Writings By Date| The Road From Hell Leads To Heaven: Driving to Monteverde | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
The road was not so much a road, but more of a streambed. It wasn't packed dirt or gravel, or even mud, but giant rocks sticking out of the ground, occasionally with two elevated trains for wheels, alternating with ditches of several inches that made the entire thing drivable only in second gear. But again, this is the road in Costa Rica. We bounced along for quite some time, as clouds and rain formed around us and cattle stared at us like we were crazy. After about 45 minutes, we came up on a few guys in a stopped truck that had been coming from the other direction and looked like they might need help. We pulled alongside and asked if everything was okay, to which they responded it was, so then we asked if the road ahead to Arenal was passable. This one older man then launched into some very thickly-accented explanation involving "the other road". All we got out of it was that yes, it was passable, but then there was something about the road to the right. Unfortunately, we couldn't tell if he said the road to the right was the good road or the bad road. Erin, our translator, thought she heard something about the road being ugly, so clearly we were on our own.
We drove along, and continued to head up into the clouds. Now, the road was getting even bumpier, and our average speed was about 10-15 kph, since we had to drive with the door open half the time to make sure all four wheels were still attached. Every once in a while I'd get the car up to 20 kph or so, then we'd hit a bump that would jossle our dental fillings, and I'd get yelled at to slow it down. Plus, with the heavy clouds, we could barely see more than ten feet ahead of us, making the entire ordeal somewhat eerie. The clouds to our side could have been masking a giant city of gold, and we'd've had no idea. More likely it was just be miles and miles of farmland. Or maybe a giant cliff. It was actually better that we didn't know.
We passed by numerous forks over the next 20 or 30 minutes, but most of them were obviously for farms or private roads. It's not like there were any signs up here in the middle of nowhere — the sign guy probably couldn't get his truck up here. Still, some forks were questionable because of the fog: do we descend into the fog on the left, or the cloud on the right? We generally stayed left and did good for the first four. The fifth one had us stumped, but we stuck with our pattern of going left, because the right one went down, and we figured we wanted to stay out of the valleys.
