by Randy Denmon
Hired by the Costa Rican government in 1871 to help transport the country’s valuable coffee, Mr. Keith, then famous for pushing rails through the daunting Andes, almost carved the country out of the jungle, a western version of Cecil Rhodes and his founding of South Africa and Zimbabwe with the aid of diamonds.
The thick forest and terrible climate proved much tougher than the steep South American slopes. The first twenty miles of rail claimed Keith’s three brothers and four thousand other men. The endeavor almost bankrupted the country, and the Costa Ricans ceded the railroad and 5 percent of the country to Keith if he would finish the job.
Keith did eventually finish the railroad in 1890. It is claimed that several of the bridges on the route were so frightening that on the train’s maiden trip, the engineer refused to cross them. Daring the engineer, Keith raised an American flag and crawled onto the engine’s front grill.
Keith went on to establish the banana industry in Costa Rica. A merger with his banana interest formed the United Fruit Company, and he was the first vice-president. Considering how many Americans visit Costa Rica every year, I’m amazed that so few people know this story. Though out of print, a great book about Keith and these wild and woolly days, Keith and Costa Rica by Watt Stewart, was first published in 1964. Filled with scheming, shames, and kickbacks, it should be made into a movie.
The sun barely hanging over the Pacific, we passed by the Carara Biological Reserve, a bird-watchers’ paradise—to my eyes just another thick wall of canopy. I’ve never been much of a bird-watcher. I could probably be coaxed into a lazy afternoon of bird-watching with Julia Roberts, but not Dean Lewis.
We needed to scoot on. Now at a latitude of less than 10 degrees, twilight shrunk by almost thirty minutes. Darkness approached with less warning.
We drove through Tarcoles and over the river by the same name. The tourists lined the bridge to look out at the huge crocodiles sunning on the banks. We saw one big, fat reptile, but this was not really a sight for me. In the last nine months alone, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has been out twice to my neighborhood to kill the nuisances, alligators, less than two hundred yards from my front door. Louisiana may be more of a virgin wilderness than some of the tourist spots here.
Gringo to the Rescue
The surfers’ paradise of Jaco looked as if it had been slapped together on a whim. Shabby shops sat beside high-rise hotels. Neon lights wedged between hammocks. I whiffed the salty air and background stench. The European and Ivy League versions of Southern gals paraded along Jaco’s main strip, the Avenida Pastor Díaz. They looked as if they’d just gotten off the beach in Padre Island or Gulf Shores, many sporting my favorite outfit, short cut-offs and a tight T-shirt.
Of late, drug dealers arrived here, and we were soon pulled over. The friendly cops quickly realized that if we needed detainment, it was in a nuthouse instead of the local pokey.
I hadn’t researched any hotels for Jaco. Our travels had devolved to the more regal, golden era of centuries past, a time not just before the internet, but before guidebooks, when travelers simply showed up somewhere and looked for a place to stay.
After several stops, we found no place to charge. We pulled over near the police checkpoint and took off in two directions on foot. I flipped through Lonely Planet and asked the police about several hotels. Not finding anything, we drove on to the edge of town, where we found a small hotel with five or six nice rooms. The owner, an elderly Tico named Antonio, sat out front in a lawn chair. We looked at a room with a 240-volt air conditioner and explained our situation.
“Sí,” the old, sun-bleached man said.
I popped the hood. When he saw the big wires, ol’ Antonio got confused and started marching around, mumbling.
I pulled out a thick wad of dollars, flipping through them liberally. Ol’ Antonio paced some more, studied the wires, and murmured some garbled Spanish. Five more minutes of dealing transpired with electricity still in doubt.
“We ain’t got time for this shit,” Dean said. “Let’s go. The old man can’t make up his mind.”
We checked another hotel, owned by a European, but it was full, and two or three more, including the Best Western. My three principles: persistence, doom, and tips paid no dividends.
My emotional rocker reclined to desperation and despair. I wondered if I might find some Prozac locally to add to my pillbox. Peanut M&Ms from the console would have to suffice.
