Costa Rica: Part II: A Night at Rudolfo’s.
We four travelers stumble through the departure gate and into the ramshackle customs area of the Juan Santamaria International Airport. This airport is located in the San Jose suburb of Alajuela, a likewise ramshackle collection of low white houses and white stone streets that snake up into the green hills.
Alajuela (Image courtesy of ds-lands.com)
Chaos reigns in the customs queue, which stretches back almost to the gates and which random people weave through as if it were a chorus line. The world blurs by in flashes. I realize I left my consciousness back in the plane cabin.
Wearily we take out our declarations for the inspectors to view. How long will this take so that we can sleep? Will they mind if I nap while they rifle through our underwear? That conveyer belt looks comfortable enough. And so on.
Suddenly over the cacophony I hear a voice clear as a bell: “Christofer!” Which is my little brother’s name.
A burly middle-aged man past customs waves a sign and gestures for us to come right through. It turns out, this is our man on the inside. He is Rudolfo, a friend of a friend of my mother’s church group – shadowy Catholic connections best not investigated too thoroughly – who works as a customs inspector at this airport. He’s arranged to whisk us through customs and provide us a place to sleep that night at his house in Alajuela. I’ve never met him before and have no idea who he or his family are. But in travel you have to roll with things.
We hurry our ridiculous big-ass bags past the people in line, shaking our heads slightly toward them – the poor saps! Guess they don’t have an “inside man”. And then we burst out the big glass double doors and into the bright humidity of the pickup area, where Rudolfo’s best friend, Wile, is idling in a beat-up work van to pick us all up. \
Juan Santamaria International Airport (image courtesy of anywherecostarica.com)
Wile is a man of few words and a fast driver. Still, in my paltry Spanish I secure a few pieces of information. He and Rudolfo live right next door to each other on the same block and have raised their respective families essentially together. When we pull up in front of Rudolfo’s small bungalow, Wile jumps out and then opens his friend’s door with his own key.
We haul our packs into the dim house and dump everything on the floor. The couches beckon. Wile, correctly reasoning that the time zone shift will kill us unless we stay up and adjust to Costa Rica daylight, has other ideas. He’s gotten a wild hair to try on a role as a tour guide and drive us around his neighborhood, show us the sights.
These sights include an elementary school (“Escuela?” I ask as he points. “Escuela.” he confirms), a statue of some female saint in a park (captured by the sculptor in a degree of apparent torment) and a store. Compounding the scarcity of interesting features is our lack of serviceable Spanish with which to comprehend Wile’s thoughts about them.
Alajuela and suburban San Jose (image courtesy of Mario Valerio via Wikimedia Commons (c 2011)
Wile drives us back after he notices my brothers snoring away in the back seat. Finally, we’ll get some shut-eye.
This fantasy is soon snatched away. Rudolfo’s just gotten home. He’s gone through a lot of trouble, missed work, effort to host us here. It wouldn’t exactly be a grateful gesture to collapse on his couch for 12 hours, wake up at 3am starving and lumber around raiding his cupboards like a bunch of bears while his family tries to sleep.
He and his wife insist on making us some food – after all, here in their plane of existence, it is mid-afternoon. The fact that I and my companions currently occupy a separate, funhouse existence of hellish delirium escapes them. But I know they are just trying to be hospitable to their guests and ease us into the time change. So we sit at the table and try to make conversation while Rudolfo’s wife cooks a dish of rice and beans and some sort of meat.
The next thing I know we are fully immersed in what might be just a serious back and forth, but feels a hell of a lot like an argument. about where we are headed next.
Of course, when you’re exhausted and can’t understand 80% of what someone is trying to tell you, and you just need to go to the bathroom and sleep for 15 hours, it’s hard to distinguish between a disagreement and a spirited exchange.
I tell him of our plans to head East and visit Turrialba (for rafting), Limon (a West Indian seaport town) and Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast, he shakes his head adamantly. We should correct our course to the east coast , he says, and head south and west, as it is much nicer than Limon and there are plenty of places that turistas like to go.
Limon and much of the Caribbean side, he explains, is crawling with “negras” – black people of West Indian descent – who will beat us up, steal what we carry, and leave us for dead.
I am dismayed but not surprised at this argument, because I have heard that the mestizo Spanish class, which comprises most of the population, harbors much prejudice against the poorer islanders (the West Indians the Spanish themselves, of course, imported to work the banana plantations – a task they imagined themselves too high and mighty to stoop to.) Also, having grown up in a small agricultural town in rural Oregon with a 30% former Mexican migrant population, I’m used to hearing these generalizations.Still Rudolfo is our host and so I let the matter rest. Definitely, I tell him, we’ll go south and west.
Satisfied, Rudolfo steers the topic of our half-conversation to the glories of Costa Rican bananas – so much better than U.S. bananas, so ripe and sweet. I devour the one that he proffers to me, and damn if he isn’t right.
The foods that taste vastly superior in Costa Rica don’t stop at bananas, I will discover. The chicken here is crazy good – it has flavor and nuance you will never get from a U.S. store bird, because it’s mostly cooked still fresh from plucking, from birds that were strutting around in the restaurant’s back yard just hours before. The Coca Cola is more mellow and flavorful because Costa Rican bottlers use real sugar (not shitty corn syrup) delivered fresh from sugar plantations. And the black beans here – don’t even get me started on the wonders of Costa Rican frijoles negras. Hot damn.
And most importantly for a caffeine addict like myself, a cup of coffee that starts its week as dried beans on a table on an organic finca forty miles away – and has just been roasted yesterday – tastes vastly superior than coffee made from beans that spend months piled green on ocean freighters before being roasted in some factory 3000 miles away.
The rest of our couple of days with Rudolfo flies by. Wile’s high-school aged daughter regales us with tales of her friend’s rafting misadventures – a choice of anecdote that eerily foreshadows what is to come for us. Rudolfo’s nephew, an EMT in San Jose, stops by to offer us fresh goat cheese from his grandmother’s farm, which I try – and try immediately not to spit out. It’s warm and quivering, much like it just dropped out of the goat and into my mouth. But it’s a nice gesture.
And when it’s time to part, the whole family drives us into San Jose to drop us off at the hostel, the Dunn Inn,
Hotel Dunn Inn, San Jose. Images courtesy of allcostaricatravel.com
and they are genuinely sad to see us go, even though we did little more than scarf their food and drool snoring on their couch.
With the possible exception of Portugal, I’ve never experienced the level of hospitality displayed by our hosts in Costa Rica, wherever we go in the country. They are truly proud of their country and like to show it off to their guests. Lucky for us, because our adventures are just starting.
TO BE CONTINUED…
beejmckay 