Wet pants in Puerto Viejo

We pull our kitebags across the border to Costa Rica on an old railway bridge with holes in it. The formalities are minimal. Hamburg didn’t let Condor’s crap flies on the plane under the false pretence that their return ticket had to be from the same country. No border guard wants to see the flight tickets here.

The first stop in Costa Rica is Hippie-Central Puerto Viejo, a somewhat too relaxed little surfer village on the Caribbean side. The non-pot smokers are a radical minority here, with teetotallers on the red list. The Rastas smoke weed everywhere and all the time. Not taking the plug out of your mouth when a police car drives past is good manners here.

I spend a few hours working on important website updates, then I walk through the village. Colourful little huts, lots of restaurants, bars and plenty of broken travellers. It’s no longer just relaxed. The deep relaxation of the freaks here reaches a dependency factor that is only surpassed by wet pants on the washing line.

A mentally handicapped traveller stumbles drunkenly over my feet “I jus drink, no eat, haw haw haw…” he stammers proudly. The one-armed bandit shoves the story of seven screws into my mouth. The at least a dozen more loose ones in the cavity above are left out. A border-sealed hippy girl from the USA explains to me that Germany would at least not have started the Second World War, as it would have been attacked by an economic war thanks to the reparation payments from the First World War. I’m annoyed by our idolised sacred hereditary guilt, but I’m even more annoyed by those who twist history. For the first time, I don’t take any pictures for a whole day. Madness is quite monotonous when it occurs so frequently.

Mel B. goes full throttle again before we set off for new destinations in the pouring Caribbean rain at half past six in the morning. The bus to San Jose takes a good five hours. We need another five hours to get from the bus station to the nearest ATM and by taxi to the airport, where our hire car is waiting. The address on the voucher is incorrect, but the hire company picks us up quickly. Another hour later we are finally micro-mobile for just €40 a day.

I call the Condor “employee” at San Jose airport: “I don’t work for Condor and I can’t help you with you baggage.” Or in short: even in the second country and at the second airport after 14 days, the crap flies still don’t manage to finally deliver my lost luggage to me. Worse, after they had already confirmed the arrival of the luggage in Panama and its onward transport to Costa Rica, it suddenly wouldn’t even have flown out of Germany. After more than 30 emails and a wonderfully cheap 2.5 hours on the Condor hotline from abroad, I’m boiling.

San Jose lies at an altitude of 1000 metres in a high valley surrounded by mighty, cloud-covered mountains. This is how I imagined La Paz. The mountains are beautiful, but San Jose is one endless collection of metastasising urban sprawl shitting on hills. The 70 kilometres from the airport to Orosi take us four hours through the worst rush hour ever, despite almost perfect navigation. Now we’re both boiling and we’ve got our claws out. A hole opens up in the clouds above the mountain slopes. The sun briefly shines through the sky goggles and I expect to see a gigantic turd fall out of the sky onto our Friday the 13th at any moment. But not even that happens.

We only arrive in Orosi in the dark of night. It’s raining. The sat nav doesn’t know the address of the hotel. We ask around for a while. Nothing is going to happen: neither paragliding from the volcano, nor thermal bathing, nor mountain climbing. Nothing. Just eat, write, sleep and curse Condor. 12 hours on the road today, and the road made a miserable destination.