Costa Rica 1992: Busing to La Fortuna

      Our bus trip from San Jose to La Fortuna was another punishing one for my back.  The bus was a rural bus, so it stopped every time it saw someone on the street flagging it down.  The countryside was mountainous, with a lot of agricultural crops being grown on the hillsides.  

    An ancient old man was sitting across the aisle from us.  He spoke only a bit of English, and he kept saying things to us, but it was very difficult to understand much of what he was said.  He kept repeating in a low halting manner, “I have no body.”(?), which left us flummoxed, but  I did understand it when he said, “Do you have whiskey?”

    During the last bit of our bus trip, it began turning very muggy, as we re-entered the moist country.  We were happy that we had hung our clothes to dry in our hotel room in San Jose, because, like in Manuel Antonio, those moist clothes would never dried out in La Fortuna.  

    La Fortuna is a town of 6,000 with Arenal, a beautifully cone-shaped active volcano, giving it character by jutting up behind it.  However, on the day we arrived, we couldn’t even tell in what direction the volcano was, because of the thick low  cloud cover.  We found Hotel Ambugue Bureo where our reservations had been made, to be a great place to stay; the best hotel we have had in Costa Rica.  It was new, neat, had attractive rooms with white walls with wooden trim.

    After checking in at 1:30, we took a nap for an hour and a half, then ventured out to explore.  We walked to a bridge over a beautifully clear tropical river.  Accompanying us on our short hike were two dogs from town, one of which attached itself to us at our hotel.

    We seemed to have had communication problems at the restaurant when we went to for supper.  We ordered “Gallo de Pollo” expecting something like rice and beans with a bit of chicken, but were served fried chicken, French fries, and cabbage slaw.  We thought we would order a fruit salad for dessert, expecting a big bowl of melon, pineapple, and cantaloupe, similar to what we saw some people eating a few days earlier, but what we received was two scoops of ice cream sitting in a slurry of Jello and canned fruit cocktail.  It tasted good, but certainly didn’t fit with the  expectations we had when we ordered it.

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