Travel gods, what have I done to anger thee?
My last three posts of the trip should have been about coffee, rum, and air conditioned hotel beds. Instead, they’ve been about a car accident, protest diarrhea, and this:
The bus ride back to Costa Rica was pretty uneventful (other than the usual border shenanigans).
On our way back to downtown San Jose, we passed the airport that I would be flying out of the next day. However, the airport hotels are always expensive, so I just stayed on the bus until were more in the heart of the city. That was a mistake.
I had met a guy on the bus who knew of a good hostel, so we made plans to share a cab there after the bus ride. Once we arrived, we found ourselves a nice driver and told him where we were heading.
[A note on "nice": he didn't reset the meter when we got in the cab, so there was a baseline charge that we shouldn't have had to pay. I noticed this right away, since the first thing I do in a foreign cab is find out what the base rate is, and make sure that I see it at the beginning of every ride (in the few cabs the even have meters). I pointed this surcharge out (somewhat curtly), and he corrected it right away. "Oh, oops, I forgot." But that common scam is more the function of his profession, and doesn't really reflect on his "niceness".]
But since he actually was a pretty nice guy, we chatted for most of the ride. And right before he dropped us off at the hostel, he casually mentioned that there was going to be a public transportation strike the following day. No cabs, no buses, no nothing.
"What?!"
So after a little bit of mental option-weighing, I realized that I had to get to the airport that night. So we dropped of my 5-minute friend at the hostel, and I told our driver to keep on driving!
And drive he did, the final fare to the airport was almost $60, which is so much money down here! I really should have hopped off the bus at the airport.
The driver called around to a few hotels, to try to find me a place. I'm usually weary of this move, since the cab drivers take people to hotels that pay them a cut, and the hotels pad their rates, accordingly. However, the recent Costa Rican earthquake destroyed a lot of the tourist hotels in the area of the quake, so all of their visitors were now staying near the airport, waiting for their flights home. Of course.
I knew that I'd have a hard time finding a place, since almost every hotel was booked solid, and I was in no mood to spend another night sleeping in an airport. So I let my driver find me a place, and the price wasn't terrible. (It was $40, and as predicted, my driver walked me up to the hotel "to use the bathroom", and awkwardly waited for me to go to my room so that he could collect his cut.) $40 should have bought me a pretty nice place down here--and this place was only a click and a half above a roach motel--but my room had a bathroom and a TV, and I couldn't have been happier.
M
