A Homicidal Maniac Cab Ride

8-21-00 Tu 1:10 PM
I'm lying in a hammock on an upstairs veranda at the Hotel Aurora in Montezuma, on the southern end of the Nicoya Peninsula, drenched in sweat. We left San Jose yesterday morning and wound over the jungle-covered mountains on Highway One to Punta Arenas. We had lunch at a little hut on the bay. I had some fish and a beer, and Rochelle had a burger. A nice spot. We found the ferry dock and waited in the sweltering sun for an hour while I took turns reading La Nacion and staring at the lush green island in the the blue water of el golfo. You can get a beer, so I got one. We met a family from Malibu. Mark and Maggie Tesh, and their one-year-old son Frederick, and Maggie's brother, Daniel, who teaches English down here. I also talked with a chatty local, about half of whose Spanish I understood. The accent here is new to me. When the ferry landed, we were one of the first cars off the boar. We surged up the little road into the verdant mountains, but we stopped to take a photo of the by through the overhanging forest, and a line of several cars passed us. Well, then it was on! The Nicoya 50-K, I shall call the race that I imagined myself in. The road turned to rain-wrecked dirt, and we bumped along wild mountain hairpins, passing cars at every opportunity until we were in the lead. Oxen and chickens lined the roadways of the little villages we passed, and we had to slow for the occasional burro-driven cart. It finally began to feel like a real adventure. Two hours later, the road finally bumped out into the little seaside village where we are now. We got a nice little room with a mosquito net and a ceiling fan. It's got hot water in the shower if you want, but who'd want? Before you're done toweling off from your shower, you're already soaked in sweat. We unpacked and headed down the village road to a little cantina on the beach called Chico's. We had pizza, wings, and beer, and I won eight pool games and lost two. We met an Englishman named Paul from Birmingham. "Led Zeppelin's from there," he said proudly. I had about ten beers and won the last five games of pool. No one in the bar could beat me. Rochelle was beginning to look a bit rundown, though, so we headed back to the room, showered, and crawled under the net for a fitful and sweaty night of sleep.

 8-20-00 Su 6:15 PM San Jose, Costa Rica

It gets dark a lot earlier down here. We have not been well-received by your man-on-the-street Tico. They've pretty much told us to go to Hell when we've asked for directions; many of the calles are unmarked. It's a little hard to know which way you're going sometimes. Perhaps they still harbor some residual William Walker animosity. We found our way to the Hotel Del Rey and sat at the Blue Marlin Bar. The Angels and Yankees were on, and Bob March, from Los Altos High School was leading Tiger Woods going into the final round of the golf tournament. The place was crawling with young, good-looking hookers. One licked her lips at me. In another time...No: Rochelle and I talked to a few characters. including a defector from Cuba who believed he could play in Major Leagues if he could get to the USA and a boatbuilder who splits his time between Costa Rica and Alaska. I would have been happy to get drunk there and root for Bob March and the Angels and the hookers to win their games, but I didn't think that would have been much fun for the wife, who can't even drink a beer because she's pregnant.

So, we took a cab to el Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, or something like that, a funny a little place full of bones and bad taxidermy: halls teeming with rotting stuffed monkeys, misshapen tapirs, a two-headed goat, a piglet with one head and two bodies, an African lion that looked like Joan Rivers after a bad facelift, thousands upon thousands of pinned butterflies and beetles, fading feathered friends, and case after case of seashells and minerals. We taped the whole place with lots of disparaging narration.

From there, we took a cab to the Museo de Cultura e Historia, pocked with bullet holes from the revolution of 1948. We saw jade exhibits, indigenous culture exhibits, religious history exhibits, and a history of Costa Rica exhibit, no great shakes, any of it.

We walked back downtown and got some sandwiches, and then kept on walking back to the Hotel Bienvenido.

8-21-00 9:07 PM Mon Montezuma, C. R.

Last night we went to a place on the outskirts of San Jose called El Pueblo, a compound of bars, shops, and restaurants, upscale by Central American standards. We wandered around, and I was drooling at all the bars in the place. We went to the Cocina de Lena and had some comida Costariqunse autentica.. Had a couple glasses of wine. Pregnant mama had some tea. They served us some tortillas and bread and different sauces to dip ‘em in. Roch had salad, and I had corn and pork soup, so they said. Rochelle had chilaquiles, and I had gallo pinto. We weren’t sure the mesero brought us the right stuff, but he said he did. It was going okay, and then we got talking about whether or not I am an alcoholic. That might be an interesting writing topic, that conversation, but fuck it. It’s actually pretty boring. After coffee, we had recovered enough to wander el Pueblo. We stopped in a joint called flubber where a couple of sensitive, romantic, Latin-lover guys sang guitar ballads that the crowd sang along with. I didn’t understand, but Rochelle translated for me. From there, we taxied to Cuartel en la Boca del Monte and paid a cover to watch some Jimmy Buffett wannabe have fun stroking his guitar and singing. I didn’t think much of him, but the crowd was pleased. We took a cab back to the Hotel Bienvenido and went to sleep pretty quick. I woke up this morning at about eight. I walked up La Avenida Central to la Gran Hotel and had a coffee and wrote a third-person page. I bought the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and La Nacional. I walked back at nine twenty and Roch and I showered and packed and went down to the lobby. Our ride never showed, and we were stuck talking to the sweet natured receptionist until we gave up waiting and she called us a cab. We took a homicidal maniac cab ride along Paseo Colon to the car rental agency where a guy named Julian rented us a Daihatsue Terio 4WD with AC. More later and elsewhere.