Twilight encasing the town, the car down to thirty miles of battery, we pulled into Morgan’s Cove, part casino, part ranch-style beach resort.
I explained our situation to the hotel staff, showing off the car. The hotel’s air conditioning was directly wired, but the young woman behind the counter buzzed the manager. As I waited outside, a taxi delivered an American couple to the hotel. The bellboy earned his tip, unloading six big bags. Were they moving here? Damn, we gringos have a lot that we think we can’t live without.
In a few minutes, the manager appeared out of the night, a big, thick, white guy, late thirties, with a Midwestern accent. Joey Teja hailed from Michigan. Small planet.
He took us to the hotel’s laundry room. It had a 240-volt socket, standard NEMA 6-20 that I had a plug for. The voltmeter read no power. We flipped a switch. I removed the socket cover, wiggled a few wires, still no power.
We next entered the hotel’s shop, a wooden structure next door, but found no socket. We did find a breaker box with two red leads, 240 volts, terminating into dead-end bolts.
Joey pointed. “There’s your 240 volts.”
I quickly checked the leads. Hot and 240.
I studied the box from several angles. In Managua, I had watched the hotel electrician wire us up. Now, it was my turn.
I turned to Joey. “Can we cut the power in here?”
Joey turned to the two Costa Rican maintenance men, eyeing the proceedings with interest. He spouted some Spanish.
One of the Ticos disappeared and in a few seconds the lights went out.
I went to the car and got my flashlight, toolbox, and plug bag. With the flashlight, I checked the power. Off. Good.
Then I rigged up the same plug we’d used in Managua and wired it in. It was a little disorienting about which of the two grounds to choose. I guessed, and nodded to the Tico to turn on the power. We all stepped back. The lights came on. Nothing exploded. But I couldn’t get the meter to read 240 volts.
The next hour passed, my body perspiring heavily in the muggy air, the light in the shop constantly going off and on as I wired and re-wired, seven or eight different combinations, swapping grounds and plugs, trying to find the right configuration.
My blood pressure skyrocketed, cigarettes were consumed rapidly as the room’s lights went on and off, the Ticos mumbling to themselves, everybody wincing at the moment of truth when we flipped the switch back on. I didn’t know whether to chuckle or cry at the unfolding farce. Dean shot several good videos of this that later turned into internet sensations, but eventually, around eight, after more than an hour of trial and error wiring, we got a green positive from the Tesla’s adapter.
As Dean went to get the car, I stepped out of the shack, the ocean breeze against my sweaty body refreshing. I wiped my forehead and turned up a bottle of water, gulping down the refreshing liquid. Overhead, the big palms swayed. The stars twinkled. To my right, the tourists hanging around the beach laughed as they enjoyed their typical two-week vacation.
After Dean drove over the back lawn to the shop, we set the charging rate to 18 amps and would be fully charged by ten o’clock the next morning. It had been a long, twelve-hour day, and I hadn’t even checked in or unpacked, but we’d gone 261 miles, our best day yet.
Thirty minutes later, confident the car was charging, I took a cab to the strip. Jaco was warming up for the night, the swanky bars beginning to fill. Would I ever have loved to roll into one of the social establishments, drop my credit card, down a bottle of rum, and display my Southern charm that
had helped get us this far in an attempt to persuade the blue-eyed foreigners to show me their tans up close. But we had a car charging, and I needed supplies and food.
Ducking into a supermarket to buy some water and other essentials, my hair flowed as freely as some of the mellowed-out beach bums. In the rush before departure from the United States, trimming the mop had not been a priority. (I cut my own hair and have for more than a decade.) I didn’t have enough money in all my accounts, including retirement, to sway Dean to put scissors to it. Worse, I had run out of hair gel, and with the long days and the open windows, I was starting to look like Shaggy.
I bought some Costa Rican hair product and four bottles of water for ten American dollars, then stepped out of the grocery to solve my other problem. Next door was a Costa Rican pizza house, the enticing smell lingering in my nose. I pulled out my wallet and confidently strolled into the pizza house for the local special.
