Molasses Covered Honeymoon - Day Seven

The seventh day of the molasses covered honeymoon was check out day at the Villa Alegre Bed & Breakfast. We were served a delicious quiche in the morning by Barry the owner/concierge/chef. Afterwards, we returned to our room to pack our bags. As I was packing I was hit with a sudden and powerful queasiness. Something in that quiche did not agree with me. I was able to pack up, but it was very fortunate that I was packing within ten feet of my own private commode.

As I packed and periodically purged my quiche, I also began to feel a strong sense of foreboding. We were scheduled to fly back to San Jose that afternoon and I was not sure I’d be able to withstand a potentially turbulent ride on a small airplane.

When we finished packing, our new friends from New York offered to take us to the Tamarindo Airport. They had a rental car and were headed that direction anyway. Olivia hopped in the car and I very gingerly situated myself into the seat next to her.

As we were driving to the airport, a policeman pulled us over. Apparently, we were driving in a car with no identification. When asked by the policeman why we were driving in a car with no identification, the dad casually opened the glove box and pulled out a temporary license plate. He told the policeman that he forgot to put the license plate on the vehicle. He sort of chuckled and tossed the license plate on the dash. The policeman glared at him for a second and then told us to move along.

As we pulled away, the dad told us that he was sorry to cause us any alarm, but he wanted to see what kind of law enforcement he was dealing with in Tamarindo. He had been driving that vehicle around town all week with no identification just to see what would happen. Strange guy. Pretty interesting though. We enjoyed his company immensely.

When we arrived at the Tamarindo Airport, we said our goodbyes to the New York crew. We sat down on a bench in the terminal, which was essentially a half covered barn with a concrete floor, a restroom, and a snack bar. The half open barn was probably a nice place to hang out most days, but this particular day was sweltering. Or my insides were sweltering, so it was more on the miserable side.

In one corner was an old television with rabbit ears. Old plastic chairs were casually placed around the television and a young couple was sitting there watching some sort of soccer match. The display we grainy and it made me even more queasy to try to follow the action. So I sat down on that hard bench and gazed into the barren airfield in front of me.

We ordered a couple bottles of water and I remembered that I had a roll of Tums stashed away in my bag. I greedily chewed up half the roll while we waited for our plane to arrive. By the time it did arrive, I was feeling a little more steady, but was far from any sense of relief.

We selected seats in the first row behind the pilots and I braced myself for lift off. As we sped off down the runway I basically held my breath and hunched over in the seat in an attempt to fortify myself from any jarring bumps that might cause me to lose any last remaining bits of my breakfast.

But the liftoff was remarkably smooth and our ascent toward the sky was steady as she goes. As we approached our cruising altitude, I felt well enough to look out our windows and enjoy the landscape below.

We sat next to a guy that looked to be in his mid-twenties. He had carried his surfboard onto the plane so Olivia asked him how he enjoyed the break at Tamarindo. He said it was one of his favorites, so she asked him where else he has been surfing. He said that he lived near Ventura Beach in California and he had been doing odd jobs his whole life to pay for surfing excursions up and down the Pacific Coast. He said he had been to too many places to count. He did try to list some for us; there were a few in Mexico, a couple more in Nicaragua, and several more in Costa Rica. He said Tamarindo was so great his first time that he had come back a second time. Olivia informed him that we had taken surf lessons in Tamarindo and that we were now, in fact, surfers as well. I nodded in agreement and added that I also rented a thirty foot longboard for an afternoon and enjoyed an epic set of gnarly chowder. The young man stared back at me for a second and then pretended to look for something in his bag.

When we touched down in San Jose and the hatch was opened, the cool mountain air wafted in, and that first wave was like a shot of adrenaline. That fresh, cool mountain air immediately eliminated any last remnants of nausea in my system. I felt like a completely different person. I felt alive. And I felt ravenous.

We took a cab back to the same Intercontinental Hotel that we stayed at when we first arrived in San Jose. We checked into a new room, dropped our bags, and went directly to the lobby restaurant for a late lunch. Olivia ordered a shrimp salad and I ordered a massive Philly cheese steak sandwich and inhaled it in three bites. It was shocking and a bit disturbing how quickly my system recovered from the poisoned quiche. I devoured the Philly cheese steak like a tornado eating into a trailer park.

After our late lunch we caught a cab to downtown San Jose. Our guide book said that one of the best things to do in San Jose is spend an afternoon at the Central Market, le Mercado Central. The guide book informed us that le Mercado Central was a melting pot of stalls along narrow passages packed with spices, fish, fruit, flowers, pets, wood crafts, leather crafts, and cheap food carts. More importantly, the guide book also noted that this was a place that the average Costa Rican went to shop. We thought this would be a good place to get some authentic souvenirs for our family.

When we arrived we were slightly confounded to realize that le Mercado Central was inside an old three-story office building. I was prepared for narrow passages underneath a tent or some other shade structure, but the narrow passages in an old rundown building was a very different experience. As soon as we walked in, a wave of claustrophobia settled over me. There was hardly enough room for us to walk side-by-side down the narrow passages. The stalls were right on top of us. The passages were short, too. We were constantly turning left then right. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately.

We wandered down a couple of passages trying to focus on the goods. The leather and wood crafts looked interesting from afar, but it was all so similar that it was too overwhelming to digest. Most stalls seemed to be filled with cheap trinkets for tourists.

We were not wandering long before we ended up in the fish section. The smell of raw fish sort of snuck up on me. I found myself standing five feet from a well-organized stack of dead fish before I actually smelled it. But once I did smell it, it was time to go for me. I looked at Olivia and she had a look on her face that suggested the same kind of subtle repulsion that I was experiencing. I started to ask her if she’d like to move on, but before I could finish the question she informed me that she would very much like to get the hell out of there.

We found the nearest exit and hustled through it. We made no souvenir purchases at le Mercado Central.

In order to salvage the trip to downtown, we tried to spend a little time sightseeing. We used our guide book to find some other interesting destinations. We walked around the outside a couple of museums, but it was too late in the day to go inside. We found the National Theatre, le Teatro Nacional, and spent some time walking around the exterior and snapping photos. It was a beautiful neo-classical building that was built in the 1890’s. It was designed by Belgian architects, and apparently had to be fixed by Italian engineers.

When we grew tired of sightseeing, we hailed a cab and headed back to our luxury hotel. We ate a light dinner of free appetizers in the hotel club (reserved for guests staying in the high roller suites). We felt right at home, being that we are high rollers too. When we finished mingling with the other elite folks in the club – that is, we basically stared at them from afar -- we adjourned to our suite and called it a day.