Flashback, Uspallata Argentina

You might think getting stuck in Liberia because of a combination of Tropical Storm Alma and Nicaraguan Mother's Day is a one-in-a-lifetime occurrence. But no. There was another time when we were stymied by an unlikely confluence of two entirely unrelated events.

It was January 2006, and we were heading out of Argentina's Mendoza wine region to Santiago, Chile, a trip that took us over the mighty Andes. The halfway point was the town of Uspallata, at the foot of Cerro Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. The guidebook warned us that accommodations could become scarce during the climbing season, which it was. So we called a hotel while still in Mendoza and told them we'd be arriving at eight. No problem, they said.

Except that by the time we arrived in Uspallata at seven, our hotel had already given our room to someone else. Our disbelief quickly approached panic. We knocked on the doors of every other hotel on the town's one street, and found nothing available.

It was getting dark, the wind was picking up, and visions of sleeping on a sidewalk were dancing in our heads. To give you an idea of what we were facing, Uspallata stood in for Tibet in the movie Seven Years in Tibet. It's a high-ish, cold-ish, desolate-ish, don't-want-to-sleep-on-the-ground-under-any-circumstances-ish kind of place.

By this time, we had figured out what was wrong. Not only was it climbing season, but we had also arrived just before a massive festival celebrating a particular kind of Argentine folk music. Uspallata was bursting at the seams with intrepid, sunburned mountaineers and thousands of people who had come from all over the world (see below) to listen to Pablo Somebody-or-other strum his ukulele.

Argentina, by the way, is a sophisticated country filled with open air cafes and tango music. I'd never suspected it of harboring folk music, let alone some vibrant folk festival popular with the bead-wearing hordes.

Eventually, we poured out our sorrows to a bus station attendant, who directed us to a family that offered 4-wheel drive tours of the mountain. They called every hotel in the area. Luckily, a youth hostel two kilometers outside of town had room, and they loaded us in their car and drove us there.

We found ourselves in a hostel filled with a curious mix of folk music aficionados and mountain climbers. And no food. Not a scrap of bread or even a candy machine, which will always do in a pinch. Luckily we had two bottles of wine leftover from Mendoza, and immediately came to the same conclusion: That would be dinner.

We went outside, sat on stumps, and began to plow violently through the Malbec. By and by, the hotel owner came out and invited us to a bonfire, where he gathered his guests and handed around bottles of homemade hooch. We were an unlikely group of friends: grim mountain climbers, bizarre international folk music fanatics, and us. The climbers were a particularly subhuman lot. It apparently takes all of your mental and physical resources to get up 20,000 foot peaks, because unless you wanted to talk about the finer points of pitons, cutoffs, rappelling harnesses, alternative routes, and oxygen tanks, their store of conversation ran dry fairly quickly.

The folk music fans were a different matter. The most memorable among them was a tall, blond 23 year old from the Netherlands, who had—in only two weeks in Argentina—already pushed through an intensive Spanish class and managed to shack up with a good-looking Argentine bravo who spoke no English. Since she spoke no Spanish, for a moment, I wondered what they talked about. Then I realized they were probably just bouncing the hammock every spare moment they had. Besides if the male half of the equation actually understood what was coming out of her mouth, it would have been all the worse for him.

We spent a merry hour listening to her babble on about the music of the great Pablo (god knows where she discovered it) and how she had come especially to see him. Then, we watched the Southern Cross rise, and turned in.

The next morning we woke up to bright sunlight, a hangover, and the strange sight of the Dutch woman following the hostel owner's pet goose around with a camera. Once we got to town, we learned that we wouldn't be able to get a bus to Santiago for two days. We also found that Uspallata was deserted. Even the small supermarket, which in no way adhered to its posted business hours, was shut (presumably to avoid the after-concert riots which are endemic to the folk music circuit). There was, however, a gas station with a small store. Over the course of the next two days we relied on its limited supplies for food.

Needless to say, we eventually did make it to Santiago. There, we went out and had a great pasta dinner kicked off by two pisco sours. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.

