Coming into Costa Rica this time, I thought how different my arrival into the country was from the first time, 50 years, almost to the day, later. This time I was flying in a Copa Airlines 737 from Panama City to San Jose. A half century ago, I was nearing the end of my four-month exploration through Mexico and Central America. Three days earlier, I was leaving Guatemala heading south, four countries yet to go, with $22 left in my pocket. My traveling companions thought I was crazy and should go home. But I wanted to get to Costa Rica, at least, and didn’t know when I would be back — 50 years, as it turned out — so I hitchhiked my way out of the border station into El Salvador.

The first ride was with some crazy surfers from Florida who were seeking the perfect wave at La Libertad, on El Salvador’s Pacific coast. I spent the night with them once we got there, sleeping in a hammock while they went off partying and risking facing the firing squad, El Salvador’s penalty for drunk driving, which they definitely did, and got stopped for. They gulped audibly in the dark when they got back, complaining about the cop, when I informed them of what they could have faced.

It struck me that there were people just everywhere in El Salvador, and it did not seem to me as a country I wanted to spend much time in. So the next day I took a bus up to San Salvador, the capital, and then took another bus, a city bus, that got T-boned by some car at an intersection. Everyone had to get off, so I walked, my huge and heavy pack on my back, out to the edge of the city, and put my thumb out, seeking my next ride. Not much longer after, I would not have been able to do that, since that area was taken by guerillas in El Salvador’s ongoing civil war.

I wasn’t waiting long and a car stopped to pick me up. Turned out it was a Guatemalan Air Force officer, Eduardo, who was driving all the way to San Jose to see his new Costa Rican sweetie he had met during a recent out-of-town match he played in with the Guatemalan national football/soccer team. Better luck I could not have had. Eduardo began by lecturing me how dangerous it was what I was doing. So, if it is so dangerous, I asked, is it not dangerous for him to pick me up? In response, Eduardo reached under his seat and brandished the rather large pistol he had secreted there.

“Were it not for this, I would not have picked you up,” he said.

Good point, I was forced to acknowledge.

Together, sharing off the driving, we made it through Honduras and into Nicaragua, then a police state under the Somoza regime, and the feeling of repression was palpable as we made our way through the night. At one point we were stopped by a policeman who required us to take some couple, who occupied the back seat of Eduardo’s car, to a health center in the next town. I think she was having a baby, but I don’t recall specifically. We spent the night in some little hotel, and the next day made our way through Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. The city had been destroyed in a massive earthquake three years prior, and it looked like it could have been the day before. Despite all the aide that flowed into the country — and directly into Somoza’s pocket, as it turned out — only gas stations and some upscale hotels had been rebuilt. It tore the guts out of me to see how nothing else had been rebuilt and people were living in shambles.

After escaping Managua, we passed Lago de Nicaragua, home to fresh-water sharks, and arrived at the Costa Rican border on Friday afternoon. At that point, I literally didn’t have a sou left to my name, and were it not for being with Eduardo there is no way the border guards would have allowed me into the country. But they did, and soon we were cruising southeasterly toward the capital, San Jose, where we arrived about 5 p.m. Once in the city, Eduardo discharged me and my backpack onto the streets since he was anxious to go see his honey.

In retrospect, that part of my trip, and the few days that followed, were without doubt the best part of the entire expedition. Often, Janis’s lyrics popped into my head . . . “freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I was busted flat in San Jose, not Baton Rouge, but I certainly had damned near nothing left to lose, and never before, and maybe since, had I ever felt so free.

To make an unintentionally longer story a bit short, that evening and the next several days were occupied with meeting new friends, getting assistance in staying at a hotel thanks to some curious cops, turning in my $6 bus ticket to David, in Panama — the reason it took me 50 years to finally make it to that country — to get the funds to pay for my hotel stay and get something to eat, finding, with the help of the Venezuelan boyfriend of this American woman among my new friends, the right bank where a friend in New York City had wired me $75 in compensation for my bike being stolen while she was riding it on the closed West Side Highway, stabbed, and sent to the hospital for days or weeks, and taking a ride on the narrow gauge railway with an Aussie new friend to Limon on the Caribbean coast, where we stayed in a combination hotel/whorehouse, and got to see sloths in the trees in the parks. And finally, back in San Jose, finding a travel agency that would take my Amoco Torch Club card — a card that combined an Amoco gasoline credit card with a Diners Club card — to enable me to buy an air ticket back to Miami.

Yes, this arrival was different from all that. Besides flying in on a shiny new jet aircraft, I had folding money in my wallet, credit cards that someone might actually recognize, and a rental car on reserve once I arrived. But as I was soon to find out, it wasn’t just my circumstances that had changed, but those of the country I was entering, too.

All is not right in Paradise

In 1975, San Jose was a nice little city that you could walk across. Other than the Opera House and the Central Market, there wasn’t a lot to be done there. But that was okay. One could walk about and enjoy the place and for more excitement take a side trip up a nearby volcano, which I did, or, as I also did, ride the narrow gauge down to Limon.

That was 1975. Today, San Jose is one more huge, sprawling, traffic-clogged mess of an urbanization. It appears to have a non-stop traffic jam on virtually every street and artery. I wasn’t much interested in considering San Jose for my relocation, but seeing it today, you couldn’t pay me to live there. In fact, the rental car guy who drove me back to the airport as I was leaving told me the traffic never stops, it only gets worse at 5 o’clock on Fridays, and he wouldn’t want to live there, either. He lives in some suburb outside the city.

