Traveling in Costa Rica

My worst travel experience occurred in the city of Puntarenas in Costa Rica. It was March of 2005, my last year in college and the first time I had done anything noteworthy for Spring Break. My friend Kate and I flew into San Jose, Costa Rica. There we met up with Kate's friend Liz who was spending the year in Puntarenas as an exchange student. I had never met Liz before, though I remembered seeing her on campus the year before and thinking that she was beautiful and seemed like a very free spirit. We clicked right away, and the three of us crazy girls made our way toward Liz's home base of Puntarenas. We stopped and spent the night in San Ysidro ( a small and rather dirty city, certainly nothing to write home about.) Then we spent two nights in Dominical-a beautiful village on a popular surf beach full of people from every part of the world and populated by an interesting mix of Costa Rican natives and aging surfers who seemed to have come to visit and never left. Dominical, in contrast with the other places I had seen in Costa Rica, namely San Ysidro and San Jose, was like my vision of a tropical paradise and I would highly recommend to anybody who is traveling to Costa Rica to stop there and discover it's beauty for themselves. Finally, after the third day, after riding many a rickety, crowded, and often out of control bus, we arrived in Puntarenas. It was terribly hot and humid and we were all sweaty, red, and grumpy as we made our way through the city shouldering our overstuffed, heavy backpacks. First we went to the home of Liz's host parents to say hello and to get the key to the place that Liz's host father owned and had arranged for us to stay in at the low price of ten dollars per night. He took us across town to a two story building. You had to use a key just to get in the place, then up some rickety stairs, past another unit and to our place. It wasn't much-there were two rooms, a bathroom, and a small living area. I was disturbed to note that the room adjacent to the other unit had a wall that stopped about a foot short of the ceiling. Kate volunteered to take that room and I was glad to let her have it. The thought of some creepy man staring at me as I slept was too much for me to bear.The place was stifling hot, with only a small fan to break through the still, heavy air. I doubted the cleanliness of the bed clothes, and the whole place in general was quite shabby. For the moment, we were just glad to have a place to rest our weary traveling feet. After Liz and her host father bid us goodbye, we relaxed for a bit then freshened up and decided to make our way to get something to eat. As we navigated through the shabby neighborhood, I noted how rundown everything was and how poor the quality of life in general seemed to be. The sun was quickly disappearing, the sky was fading to purples and greys. Groups of people gathered together in front of ramshackle buildings, their slack brown faces staring at us as we walked by. Most of these faces were devoid of expression, but others appeared sinister and unwelcoming. I was sure they were wondering what these two white girls were doing in their neighborhood, so obviously out of place. My friend Kate, ever the boisterous redhead, marched along confidently calling out "Hola," "buenas tardes" and "Como estas?" to the people we passed. These greetings were not returned, and my uneasy feeling continued to grow until I was downright terrified. My Spanish skills at the time were extremely minimal but I could have sworn I heard one group of men calling out to ask how much we cost.
"Kat, they think we're hookers." I hissed at her. She was oblivious to any danger while I gripped my miniature pocket knife necklace tightly in my hand. I sensed that we were in a situation that could go wrong very quickly-two American girls in the middle of an impoverished ghetto. I had read about Americans disappearing in Costa Rica under similar situations. I felt very out of my element and very insecure. Kat thought I was being ridiculous, but I was raised to mistrust strangers. My aunt was murdered at seventeen, and my mom learned too early how evil the world could be.She knew that one can never be too safe or too careful. She passed this bit of wisdom onto me, and I believe it has saved my skin more than once. Needless to say, I wasn't able to relax until we got back into our room and locked the door behind us. Even then, I felt nervous, especially when some man downstairs began pounding on the door outside of the building, and calling for someone to let him in and would not let up for hours. I convinced Kate that letting him in was a foolish idea.As the noise persisted, we were scared to even venture out of our room in fear of encountering the irate pounder but he eventually went away and we were able to leave our little prison to meet back up with Liz. She introduced us to some of her friends. Some were native Costa Ricans, some American, some from Denmark. We all went to a disco and had a great time. Afterward Kate and I invited some of the group back to our place to continue the party. We were all sitting on the floor in a circle, engrossed in conversations when the hugest cockroach I had ever seen ran across the floor. One of the guys killed it, but it wasn't long before another made an appearance. One of the girls we were with, a stoic Costa Rican teenager who lived in the city, wrinkled her nose. She told us that this place was terrible and that she lived in a large beautiful home in the nicer part of the city with her mom who often rented their extra room to travelers. She said we could come stay there for the same low price of ten bucks per night. She told us to come the next day to check it out. I was certainly willing, and especially when, after they all left, the man in the adjacent room turned on a porn movie very loudly. The sounds drifted right over that short wall and into our space. The man knew we were there. He had seen us earlier when we first arrived. He was playing that porno at max volume to ensure that we heard it. God only knew what else he was doing over that wall. Sure that the man was some type of pervert, I felt more uneasy than ever about the space below the ceiling. Thankfully we survived that night, though I am reasonably convinced that the neighbor did peek over the wall at poor Kat as she slept. Bright and early the next day we met up with our newfound savior who brought us to her house, a lovely spacious home with Spanish tile. She introduced us to her charming mother, her nice uncle, and a housekeeper who was willing to make us food or coffee any time of the day. We moved into a large spare room with a ceiling fan, two beds with crisp clean sheets, and walls that went all the way up! The rest of the trip we had our own travel guides and escorts with this nice family as the girl and her uncle accompanied us almost everywhere. After that my experience in Costa Rica improved completely. What had momentarily been the worst travel experience of my life led to the single most beautiful day of my life, but that, my friends, is another story altogether.