Day 1

My alarm went off at 5.15 am, but since the clock was set back one hour the day before, I kept telling myself it was still a much more acceptable 6.15 (but I was pushing the limits of how much fooling itself my brain allows). Before stepping out the door, I took a quick glance in the mirror. Let’s face it, I don’t score high on the ‘adventurous personality scale’, so I’m not trying to fool anyone, but I cannot help feeling very cool when I’m wearing my big backpack. I felt even better about myself, when I found out at the airport in San José that I was the only one in our group that had one.
The big hurricane that had hit Mexico only 2 days earlier, did not affect our trip at all, so the journey to Costa Rica went smoothly. At Schiphol airport, I was ‘randomly’ selected at for an additional security check, which entailed a swap of my carry-on luggage, clothes, and shoes for traces of chemicals and drugs. We transferred at Newark airport to San José and given that the US government knows that I studied biopharmaceutical sciences (that sounds scary enough already) and that I am currently an assistant professor in pharmacology (OMG imagine how scary that could be), I could not help feeling that this may have had something to do with the ‘randomness’ of the test. However, when leaving Costa Rica for our transfer in Houston, I was not selected, so I could be wrong.
Flying remains a necessary evil. In addition to not allowing itself to be fooled, when I’m in a plane my brain occasionally reminds me that I am in a big metal cigar 3k up in the air and that there is very little that keeps us all from crashing to the ground (imagine the time it would take to fall that far and the horror that would be!). On both flights I was sitting next to Tonnie and Tineke, two elderly ladies that I grew very fond of during the trip, but since I’m quick to judge and generally not in a positive way, this took a bit of time. Neither of them was proficient enough in English to fill out the immigration forms and (granted) the print on the form for Costa Rica was so small that even I had difficulty deciphering it. I helped them out, but quick judgment did make me wonder why they would even embark on a trip like this if you don’t even speak English. One question on the form for Costa Rica was whether you were bringing any chemicals, pharmaceuticals, explosives, weapons, bombs... into the country. I did have a small supply of ‘pharmaceuticals’ for personal use with me, but wondered whether it would be better to lie about it (with the potential of getting caught providing untruthful information on an official document) or to truthfully indicate that I indeed brought with me items from this list of mostly terrorist-related items. I opted for being truthful and figured I had a good story that should not cause too much problems. At the airport however, I discovered that I should not have had to worry about this at all, since an officer just walked by the line of waiting tourists to collect all forms and he did not look at a single one of them. I figured that they would probably not come after us, if they found out this mistake (or would they?).
Of course there are no good Dutch group trips without a few Belgians in the group as well and this time, in addition to having two friends from Belgium in our group, we even had a very enthusiastic guide, Dirk, that was from Belgium, although he had lived in Central America for 16 years already. We also met Gerardo, nicknamed Chavo, who was our driver. After driving only a few hundred meters on the highway, he stopped in the middle of the far left lane and jumped out, because one of the mirrors had fallen off, this was however the only incident. When it came to his bus, Chavo ran a pretty tight ship. He would clean it every day that we were not traveling and he drove pretty much according to our European standards. Which could not be said from every Central American. As Dirk put it, general perception seemed to be that what you cannot see is not there, so we have witnessed a number of close calls when people would take over other cars before a curve or hill in the road or just behind a truck (if a big truck can make it, surely you can too, even if you are a big truck yourself).
About 24 hours after getting up, I resigned to bed in our hotel in San José. Interesting details here was that the towels were folded like elephants (during two trips in Africa, I’ve seen my fair share of swans, but I never had my towels folded as elephants), moreover, there was a special towel to clean your shoes.