Writings By Date| The Road From Hell Leads To Heaven: Driving to Monteverde | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Once outside of town, we lost our pavement again (and our sunshine) almost instantly. However, our expectations were suitably lowered after the road out of La Fortuna, so we didn't find this one to be nearly as bad. At least it was a little wider here, and more "trampled", so there weren't huge, jagged rocks, though there were the usual bumps and jostles. This was a "third-gear" road, so we made it to Santa Elena, 41 kilometers further, in about an hour and a half.
Actually, we're not really sure how far it was. Upon leaving Tillaròn, we saw a sign that said it was 35 kilometers away. About a hundred meters later, that number jumped to 41. Eight kilometers later, it was 35. Six more after that, it was 31. We've come to realize that this is standard affair in Costa Rica. The members of the Costa Rican transportation department either pre-fabricate these signs with the mileage, then leave it up to people with bad directional skills to place them wherever they can, or else they're very bad at math.
From here, it was only three more kilometers to Monteverde; the towns basically merged into one another, and the hotel we were going to try was somewhere in between. But here's the scary part: the roads in the town were the worst we've seen yet! There were occasional boulders jutting out of the road that our truck would barely clear, if at all. Sinkholes would stretch the entire length of the road, and appear every two feet for a while, so there was virtually no way to avoid experiencing a little roller coaster ride. There's something to be said about the feeling of having the steering wheel constantly be pulled from your hands from being bounced around so much. It's not very comforting.
On the bright side, I was starting to get the hang of these roads, and realized that taking them at 15 or 20 kph was often much smoother than taking them at 5 kph, at least until I would suddenly come up to a giant two-foot dip and would have to slam on my brakes so that my front wheels would dive in, but I could at least keep from bottoming out the rest of the car. Ironically, the signs along the road said "Maximum Speed: 25 kph", but I could not for the life of me imagine how any vehicle, including the numerous people riding ATV's and motorcycles (without helmets, I might add), could ever achieve such a velocity, unless they had wings and were airborne.
