Puerto Jiminez to Nicaragua
On the bus I sat next to a french woman for part of the way who spoke no english or spanish. I studied some french so I tried to talk to her. It was very hard at first because I was in a Spanish mode, and French wasn´t coming easily. But as I stumbled a bit it came back to me and by the time we were done I was actually, almost, communicating!
When she got off, someone got on with a chicken in a bottle. No, seriously.
We asked them ¨wow, how did you fit that bird in that bottle!¨and they got a kick out of it. (There was a notch cut out of the other side). Apparently it was a special cornish hen that would have very nutritious eggs that were worth a lot. That was about all I was able to get. Anyway, the ride from Chacaritas to San Isidro was new territory for us, and it was quite beautiful. Just one sample:
That afternoon saw us in San Jose, where we transferred to a bus for Liberia, to spend the night in a hostel there. The price of the hostel was quite cheap for Costa Rica - 7$ - but we got scammed a bit. See, he quoted us 7$ each. So 14$ for tw0. He then asked for 8000 colones, which is a favorable rate for him (about 550 per dollar, which is close to right). I then didn´t have many colones (I was not wanting to get stuck with many at the border) so I gave him a US 20$, worth about11,000 colones. He then gave himself a very, VERY favorable rate of exchange on the change, at about 500 colones per dollar, thereby giving me back 2000 colones, or about 4 dollars. So all in all, he scammed me for about 2 dollars.
Not huge, but worth noticing since it has happened to a lot of travelers I talked to. Especially at this hotel. Hotel Liberia it was called, and it is quite run down, and the owner not too nice. Lonely Planet gave it a great review, but evidently it is not as nice as it used to be. Anyway, it was cheap. So we caught a bus to Nicaragua and saw the biggest Papaya I had ever seen…
And the rest later…
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Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Natnee and filed under Costa Rica |
