Day One - Costa Rica

What a day! We woke up this morning grumpy and tired, and struggled to get the girls out of bed. We had arrived in Costa Rica after more almost 48 hours of travelling, and we were pretty exhausted. We finally made it to breakfast with 10 minutes before it finished. We had Kellogg’s Cornflakes and fruit. We had a short walk around our hotel, Brilla Sol (Bright Sun) looking for bugs. The first we saw was a butterfly with see-through wings, then some tent spiders, a wasp, jumping spider and spiky orb-weaving spiders. At this point we couldn’t identify anything correctly, as we didn’t have any wildlife books with us. We also found some leaf cutter ants trailing across the path.

We got onto the hotel computers to send quick emails to our families telling them we had arrived safely, and to update Facebook (of course!!)

After breakfast our rental car was dropped off to us. The down side – it’s a manual car, and with driving on the right side of the road, it was a bit of a struggle for Alan to navigate the streets. Every time he got in a panic he would grab for the gears only to find the door handle and the window controls. On the upside, every time we were in trouble we already had the windows down ready to ask for directions.  

Our left-hand-drive manual car, which we have to drive on the right side of the road!

 We needed to go to the migration department to get visas for our 4 month stay. However, no one seemed to know the address! Addresses in Costa Rica are a little different to Australia. For example, few streets have names except for the major roads like highways and freeways. So addresses are generally directions in relation to other places. Our hotel’s address is 5km west of the airport. That’s it. No turn left here or veer right there. And the road isn’t direct, as there are quite a few turns from the airport! So when we were looking for the migration department, we didn’t have a clue! The map we had was vague at best, and didn’t show all the roads we needed to go on. So after strapping the girls in their car seats, we ventured out to the streets. The Lonely Planet guide says that driving in Costa Rica is for those with nerves of steel; ours were like highly strung steel guitar strings! Still we managed to make it onto the main road, and work out roughly where we were. After driving into down town San Jose, we realised we’d missed our turn, so we painstakingly made our way back again. Needless to say there was plenty of shouting in the car, mainly by me who was trying to direct Alan who was driving. Almost by mistake we found ourselves in the general area of the migration dept, only to miss our turn again and head off down a one way road. My directing wasn’t very good, but I blame the map and lack of street names! (We’ll ignore the fact that I regularly confuse left and right). We managed to turn around again, and after many more wrong turns, found ourselves at the back of the migration department. There was no way in at the back, and after asking some security guards who didn’t speak English, we found out we needed to drive right around the block to the front. Hooray, we had found it, after about an hour of driving!

The map we used to get to the Migration department. Our destination (circled in red) looks easy enough, but it wasn’t so. Note the lack of street names.

We walked through the barrage of people at the entrance, asking us if we wanted them to take a photo of our family or buy a protective cover for our passports. At the information desk, we found that no one spoke English. We conveyed that we were after an ‘Estancia’ visa and handed over our letters (written in Spanish thankfully!) The woman at the desk handed us a pamphlet in Spanish, and told us we need to go to “beesas”. I said “Gracias”, and headed to the big map of the various departments, with Alan saying “What the !@#%? Do you know what she said?!” Of course I didn’t, and at this point I wanted to cry and scream all at the same time. We then find the Visa department, and go up to the window only to semi-translate that the office is open from 8am to 12:30pm. It was 12:55. We missed it by 25 minutes of wrong turns in the traffic!! Our only option now was to try to find our way back to our hotel, and who knows where that is at this point! We found the highway, and then found ourselves veering to the right when we should have been going left. We needed some lunch anyway, so we stopped at Burger King, as it was the only place we could find that had a menu we could translate! The kids had a play at the playground, while Alan and I argued about the exchange rate of the Costa Rican colones (lunch cost us over 12,000 colones – roughly about $25 dollars) And we used the free wi-fi to find our way roughly back to the hotel. After even more wrong turns, we finally made it back – Hallelujah! Now we get to look forward to doing it all again very early tomorrow morning, as we need to get our visas before we make the 8 hour journey to Dos Brazos on the Osa Peninsula. From our experience today, it may take us 12 hours!! 

Outside Hotel Brilla Sol after dinner, with the pretty fairy lights that the girls loved