First Days in San Jose

After flying into San Jose on the afternoon of Thursday November 19th, we set out for the Hotel Aranjuez near downtown San Jose. For $13 USD, we caught a cab for the 25 minute ride from the airport, and were gratified to find we'd done well with our internet research. The hotel is a sprawling, brightly painted, clean, comfortable and remarkably affordable oasis...in a really rotten part of town. The place costs $25/night USD for a small room with a double bed and a shared bathroom...and a phenomenal breakfast spread that really must be experienced to be believed.

The first lesson we learned in Costa Rica is that you don't go there for the city life. The cities we experienced are dirty, smelly and not tremendously safe. If you make good choices, you're fine, but it's very easy to make choices that are not so good (more on that later).

After spending an uneventful first night at Hotel Aranjuez, we got up the next morning and went on a tour of the Cafe Britt coffee plantation, which was easily one of the best things we did. As a matter of fact, I'm drinking Cafe Britt Dark Roast coffee as I write this!

For $34USD per person, Cafe Britt sends a driver to come pick you up in a van full of other touristas, drives you through the lovely countryside between San Jose and Heredia; then they take you on a very educational (not to mention hilarious) tour of their coffee plantation and their factory; then they feed you a fantastic gourmet meal.

These are ripe coffee cherries from the first harvest of the season at Cafe Britt:


Saturday morning, we set off for the Jade Museum in San Jose. On our way walking through the city, a "helpful cabbie" stopped and told us to put our cameras away. After quite some work in our broken Spanish (he did not speak any English), we understood him to say that we were in danger of having our cameras stolen. After quite a lot more work, we learned that the museum we were interested in was closed, but that he would be happy to take us to the zoo, a butterfly preserve, and the bank instead. When I asked him how much it would cost to have him do all this, he said "don't worry about it". (Danger, Will Robinson....)

So, off we go with him to the bank. After a bit of a struggle in broken Spanish, I manage to convert some USD to Colones (Costa Rican money), and then we looked at a map to see if we wanted to go all the way to the zoo. Oddly enough, when you look at maps of San Jose, it is almost always deceiving how close things are. The maps somehow make things appear a lot farther away than they actually are.

Helpful taxi driver says it will be less than a 15 minute drive. So, we start driving, and after a little bit more conversation, we decide that we'd rather go to the butterfly sanctuary, which appears to be near-ish to the zoo. So, once we communicate this to him, he pulls over, stops the car with a grumpy grimace, points, and lo and behold, there's the sign for the place he was describing. It seemed odd that we happened upon the very place we wanted to go right as we made the decision.

Anyways, he said he wanted 18000 colones for his services...which sounded like a hell of a lot to me...which is where the meter should have come in...but I then noticed that it was not even attached to anything so that he could have turned it on. ( ! ) The wires for the meter were hanging down on the floor of the car. So now I'm in a bit of a pickle. 18000 colones converts over to about $32USD, but I had only changed over $20, or about 10000 colones. We ended up settling the matter for all the colones I had, but I still felt like I'd been taken, based on our previous experiences with "official" cab services in the city. So...second lesson learned...make the cabbie turns on his meter, or walk away.

Here are a couple of the butterflies we saw:



While we were walking around, enjoying the butterflies and gardens, it became clear that the zoo was right behind the butterfly farm. Ah, the strange, small world of San Jose. :-)

Being a little gun-shy now, we consulted our map and decided to hoof it back to our hotel. It was only about a 20 minute walk, and while it was not at all a good part of town, we at least felt a bit more in control of our own destiny.

More adventures to come...