Touch and Go
I was up early the next morning, five-ish, the night’s sleep spotty at best. Three times during the night, I got up to check on the car. Then, with Dean still snoring, I grabbed my laptop. EV World ran the story and posted the podcast of our interview. I didn’t bother to read the details, but noticed that, in less than a day, the story had been viewed well over a thousand times and had quite a few positive comments. Somebody in the developed world cared about us after all.
Not having time to gloat, I pulled up Google Maps to figure out where we were headed. I did a quick general search of driving in Costa Rica. Rough Guides travel books said:
Ticos frequently risk life and limb passing large trucks on blind curves, but don’t be tempted to follow suit—Costa Rica has one of the world’s highest road-accident rates.
This was not news. I turned to the bigger problem. We had one last physical obstacle to surmount, the vast, sparsely populated jungle of southern Costa Rica and northern Panama. Though I’d never been to either of these areas, I had heard about the huge, largely empty tropical forest. Adding to my anxiety, I had asked Joey the night before if he knew somewhere to the south where we might get a charge.
His response had been terse and poignant. “There’s not much south of Quepos, but the coast road is good, at least in Costa Rica.”
Reviewing the maps, trying to gauge the sizes of the towns represented by dots on the map, I found little solace. The guidebook only mentioned five towns in the area with scant recommendations for lodging. I googled “population density North America map.” Reviewing one of the maps that popped up, I squinted to study the varying shades of blue. Only the Chihuahua Desert was less populated than the next few hundred miles, and only slightly, but the jungle to the south of us was bigger, at least the portion we had to cross. It would require three days and two charges instead of the two days and one charge we used to cross the Chihuahua Desert.
I settled on David, Panama, as the day’s objective, the biggest town in the entire stretch. With about one hundred thousand people, it was 195 miles away. South of David, the guidebook mentioned nothing for 250 more miles.
Dean stirred in bed, stretching his arms, yawning, and looking at me as the morning sun filtered into the room.
I said, “Looks pretty vacant where we’re headed. Getting a charge may be touch and go.”
Dean rolled back over on his side, turning away from me and the rude sun. “If you haven’t noticed, this is touch and go every day!”
I got breakfast and ambled down to the beach. Not much, only a slice of brown, grimy sand. At eight, I made a call to a shipping agent in Panama City. There, the Pan American Highway—and all roads—end at the Darien Gap, a ninety-mile-wide belt of impenetrable jungle and lowland delta. The road picks back up in Colombia on the southern side.
Before the trip I’d done a little research into shipping the car onto Colombia or home from Panama without expending a lot of time or energy, the endeavor too premature. Who knew if and when we’d make it there, or where me might need shipping services? My limited research had told me that shipping the car out of Panama to anywhere would be a time-consuming, bureaucratic nightmare. In any case, we needed a shipper no matter when, where, or if.
I did have a phone number, the local affiliate of the American international shipping company Expeditors. Dean had a friend who worked for the company in Seattle. I quickly realized the shipping problem couldn’t be solved over the phone. The language barrier and the oddity of the car and the trip made it too difficult. The English-speaking woman on the end of the line inquired about all kinds of strange things. What was my address in Panama? What type of visa did I have? What was my visa number? Did I have the import paperwork? On what vessel did the car arrive in Panama? This was another obstacle only to be sorted out when we got to it. Like everything else on the trip, we’d figure it out when we got there, wherever there was.
By nine-thirty, we said goodbye to Joey and the great staff at Morgan’s Cove. On the way out of town, Dean wanted to stop at a store. Inside, I found four cans of smokeless tobacco, Skoal, some type of rare banana-flavored variety. I bought all four. If we got into another Costa Rican traffic mess, I could get my nicotine injection and keep both hands on the wheel, or better yet, triple up, cigarettes, Nicorette gum, and Skoal.
About forty miles south of Jaco, we passed through clean, cute, and laid-back Quepos, wedged snugly between green hills, its colorful two- and three-story hotels and restaurants sitting behind palms and English signs advertising first-world goods and services.
