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.

One Night in Bangkok

It's not entirely clear to me how Nicole discovers these things, but for the Macau-Hanoi leg, she unearthed a budget airline called Thai Air Asia. It was having a fare promotion that would bring us those 600 miles at a cost of less than a dinner and a movie in the States. But there was a catch. We had to book two flights, one to Bangkok, and another to Hanoi. That meant that between the two we would have to deplane, collect our luggage, go through immigration, check in again, go back through immigration, and get on another flight—all in two and a half hours.

Sitting in our cozy hotel room, snifters in hand, we came to the conclusion that it was doable. It might even be adventurous. The only downside was that if we missed the connecting plane, we would be stuck for a day or two in Bangkok. We love the city, though, and the prospect of green curry and mugs of Singha sounded just fine.

Of course, we were wrong. Getting stuck in Bangkok was not the only downside. There was also the possibility that we might get stuck in Macau. This unpleasant reality dawned on us as we sat in front of an empty gate at the Macau Airport, while the departure time for our flight passed. Not only was there no plane, there was no visible presence of Thai Air Asia. This had bad news emblazoned all over it. As a precaution, we immediately headed over to the duty-free shop and spent our last Hong Kong dollars on a two-pound Toblerone chocolate bar and a bottle of Macallan single malt scotch. It simply wouldn't do to be caught overnight in an airport without basic supplies.

About a half hour later, a young Chinese man with floppy hair—he looked like a high school freshman—walked up to the counter and commenced a boarding procedure that I'll charitably say was one of the most chaotic I've ever witnessed. Thai Air Asia does not have assigned seating, and, this being China, we had to all shove our way onto the plane like a herd of wildebeests on the annual lion-run across the Serengeti.

We arrived in Bangkok a half hour late. Thai immigration was agonizing. It's not normally so, but there was a religious convention of some kind going on that had attracted an enormous quantity of barefoot old men with Father Time beards. In our calculations, we had, somehow, omitted to account for this possibility. They were wandering through the immigration area, oblivious to the finer points of passports, customs, and, for that matter, lines. The Thai police soon rounded them all up, and we pushed through and gathered our luggage.

I love Thailand dearly, but it's not easy to navigate the 50 yards or so outside the arrival terminal at the Bangkok airport. Hoteliers and gypsy cab drivers block your path, grab at your suitcase, and understand the word "yes," but not "no." They're quite useful if you've come to the city with the intention of paying someone an absurd sum to drive you to an overpriced dump of a hotel, but that was not our intention.

Luckily, we guessed correctly that the departure gates were on the second floor. Working together, we quickly deduced the proper check-in counter, and managed to hit it exactly an hour before our plane departed. (In case you're wondering, that's about the bare minimum for ensuring your baggage makes it on an international flight).

With boarding passes that were printed on paper one grade above Kleenex, we sprinted off to immigration, where we received another shiny new stamp on our passports. At security, the Thai Home Guard inexplicably relieved Nicole of a jar of peanut butter, but allowed her to keep a —to my mind—far more dangerous bottle of Sriracha hot sauce. People of Thailand, your airport security men require more training, preferably in deductive reasoning.

Finally, we escaped, and made a final sprint to our plane to Vietnam. Total savings: about $600. Total stress: priceless.