How can a day that starts with pancakes turn into such a mess? (Actually, a lot of my craziest days have started with pancakes so that sentence is already false, just a good way to start a blog post #UnreliableNarratorProblems)
Now, as you might have assumed from my into, today started with fresh fruit and pancakes! Our hostel had pancakes as today's complimentary breakfast and this made me very happy. We ate, finished packing and waited for our 8:15 shuttle.
In the first time in the history of Central America, the shuttle arrived early! 8:13! Mind blown. There were a few shuttles leaving from our hostel at nearly the same time so we verified that this one would be stopping in Jaco, even though that was not its final destination. Having performed this simple check, we climbed on board with the two other passengers and were off.
We stopped a few minutes later but no more passengers joined our crew. This is where things started to go wrong because unbeknownst to me (and not revealed by Whitney for several hours) we changed drivers here.
A lot of the ride was unpleasant. The roads were bumpy AND winding which means that Satan himself must have been the ones to design these plans. The roads actually weren't simply bumpy either -- for the most steep curves of the drives, we were on dirt roads. I had to give up trying to get a drink of water because the bottle would either fly away from my mouth when I tried to take a sip or the shuttle would rattle so drastically that the water would commit suicide by flying up and landing in my lap.
But soon, we were seeing signs for Jaco and this gave us hope. Actually, I was the one mainly seeing the signs because Whitney was asleep. We kept getting closer and closer and then we were in Jaco... and then we went past Jaco.
I wasn't worried because I knew that we were meeting Lindsay bit outside of town (she's given us the address of a hotel near her place since she knew that no one would recognize a private address). And then we kept driving... And I started to realized that our driver had forgotten to stop on Jaco. We were now a half hour past our destination.
I made him pull over and we had a disastrous "conversation" since he didn't speak English and I don't speak Spanish and then Whitney woke up and got involved. This new driver had never looked at the list to see that there were people to be dropped off before Manual Antonio. He tried to blame us for not stopping him in time but we were not having that. We were now smack in the middle of Jaco and Manuel Antonio and nobody was improving in their ability to speak English/Spanish. Using hand signals, we agreed that we would ride all the way to the final destination and get dropped off in Jaco on his return trip to Monteverde, adding an hour and a half to our travel time. Whitney was furious, I was mainly hungry.
After depositing the other passengers, our driver stopped at the side of the road and got a monstrous bag of lychee fruit. For those of you who don't know, lychee fruit basically looks like an alien egg. It has a pink, spikey skin that you must peel to get to the fruit part, which is white and has a seed in the middle. The texture most closely resembles a grape. If you're thinking that this was a strange thing for him to do, you're right because so did we... UNTIL he offered us some lychee! If you were trying to bribe us, shuttle driver, it worked. I'd eaten lychee before but Whitney had not and didn't like it which just meant more fruit for me.
We were dropped in Jaco at 1:30, meaning that our drive lasted over five hours! Whitney was furious while I was mainly still hungry (lychee are small and I only had four so Dave your judgement for someone who cares).
Lindsey picked us up and brought us to her place, which is, of course, lovely. It's the first time we've seen her in eight years so there was a lot of catching up to do! We brought her up to speed and promptly collapsed. Whitney showed her the video of her bungee jump and borrowed her laptop with a disk drive to upload the video to Facebook!
Lindsey and her husband, Glenn, took us out to dinner where Lindsey, Whitney and I ordered the whole fish special after Glenn's suggestion. And yes, it was a whole fish, face and all. You never think about how much meet a fish actually has until you are challenged to eat all of it! And by eat all of it, I mean eat some and bring the rest home for leftovers.
The moral of the story is that any day that starts with pancakes can easily go wrong but will eventually right itself, and you might end up having a staring contest with your dinner along the way.
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