I knew of the town, though I’d never been there. One of the great fishing spots in the world for sailfish and marlin, catch-and-release only, strictly enforced, but also yellowfin tuna, roosterfish, mahimahi, and tarpon. There’s also great snorkeling over the coral reefs, rafting the raging Naranjo River, and the nearby popular Manuel Antonio National Park.
The jungle grew more lush and dense, receiving almost two hundred inches of rain a year. For comparison, Hawaii gets the most annual rainfall in the States, about eighty inches, followed by the Gulf Coast at sixty inches.
We drove through the dusty little town of Savegre and over the turbulent river of the same name, now placid in the dry season, but the banks of its deep gorge ripped bare of vegetation and displaying huge wedges of eroded soil that bore tribute to this restless, untamed terrain—when the air fills with energy, and the land and water come alive with the full force of nature.
“Fishing’s good here, too,” I said. “Freshwater trout. Did you read that weathered sign? Turn right. Organic campground. Whatever the hell that is.”
“A gypsy and free-thinkers’ nirvana.”
“I prefer the hippies that chill out and smoke pot to the in-your-face type.”
“Reckon it’s a good place to get laid if nothing else, especially in an electric car. Though I wouldn’t tell them you’re a Republican, fisherman, or that you were in the Army.”
“They don’t mind the fishing, as long as you only catch what you eat. That’s sustainability,” I laughed. “But they probably prefer the fish raw.”
“I think they eat a lot of berries.”
“Maybe it’s the new thing. That Costa Rican hair gel I bought was organic.”
The out-of-the-way surfing hole of Dominical came and went. Like Quepos, the little beach town appeared to be gearing up for bigger things, like vacant land just on the perimeter of American urban sprawl. Several of its dirt streets were being paved and two hotels were under construction. But this was the end of the gringo track. Few tourists ventured south of Dominical.
Off to our left, the wild Fila Costena Mountains, 5,000 feet high, their summits only fifteen miles away, butted up to the coast. Further afield were the Cordillera de Talamanca Mountains, fifteen miles farther and twice as tall. The mountains swept across the horizon, their jagged ridgelines the deepest green, without a manmade scar. Somewhere over there loomed Cerro Chirripó, one of the tallest mountains in Central America at 12,533 feet.
I felt terrific on the open road
, the traffic becoming sparse and heading off to the ends of the earth, the isolated scenery fitting. The entire state of Puntarenas, just a tad smaller than Connecticut, only has about four hundred thousand residents, and only about half of them live south of Jaco in the entire southwestern corner of the country. This is a solitary land, still ruled by a way of life not much different from a century ago. It’s what’s left of the Costa Rica before the arrival of urban gringos.
Under the soaring trees, we passed through several lazy villages, the side streets unpaved and ringed with simple buildings constructed of rough-cut timber that gave a sense to the wild, pristine setting. The road sliced near the coast. The green hills bumped into the blue sky. Timeless waves crashed into the brown beach. I felt the cheery sun and cool, salty wind on my face, tropical and relaxing.
Was this even reality, or one of those deep dreams we don’t know is a dream until we’re shaken back to consciousness? In the States, I never drive relaxed like this; I’m always more worried about how fast I can get there as opposed to whether I’ll get there. There was nothing to hurry for here.
What would I be doing at home right now if we weren’t rolling along in this otherworldly place? Rushing to a meeting? Worried that the battery on my overworked cell phone was too low to return a list of urgent calls and emails? Or banging on the steering wheel because somebody in front wouldn’t step on it and get out of the way? The trip had induced a magical state. Too old for college pranks, too young not to give a damn, this was spring break for forty-somethings.
Outside of Puerto Cortés, we bisected miles of banana and African palm groves introduced here a generation ago by United Fruit. The scheming white men from the north left their permanent mark on the land.
I knew a little about Cortés, professionally. The port city of five thousand on the banks of the Rio Terraba also called Rio Diquís, the latter meaning “big water,” was considering relocating to higher ground. The tropical storms belting the river and its steep, unique watershed in the nearby mountains produces some of the fastest rising and most tempestuous waters in the world, incessantly flooding the town.