Day 9 Wednesday 3rd October: a short hop back to San Jose

John writes: today was to be easy – morning budget review, a last shot of Caribbean sunshine before escaping our dump and a short hop to San Jose.

We started well with good news – despite the cost of red wine, we are $19 under budget after 8 days!! Chris then armed himself with pictures for his Booking.com liquidation proposal and we headed off at 1pm sharp to take lunch on the way.

No demonstrations this time in Limon but plenty of shacks in this run down Caribbean town.

Just outside we passed Liverpool (true!!) with it’s Midnight Express style prison, the many container terminals and truck after truck after truck.

Made great progress for the first 50kms through miles of banana and pineapple plantations and given this, kept going in preference to lunch. Then we stopped. Tried a detour but to no avail so sat for an hour admiring locals’ attempts at short cuts! And regretted no lunch or emergency provisions in the car (apart from a bottle of red which we didn’t touch!) so lesson learnt. Eventually we started moving slowly and were waved around a broken down truck 1km ahead. A simple thing caused mayhem and traffic was backed up for 10kms as we continued slowly. We were lucky!

Climbed to over 5000 feet with busy, twisty  roads, aggressive truck drivers

and through the cloud

before descending into the San Jose rush hour for a crawl to Avis. It took almost 5 hours at an average speed of 22 mph. Well done to driver Mike who earned his presidential suite tonight even if his bed is 4 times the size of mine!!

To cap it all Booking.com’s airport hotel is actually downtown but Uber saved the day for another crawl through rush hour for a well deserved beer, glass of red and a combined lunch/dinner.

Tomorrow it’s up early for our flight to Guatemala and some 5 star treatment at Frankie Carlow’s house in Antigua.