Puerto Jiminez, Costa Rica
Sunday, April 6, 1997
8:00 p.m.

We're camped out in the dusty, remote, wild town of Puerto Jiminez. Jeff, Taylor and I just finished our second meal of the trip -- a dinner of arroz con pollo, chicken with rice -- and a round of Pilsen beer, for a total cost of 4,300 colones, less than $20. We dined at the restaurant attached to Cabinas Iguana Iguana, our lodgings for the night. Sitting next to us at dinner was an American who moved to Carate, about two hours down the road from here. He told us about his experiences in the area and gave us a good idea of how long the remainder of our trip to the ranger station at Sirena will take. He was probably 50, with long gray hair that cascaded down to his shirtless shoulders and skin that looked like it had been treated in a leather tannery. He wore a black technical cast on his right leg, and said he was spending some time here in Jiminez recuperating from surgery in San Jose for blowing out his knee. A former Californian, he said he'd escaped to Costa Rica to retire and surf the swells.

My preconceptions about Costa Rica have so far been wrong. When Jeff and Taylor met me at 8 this morning in my antiseptic, contemporary room at the Hampton Inn hotel just two heartbeats from the airport, I expected we would make the trip from San Jose to Puerto Jiminez by midafternoon, if not hours before. We were delayed because the rental car wasn't ready, and I took several minutes to pack and to check out of the hotel and to sample the delicious pineapple at the hotel's continental breakfast spread. (It's white pineapple, unlike the yellow kind we get at home, and it just melts in your mouth. It's so sugary sweet that I'm salivating at the thought of it.) The result was that we didn't start on the road until 10 a.m., and the road held some surprises.

This stretch of the Pan-American Highway was unpaved. There was hardly enough space for the truck on the left to pass the bus in front of us.

Naming the strip of cleared land that runs from Mexico to the South American border the Pan-American "Highway" is truly a case of false advertising. The excellent guidebooks we consulted before the trip warned that the road is difficult and tedious to traverse, pockmarked with potholes, inexplicable ruts, washed out gorges and mudslides. It's tough to believe that until you see it.

The Toyota 4-Runner we rented is large, but its suspension, which is similar to that of a child's rocking horse, is no match for the foot-deep potholes and abrupt interruptions in the pavement. The loose suspension is not bad thing when you're running over muddy, packed dirt roads that are washboarded at 65 kilometers per hour. In fact, traversing these roads with anything less than a truck seems almost suicidal.

The drive from San Jose, the country's capital and the city that nearly half of this nation's 3 million citizens call home, to Puerto Jiminez, is 350 kilometers (about 190 miles). The difference in mindset and surroundings, though, is many multiples of that distance. As we drove through San Jose and its suburbs, particularly Cartago, we saw closely spaced houses, some of them quite large, places of business, car dealers and other indications that there was some wealth in the area.

This "highway" connects Chacharita to Jiminez. The hungry jungle encroaches on the road from both sides - and from above.

The change in the more mountainous areas as we drove toward San Isidro and down toward Palmar Norte and then to Rincon gave us an idea of how dangerous and expensive road travel is for Costa Ricans. Trucks, cars and all other types of vehicles pass along the poorly-paved Pan American highway, and at many points landslides of thick, bright red dirt have fallen off the mountain face onto the road. The asphalt has not been maintained, and gaping potholes spattered all over the road force drivers to swerve across the road to avoid jolts that can ruin suspension systems and pop tires like bullets through a balloon. Along the roads are the sodas and the pulperias, snack bards and larger versions of the classic American lemonade stand. There are no rest stops.

Despite the physical discomfort of driving over roads that were often unfit for oxcarts, the trip itself was enjoyable. At nearly every point in the journey there was something important to learn, remember, or contemplate. In one day, we drove across half the length of the country. We saw vistas from the top of the cloud forest, perched atop mountains that were 11,400 feet high according to Jeff's global positioning system device. Being able to see the tops of the clouds from land was unbelievable, and became truly otherworldly when the clouds began to encroach and then engulf the road. Old-growth trees outside Rincon tower hundreds of feet into the sky, the only outcropping in a vast forest of banana trees and pineapple plants. And the descent from Palmar Norte to Rincon, when we first caught sight of the Pacific Ocean, gave us a hint of what we could expect at Corcovado National Park, our destination for this first half of the trip.