After an excellent morning ziplining we went to the rental car place to pick up our “Jimny” Jeep for the trip down south to Puerta Jimenez. This place is on the east side of the Osa Peninsula overlooking Golfo Dulce. What we thought was a bad start to the trip, the jeep we booked was not being available due to us changing our booking, turned out to be a bonus. We ended up with a 4x4 Toyota truckie thing (Bob may be able to give a more technical description) which in the end turned out to be just what we needed...eek! By the end of the trip the truck was affectionately named the Tortuga (turtle) truck by me (not because it was slow but because I like turtles). We bought snacks and water in readiness for the 5 hour trip. Armed with the rental car map it looked like we would have a variety of road standards on the way down; highway, standard roads, local roads.
I had the role of navigator, mainly as I couldn’t get my head around driving on the opposite side of the road. Well that was my story anyway and Im sticking to it, nothing to do with the female driver thing! This always makes me nervous both about getting us lost and the state of our friendship by the time we get to the other end...:)! Kilometre after kilometre rolled by, as did hour after hour. It was hard to tell the difference between highway, standard and local roads and we had no idea what was ahead!
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| Road fallen away |
The turn off to Puerta Jimenez that was meant to be 10kms after the major service station didn’t eventuate so after 25 kilometres we decided to stop and ask. Not an easy task with only the Spanish from a week (15 hours) of intensive travel Spanish lessons, but managed to confirm it was just a bit further down the road! When we finally turned off, with 70 kilometres still to go and 5 hours already having passed, we discovered the worst was yet to come. It was now dark, the road became dirt and then they appeared...pothole after pothole...not just little ones that any car could get through...ones that seriously needed to be avoided. Not to be avoided so widely though that the truck went too far off the side of the road that had often dropped away and we could not see what lay below...eek!
Along this road we saw a sight that made us laugh out loud. Coming around a bend, there in the headlights on the side of the road were two horses without saddles, only reins, grazing in the grass. Their riders, two teenage boys, were sitting on logs beside the horses...both texting on their mobile phones..:)! A priceless representation of a culture in transition from the old to the new.
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| One of the scary bridges |
At one point the road turned into a brand new highway, flat, paved complete with reflectors. Spurred on by this luxurious road we were speeding along when suddenly we were confronted with a road construction site, a bridge that didn’t look passable and no signs to be found. We thought we had both fallen asleep and taken a wrong turn! It turned out to be a break in the highway and yes we were meant to cross that bridge (now that we had come to it..sorry, had to be done!) It was actually the first of 3 seemingly impassable bridges that we crossed that night. We got a photo of one on the way back which I have included here.
Thankfully the right person out of the two of us was behind the wheel. His driving was outstanding and it almost became kinda fun (for me anyway)...which of course I was only brave enough to admit to him when we had arrived safe and sound without blowing out a tire or breaking an axle (trucks have axles, right?). In total I think the trip took 7 hours rather than 5 and we arrived tired and hungry. Happy to say though we still had our sense of humour and the friendship was still intact!
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