backpack, and wallet and Jared’s backpack and suitcase. Miraculously, Skye had opted to not put their passports in their bags and Jared and I had ours in our pockets. Bracken did, however, lose three hundred bucks in cash as well as their credit cards. They later found out that the cards had already been used while we were driving back to San Jose.

The glass took a few minutes to clean then we continued our trip to San Jose a little downtrodden but not disappointed with the trip overall. The drive took an unexpected turn when the paved road was blocked off and we were forced to take a dirt road that was being worked on for half the journey back to San Jose. Luckily we were riding in a little Daihatsu Bego. That vehicle surprised all of us. We ended up driving on some pretty treacherous terrain. There were huge construction vehicles zipping past with no regard for a Bego. We even had one moment where we had to slip by a huge crane that was in operation. We had no idea if it would turn toward us or not. We went up and down huge uneven dirt hills through big mud puddles. That whole time we didn’t even know if we were going the right way and we had to make decisions about which fork to take a few times hoping that we were headed in the right direction. Nothing was marked and it had been dark for a while. It was a crazy drive that ultimately spit us out on a paved road and eventually on to the Pan American Highway and right into San Jose. It was unbelievable.

We informed Thrifty of the broken window. Luckily Costa Rica forces you to buy insurance for a rented vehicle, but they make it difficult to claim the insurance. They made me get a police report from Costa Rica’s version of the FBI at the Judicial Building in San Jose. It took a couple hours and I had to repeat the story several times to a guy who seemed less than interested in what had happened, as evident by him writing and receiving text messages every few minutes. I was annoyed, but I couldn’t do anything about it, much like we couldn’t really do anything about being burglarized. We left Thrifty once the claim was taken care of, went to McDonalds, and then drove right back to Thrifty when we knew the workers had left. We parked the car there and attempted to sleep. We had no intention of getting a hotel after losing a lot of money. It was an uncomfortably long night with four people trying to sleep in the Bego, but it was memorable. The whole trip was unforgettable, and seeing as how we were already laughing about even the bad things that happened it will be considered a great trip for a long time to come.