This month Little Jack ("Juanito") heads south to Costa Rica. On my vacation there, I passed through two places that mean "corner" ("Rincon" and "Esquinas"), so I took this as a divine sign that a report was needed.
The trip Susan and I went on was sponsored by the Bicycle Adventure Club, which is not a commercial tour outfit, but a club whose members lead the trips. The trips almost always have a sag van and stay in generally nice places (i.e., no camping in mosquito laden swamps). The trip locations are in the US and Europe primarily. This trip seemed attractive since we've always wanted to go to Costa Rica, and it combined biking with other activities, keeping Susan happy.
I thought from the relatively low daily mileages that this would be a real easy trip, and I'd have to spend an inordinate portion of the day sampling various tropical drinks. But the combination of heat and rough roads made these modest mileages a good day's work. Not the place to do centuries.
I started out by breaking my glasses about two days before the trip. My first repair job was rather stylish, using scotch tape, which rapidly gave way to electrical tape, and finally duct tape. This kept them together most of the trip, until they finally came apart during a white water rafting trip, when the guide applied a fresh duct tape tourniquet in between rapids (I was impressed).
In my usual meticulous fashion, I made sure the bikes were in tip top shape for the trip. That is, I pumped up the tires.
The terrain turned out to be rougher than anything I've seen before. The roads that were paved sported giant potholes that put Cambridge to shame. Most of the back roads were a combination of large rocks, clay, loose gravel, peppered with an occasional stream crossing. Susan's Bridgestone performed like a champ, but it was in dire need of a headset adjustment at the end of the trip. I took the Proflex, which started out with a few minor problems that blossomed during the course of the trip. The rear brakes had more of a placebo effect than actually providing any stopping power. In fact, once applied, they stayed on in a state of rigor mortis. So I resolved not to use the rear ones at all, but chickened out on some of the steeper grades. The rear shocks seemed to deteriorate pretty much in tandem with the road surface. Towards the end of the ride the Proflex became a NoFlex, as the shocks bottomed out worse than my '60 Falcon.
Our trip circumnavigated the Osa Peninsula. This is a great area for wildlife. Poisonous snakes, poisonous frogs, poisonous ants, enough to make a city boy like me look around for the nearest cab. The climate is not gringo friendly, with sweltering humidity and lots of sun. At one point while riding I realized it was only 8:30 in the morning and it was already hotter and more humid than it ever gets in Boston. Spent a lot of time trying to avoid becoming "Gringo Frito" with massive quantities of sunblock. The heat and humidity was enough to steam stamps off envelopes, and it had a similarly deleterious effect on my handlebar tape. What started out as a small tear gradually unravelled about one turn a day. Even my old friend Duct Tape was of no avail creating a gooey mess that made my gloves (or bare hands) stick to the handlebars.
Fortunately, since there's a mountain range in the middle of the country, you could have just about any weather you wanted depending on how far you climbed. The The roads there are really steep. It makes Vermont look like Texas. I often found myself balancing precariously between the need to keep weight back for traction or forward to keep the front wheel on the ground. I had to walk on several occasions when I lost traction on the combination of steep grade and loose gravel.
On the last part of the trip, we left off the bikes and walked a mile down the beach to Corcovado Tent Camp, right in the middle of the rain forest. This is where I saw the real Macaw, the Scarlet Macaw, that is, which I'd been hearing about for days. This is the same place where we whiled away the time before breakfast watching a boa constrictor have his breakfast, a bat. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
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