Patrimony National, Liberia, Costa Rica

Among the 20 or so things you're not supposed to miss in Costa Rica is the Calle Real in Liberia. It's supposedly the "best example of colonial architecture in the country."

So we pulled out our guidebooks and joined about ten puzzled tourists milling around with their guidebooks. We passed to and fro, up and down the Calle Real—which is a strip of ordinary bars, backpacker hotels, muffler shops, cheap eateries, and hardware stores.

What we didn't realize is that winning the prize for colonial architecture in Costa Rica is like winning the Puerto Rican All-Commonwealth ice hockey title. The Calle Real has perhaps two small buildings left over from colonial times, and they probably weren't very important then. Other than that, it's just a street.

Liberia is a nice town. It has a small plaza bedecked with flowers, a number of good but cheap eateries, and three bus stations (Costa Rican towns never have just one). But we're happy to be pressing on.

Hurricane Party: Liberia, Costa Rica

We were enjoying a morning coffee in the tropical storm, when someone asked if we spoke English. She was a small woman with a large chip on her shoulder. Had we been to the beach? she asked. Had we SEEN what was there? she asked. Her tone indicated that the beach was the place where Costa Ricans molested their children in public.

She had been to Central America several times, she said. She was a seasoned and patient traveler, she averred. She had been to Nicaragua (pronounced Nee-haar-A-wah) and Panama (pah-na-MAH), and had never ever turned her back on a place before. But she had gone to Playa Flamingo (PLY-zhha, Fla-MEEN-goh), a tony resort, and had been appalled. It was unspeakably bad.

"What was wrong?" we asked.

"It was soooo touristy," said this tourist, "I just don't go for that kind of thing." She searched for the best way to illustrate her disgust. "They had a Pizza Hut," she said.

We nodded in deep sympathy (even though we'd just knocked back a personal pan pizza apiece at the airport in Dallas).

She asked us if we knew if other beaches in Costa Rica were like that. Without waiting for an answer, she continued on. She and her husband loved to travel. She was very fond of Nee-haar-A-wah, where things were not like they were in Khost-ah REE-kah. Of course, the beaches there weren't so nice, and the policemen carried machine guns and picked up spare change by robbing tourists, but at least she didn't have to share air with Pizza Hut employees.

After having gotten that off her chest, she pushed off to her room. I felt a little bad. Costa Ricans are a sensible folk who abolished their army 60 years ago and have, as a result, never had a civil war since. They have managed to build up a stable tourist industry, a large number of coffee plantations, and a safe, stable society.

Of course, for the people most inclined to take the side of the oppressed underclass that makes Costa Rica a place to avoid.

The Perfect Storm: Liberia, Costa Rica

The next morning, we trotted a kilometer up the PanAmerica to the center of town. Once there, we learned there were no bus tickets to Nicaragua. Sunday is Nicaraguan Mother's Day. Since half of Nicaragua's men seem to work in Costa Rica and all of them apparently love mama, there were huge lines at every bus stop.

"We have no tickets until Saturday," we heard everywhere.

At our hotel, we managed to hire a car to the border at a perfectly larcenous rate, but it soon got worse. It started raining. Hard and steady. It continued to rain all day and into the night.

By morning, parts of the hotel were ankle deep in water. On the TV, we learned that an extremely rare—once in 100 years—early season Pacific tropical storm, Alma, was laying off the coast pouring rain onto the country. Soon rivers had broken through levies, and whole towns were under water. In San Jose, there was an frightful bloodbath on the highways (Costa Ricans are horrific drivers.)

Somehow, the idea of standing for hours at the border during a tropical storm, along with the entire mother-mad nation of Nicaragua, was too much. We canceled our car and spent the day watching the news.

There were the usual images you see of people paddling boats down streets of submerged houses, dogs stranded on rooftops, hundreds of wet, miserable people being handed out sandwiches in school gymnasiums. Then, there were the bland public officials assuring everyone that due to special measures taken since the last round of heavy rains, everything would be different this time. Don't worry! Teams are in place! Help has been dispatched to all affected areas! We have called up the special reserve units (whatever it is they do)! Cooperation at national and regional levels has been extraordinary! Everyone is working very hard (with the exception, perhaps, of the bland public official, who is doing nothing)!

