The First Week: And So, It Begins

I stepped off the plane in San Jose to find that American Airlines had lost my luggage.  "No big deal," I told myself.  "You can't do anything about that".  The incompetence of American Airlines actually allowed me an extra day to explore San Jose before I had to head to the village where we would stay for a month.  I immediately got lost in San Jose, a city of interminable signless streets and potholed pavement.  In big areas, I try to move with the crowd, to become lost and overcome with the collective sentiment.  But here, it is impossible.  You find some streets in the center strangely deserted, and others filled with people on individual trajectories, like arrows horse-blinded to their purpose.  Then there are the lotterymen and street vendors, barking eddies of desperation, making you wonder 'do they actually sell any of this stuff?'.  

So I left the city a day late and slightly disillusioned, but ready to find out everything I could about my new home.  The road from San Jose to Los Angeles de Paramo is, when compared with anything in the USA, treacherous.  The Panamericana (a main highway in Costa Rica) is a two-lane windy mountain road.  Common obstacles are: fog so thick you have to slow to a crawl, rock slides closing off half the road, Mack trucks in your lane speeding at you head on as they try to pass slower Mack trucks, scooters, bicycles, angry Panamanian window tinted tailgating BMWs, and your  own exhaustion as you fight to hang on to the inside of every curve.

Leaving the Panamericana, I had to take a dirt road an hour into the mountains.  It is a different kind of horrible than the Panamericana, requiring slow and careful driving to avoid the ditches where you could get your 2010 Hyundai Tuscon stuck forever.  At one point, the road had even been closed down for a month -- a mudslide due to heavy rains washed it completely away.  So I arrived in Los Angeles de Paramo in a drained and dazed state, carried only by the momentum of the roads and some odd vestige of energy I had tucked away before the trip.  

My first meeting was with our Costa Rica contact, Juan Vianey, and the local-head-of-town-shop-owner, Hugo.  I was so exhausted during that interaction that I sat sipping my blackberry smoothie while they blabbered away in fast Costa Rican Spanish.  Apparently, they had decided a lot of things during that conversation, including but not limited to: (1) I was to stay with Hugo for the week (2) All of our projects for a month (3) and that Juan was going to sell Hugo his 15-passenger green Safari Land Rover.  Juan left in his tiny green truck, and there I was, up in the clouds and coffee plantations, preparing myself for what would be one of the craziest months of my life.