San Jose Thursday March 18 to Friday March 19 Departure from the Sea-Tac airport went smoothly enough, "I hate you so much" but Talina and I ran into some issues during our layover in Phoenix. The cabin crew actually had to reopen the airplane doors for us as we ran up. Let it be said right now: SouthWest is a substandard airline. Outrageously overpriced food, $5 headsets that you didn't even get to keep, and old bitter stewardesses. Our stewardess became my instant archnemesis and hating her kept me occupied for most of our 6-hour flight. We arrived in San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, at about 11pm. Went through Customs in a blur, then emerged, dazed, into warm chaos outside. We were assaulted by taxi drivers, all aggressively trying to convince us to ride with them. Talina and I tried to speak to the woman at the Information Desk, but we were quickly frustrated by our poor Spanish and just allowed ourselves to be herded by one of the less sketchy looking taxi drivers. About the ONLY planning we had done was to decide to spend our first night at the Buccaneers Hostel, in the Barrio Amon district of San Jose. The taxi driver responded positively to our struggling Spanish and, as we headed towards the Buccaneers Hostel, he gave us a quick lesson on the street layout of the city: Calles went north-south, avenidas east-west. Odd street numbers on one side of the city, even on the other. After being flirted with by the young guy manning the front desk, we paid for a cheap dorm-style room at the Buccaneers. After all the warning I had read about local pick-pockets, I wanted to strangle Talina when she blithely "Oh don't worry, I have LOTS!" pulled out a giant wad of colones (Costa Rican currency) from the back pocket of her jeans and peeled off one note to pay her half. I was tired from getting up so early, so I wanted to go upstairs and go to sleep. Talina wanted to check out the bar adjacent to the hostel. I said, "Here's your mission: gather information from the other bar patrons on places we should visit, and we can check what the Lonely Planet says afterwards." I went upstairs to an empty dorm room and fell asleep on clean white sheets, with the sounds of the city outside. Meanwhile, Talina drank Imperial beer (Costa Rica's main brew) and chatted up other travelers in the bar next door, which had volcanic rock floors and was open to the sky. The next morning, we ate our first Tico meal at a restaurant down the street from the Buccaneers: fresh papaya and gallo pinto con huevos. Gallo pinto is rice and black beans, seasoned with onions and liberal amounts of cilantro. It's literal name is "Spotted rooster" due to the colour. People eat gallo pinto in Costa Rica at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It tends to be very cheap - 300 to 400 colones, which works out to less than a dollar - and is surprisingly filling. Over breakfast, Talina told me that the travelers at the bar last night recommended visiting a town on the Carribean coast called Cahuita. We looked it up in our guide book, which claimed Cahuita was a sleepy beach town walking distance of a national forest. That was pretty much everything we wanted out of Costa Rica. After eating, we walked a few blocks to the Museo de Jade (Jade Museum). It was on the top floor of a very tall building, and we had a great view of the city. We had a good time reading the Spanish plaques aloud, attempting to decode what they meant. A surprising number of the displayed carved jade pieces were highly sexual, with an emphasis on penis representations. We returned to the Buccaneers Hostel and packed up our gear. We got directions from the flirty guy at the front desk on where to catch a bus to Cahuita: at the Coca-Cola bus terminal, which was a short walk from the hostel. The Costa Rican bus system was initially bewildering - there were different ticket booths for different destinations, with only major cities indicated. We had to look at the map in our Lonely Planet to figure out we wanted the bus that continued on to Puerto Viejo. We eventually managed to buy two tickets for Cahuita ("Dos boletos a Cahuita, por favor," we practiced before going up to the window). While we waited, Talina bought a neon green bikini from a shop adjacent to the Coca-Cola bus terminal. We looked in the back of the Lonely Planet for handy phrases like "I'm a size medium" and "this makes my butt look fat." When the bus arrived, it was clearly an old Greyhound - seats battered, windows jammed open and grimy curtains keeping out the hot sun. This was a distinct improvement over some of the local buses we saw arriving, which were old school buses. All buses were invariably overcrowded, with people standing patiently in the aisles. We went bouncing along the mostly unpaved roads, our knees wedged against the back of the seat, shaken half to death on every pothole. NEXT: Six hours later, we were dropped off in Cahuita Home | Pictures 1 2 | Beck and Forest in Fiji | Forest in Australia 1 2 Poppy in Australia 1 2 | Mp3s | Beck and Talina in Costa Rica Beck and Descie in Europe