San Jose (Costa Rica)
22 January – 24 January 2017
Exiting the terminal in San Jose I desperately wanted to ask someone, ‘Sabes
como llegar a San Jose’, which is
roughly translates to asking someone whether they know the way to San Jose. Our opportunity did come soon enough when we really did need to find the local bus that went downtown. The meaning, or rather the relation of the question probably would have been lost on them in the sense that the song, ‘Do you know the way to San Jose’, was
about busting out of Los Angeles rather than trying to find your way out of a Costa Rican airport.
This will take you to San Jose - the bus driver must know the way, right?
San Jose - Costa Rica
Staying the course with our budget
busting holiday we jumped a public bus from the airport and made the assumption that whichever one we took it was eventually tracking to city centre, which in fact it was, just that we exited a couple of
kilometres too early subjecting us to an extended walk across town in order to
get to our hostel.
Down town San Jose - Costa Rica
San Jose - Costa Rica
San Jose - Costa Rica
San Jose - Costa Rica
In all honesty we found San Jose
to be unremarkable. Fairly ordinary concrete structures, honking traffic,
nothing outstanding nor noteworthy. San Jose, aka, ‘Chepe’ is not
even a vanilla capital, it’s the
lighter side of beige. The only place where we found some respite from the run of the mill was within Barrio
Escalante, an area known as the gastronomic centre of town. At least here you
could wonder in and out of several fairly cool establishments without
journeying too far and without acquiring that innate level of boredom where you
look at a city and just think, ‘so what’.
Some of the coolest looking cash around - Costa Rican colon
Down town San Jose - Costa Rica
Cars side by side with good 'ole fashioned rail - San Jose - Costa Rica
Unfortunate as it is, San Jose is
the capital of the mediocre but far from being representative of the entire
country - thank goodness for that. I understand that like many places, digging deeper, getting to know the people, making real connections would probably light the way to fascination but that's the oeuvre of modern day travel. It's identification by Instagram, your bite sized one stop shop of satisfaction that necessitates a highlight for both validity and depth. San Jose, we just didn't have the time for you. Apologies on our part, but really, you need to get yourself some game!
