Not a bad trip at all, considering it's our first backpacking trip with our boy!
Here we were, finally on our way to Rancho Mastatal, and we were going to see how enoying traveling with more luggage than we were used to really is. I typically take nothing bigger than a 40 litre backpack and my wife's is a 35 litre... this time we were lugging around those same two backpacks, with a suitcase that is just about as big as both our packs and a stroller much too cheap to carry anything but a four year old on a smooth road!
Ok so you might think that a stroller would be helpful because it's a set of wheels and we could use it for something heavy when our little homie's not in it. I was concerned about the sidewalks in central america, I didn't remember them to be the smoothest I had ever seen, we weren't going to Switzerland or anything like that!!!
Turns out it really hasn't been bad so far. We took a taxi from the airport, switched hotels in San Jose by taxi (Uber works by the way over there and is really cheap, about $12 dollars from the airport to the center of town) and did the same from the hostel to the bus.
One really nice bus, a rapido took us to Puriscal. This was like any long distance bus you would expect in Europe or North America without a bathroom. All our baggages went under, in the belly of the bus. After about an hour or so, we were let off at the station in Puriscal, it seemed as though everyone knew we were going to Rancho Mastatal, I guess most foreigners wouldn't get out here otherwise...
We had a couple hours to kill, so we sat down at a little restaurant, we had rice, beens, fried fish, cauliflower fried with an egg that was delicious... I was craving chicharon so I ordered some, Jess thought it was grosse but it really was delicious! She's become a vegetarian over the last year. We think she cannot have meat because of the lone star tic that supposedly makes one alergic to meat!
We still had a good hour and a half to play before getting on another bus that was supposed to leave at 3 according to about five or six different people we had asked. I wanted to really make sure because it was the only bus that went that way for the day!
So we played in the town square, a cute little park a bit run down by time.
There was this time capsule i really liked... funny it kind of looked like a giant red button, like the one no one dares to push, because we know it would be the end of us.
And the time came to get on that second bus. It was a lot more reminiscent of my old traveling days in latin america than that first fancy bus. Ok there weren't any goats or chickens flopping around and it wasn't nearly as cramped but it felt like those old days. There were all sorts of large bags and other items being delivered along the way that took up the space where a wheel chair would normally fit and a bit of the aisle.
After about an hour, the road got small enough that when a truck came the other way we had to slowly inch forward because they barely fit. The cliff side looked well too close for comfort, but I was excited, I hadn't seen this in a long time. It reminded me of my first trip through Mexico!
And then we were on a bumpy dirt road. Manu had a lot of fun, he was being thrown around the seats like a carnival ride! We laughed a lot and it made this almost three hour bus ride fun. The mountain views along the way were amazing and we could see his mind was running at a million miles an hour taking it all in.
A man took a bag of feed (I found out all those bags were feed for pigs and chickens) on his back and so our little boy was asking why was the old man carrying that big back on his bag like that, and if the dogs that came to meet him when the bus stopped were his š. Like I said, his mind was racing at a million miles an hour!
Those dogs were so happy, we supposed they were his or that at least he feeds them from time to time and they know it very well.
Until tomorrow... or sometime soon after!
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