Then the news cuts to the Man Who Has Lost Everything. He is standing in a T-shirt and shorts with rain pouring down his face, while Jose, a reporter in a sparkling new poncho and freshly oiled hair, draws near.

"What happened?" asks Jose.

"I lost everything," says the man. He begins to explain how his whole house was inundated by the flood and what little possessions he had were swept away. But suddenly there's an interruption!

Why it's the news anchor, and he has something very important to say. "Jose," he says, "That is a very sad story, and we hope everyone prays for him. But right now we have to go to some amazing footage of a man rescuing a dog from a tree."

And so it went.

The pictures here are from our last watery debacle, when we were in Chiang Mai, Thailand and it rained for about a week. The river that runs through town jumped its banks leaving the entire city in knee deep water.

A truckstop café in Liberia, Costa Rica

We woke up expecting a comfortable van ride north, followed by a taxi ride to our decent hotel. But we had traveled long and hard and slept late. Our breakfast, taken in the courtyard of our old hotel, was some deliciously ripe fruit and rich, smooth Costa Rican coffee. But at the desk the clerk told us that all of the regular minivans had already departed.

Costa Ricans are accommodating folks—probably have seen too many pushy tourists. So she went into a long account of the amazingly expensive options available, including limousine service. We must have looked distressed, and so said, "Or you know, you could take a public bus. That's what I'd recommend."

We took a taxi through the dreary, wet streets and found a shelter of a bus station: concrete blocks and corrugated tin roof. Tickets were a snap and cheap. We listened to the rain drum on the roof of the bus station, staring at a sign that said "Absolutely no farm animals allowed on the bus." In one corner there were six dirty men throwing dice, arguing, drinking; in another a café serving up piles of rice and beans. And the assorted panhandlers of the area who took our worldly wealth a quarter at a time.

A half hour later, and we and twenty Costa Ricans were on a bus, with the air blowing through our hair. We sputtered through a tropical mountain range, ringed by emerald green grass and fields of banana trees and lumpy white cows.

Our goal was Liberia, a transit town consisting of a small grid of muddy streets, a few supermarkets, three bus stops and a dozen hotels. The PanAmerican Highway, which runs through its heart, makes it loud, but otherwise it's pleasant. After getting to our hotel, we walked out to the nearest restaurant, which happened to be in a truckstop. We ordered plates of meat and rice and beans—Costa Rican food is underrated—and set to with gusto.

San Jose, Costa Rica

About the charmless capital of Costa Rica, the less said the better. But that's not much fun. Though San Jose sits in a lush little valley, it is loud, ramshackle, filled with barred windows, corrugated tin roofs, broken sidewalks, huge storm drains, and people standing in doorways looking at you like they would like nothing better than to see you fried in lard, and they wouldn't even like that very much.

Our stay was a brief layover, made somewhat interesting by the fact that our good hotel was in a bad place. We know it was a bad place because it was filled with tire repair shops and patrolled by San Jose's finest streetwalkers. Well, maybe they weren't the finest. They all looked as if they had been stamped out of the same mold at the local hooker factory: giant fake boobs stuffed into leather bras one size too small. They stared at every passerby as if they were utterly bored and murderously inclined. They seemed underemployed too. (Surprise.)

But our hotel, the Britannia, was a lovely old thing, all courtyards, lush plants, and crown moldings. We arrived late and after a quick dinner of crackers and cheese, and a few swigs from our flask, we settled in for a long summer's nap.

La Proxima Parada: San Jose, Costa Rica

Will it qualify as a real tripp? Hard to say, because we are in a state of exhaustion thanks to a four month home renovation. We've chosen to travel all the way to Costa Rica to explore its unique culture, sample its exotic cuisine, hike through stunning cloud forests, scale majestic volcanoes--who are we kidding? We're beat. Say hello to white sand beaches, all inclusive resorts, gallons of Coppertone, and swim-up bars. Viva la Cuba Libre (not the country, the drink).

That said, we may recover in time to take a shot at Nicaragua. Posts start day after tomorrow. We miss traveling.