It literally took me four hours to get out of San Jose. More than an hour to get through immigration on a lengthy line that snaked for what seemed forever. I haven’t been in an immigration line like that since Brazil decades ago, and I threatened to report that one to the local news media. Then almost an hour to get the rental car and be charged an outrageous amount for insurance I wasn’t supposed to need, but unlike any other country I’ve rented cars in, and there are many, without an actual printed letter from one’s credit card company, one is not allowed to waive the insurance. And then two more hours to fight the traffic, deal with wrong roads with no way to turn around, and general chaos to get out of the city.

By the time I found my way pointed in the right direction and was climbing up the winding road into the mountains that separate San Jose from the Caribbean coast, it was already getting dark, which it does early in Costa Rica. And then it started raining, and getting foggy. By then I was at the time I was expected at the AirBnB in Puerto Viejo, on the extreme southeast coast, almost four hours away under normal circumstances. And as I was finding out, there are few, if any, normal circumstances in Costa Rica.

I specialized in transportation planning when I was an undergrad in college. And I can say authoritatively, Costa Rica violates virtually every law of good transportation planning, often deliberately. Another rental car guy, who picked me up upon arrival, laughed when he heard they don’t have signs in Panama. Or route number markings. Of course they do here! Sure they do. Sometimes. Sometimes not. And the route number markings, when they have them, for unfathomable reasons are so small, you have to be practically on top of them to make them out.

In 1975, Eduardo and I cruised down a newly paved road from the border. It being late Friday afternoon, there were first aid stations set up every few kilometers along the road to be available to render assistance should any accidents occur. The country was known for abolishing its army in 1948, in response to an attempted coup, and directing the funds that would have gone toward the military for things like building schools, rural electrification, and paving roads. There was an air of true progress in the country, and I don’t think it was just my own receptivity to the idea that allowed me to feel it.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but even with the influx of tourists and wealthy gringos settling in the country, I didn’t have the same sense this time. Yes, the new airport is exceptionally spiffy — if by spiffy you also include $25 hamburgers and $12 ice cream cones in the definition — and I understand other new airports have been built on the Pacific coast to encourage those wealthy gringos to fly in. But I sure didn’t see that sense of progress on the road to Limon, which was — I’m not making this up — more of an obstacle course than a thoroughfare.

For reasons that eluded me, every few kilometers there would be barriers set up across the left lane. Sometimes painted arrows on the pavement would tell you to move right, and sometimes they’d be aimed straight into the barriers. One would think effort would go into a highway connecting a country’s capital and main port, but that highway comes and goes, seemingly whimsically, at times disintegrating into dirt, potholes, and winding deviations. My most common phrase, coming across one unexpected hazard after another, was “Jesus Fucking Christ!” and quickly taking evasive action.

Driving after dark in these countries adds a whole other dimension to things, and this experience certainly did that. I took to following trucks, and later a bus, since I figured at least they knew the road, the turns, and the pothole fields. Trading off a bit of speed for that knowledge proved worthwhile, invaluable even.

Another long story, short

I don’t want this account to just turn into a gripe fest about the driving experience, but by the time I got to Puerto Viejo — which, it turned out, is absolutely lousy with young gringas and gringos wandering from bar to restaurant to bar — and then couldn’t find the AirBnB, it was almost 10. And by the time I was able to find an unsecured Internet connection among the dozens turning up on my laptop in the main part of town while sitting in the car — a brilliant idea that came to me to look for one — the owner of the AirBnB and his niece, who was to give me the keys, had gone to bed and weren’t answering messages. So I wound up doing what I’ve done before, which is sleep in the car, as close as possible to where I thought the AirBnB was.

Before 6 in the morning — it also gets light early in Costa Rica — I was awakened to what sounded like lions roaring. I couldn’t imagine who would keep lions there, and it turned out, no one. I was later informed it was monkeys I heard, and I continued to hear them during daylight hours the whole time I was there. Through a series of the kind of coincidences I’ve come to expect in these countries — only would that they had occurred nine hours earlier than they did — I was able to identify the AirBnB and be admitted by a lovely relative of the owner who happens to live across the street from it and has a set of keys.

“We were all worried about you,” she said. “That road is so bad and dangerous.”

I admitted I was worried myself about me. But at least I made it.

I loved the AirBnb, all open and airy — that jungly photo above was taken from the open balcony off my room — and I felt very close to nature, which I especially love. And if there is one thing Costa Rica has, it’s nature.

I managed to do some exploring, heading down to Manzanillo, where the road ends, before the Panamanian border, and got to have one more dip in the Caribbean on the amazing beach there. That’s where the featured image, and that ship wreck you see, was. But overall, I felt the area was just too touristy for anywhere I’d want to live, and things are rather pricey, so I’ve taken Costa Rica off my list for possible relocation.

The drive back to San Jose, three days later, during daylight hours was much easier, and a nominal three-and-a-half hour trip only took a little under five, which I think is pretty good. I even got to see why they put those barriers across the left lane. It’s to create left-turn lanes. Who would have thought? I guess no one thought of putting in actual left-turn lanes, or jug handles, or something. But wait! At one point, amazingly, there was an actual left-turn lane! What a brilliant idea! I wonder who thought of that! Give that person a medal!

Flying out of San Jose, en route to a plane change at Lima, Peru, and onward to Montevideo, Uruguay, also was a lot different this time than in 1975. Back then I had eaten something the night before departure that kept me in the bathroom on the plane most of the way to Guatemala City, in the airport bathroom at the Guatemala City airport, and then again on the plane to Miami. I don’t think my stomach was ever the same again. Fortunately, no such issue this time.

Next stop: Uruguay.

Featured image, the beach at Manzanillo, Costa Rica.

Jungly scene from my AirBnB open balcony near Puerto Viejo,  Costa Rica.

Shipwrecked on the Caribbean, Manzanillo, Costa Rica.

All photos by the author. Credit for the title, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” to Jimmy Buffet.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.