Magic Turquoise Bus

After midnight my second evening in Costa Rica, my roommate, Monica (right), arrived. I was awoken by a knock about an hour after going to bed. It wasn't hard to wake up, since I hadn't been able to find the switch to turn off the overhead light.

I wiped the sand from my eyes and opened the door. A beautiful young woman walked in, trailed by a man with a large backpack. He dropped the pack heavily on her bed, and in my sleep-deprived condition I started to think I'd be spending my vacation with a couple. GAP had warned us singles could be rooming with members of the opposite sex. Great, I thought. Just what I need! But the man left, leaving Monica behind.

We talked for about an hour, and it turned out we were a great roommate match. Monica told me she's a biologist from Belgium, and she'd been stuck in Panama because of bad weather. She'd traveled through Miami and was very laid back about her whole situation, even though she would have had to take public buses on her own to Playa Matapalo had she not made it to our hotel that night. I looked at the clothes I had put on our nightstand, carefully folded in preparation for the morning--along with suntan lotion, bug spray and a first aid kit--and thought our different personalities would be a perfect fit.

In the morning, we got on the Magic Turquoise Bus and headed southwest to Playa Matapalo. The bus climbed up and down roads winding along the coast, passing families and dogs and oil palm plantations. Attached to the trees were large, lychee-like red fruit (thanks to ASD Costa Rica for the photo). Local people pick them on behalf of corporations, which convert the fruit to palm oil. Corina told us the oil is extremely high in cholesterol, so companies use it only for machinery and manufacturing--except for McDonald's. One of my fellow travelers asked whether palm oil could be used for biofuel; Corina said she'd never heard of Costa Ricans doing so, although according to the Web a market seems to exist for it.

We stopped in Quepos, about 25 kilometers from our destination. Quepos is a compact, busy city with a grocery store, restaurants, souvenir shops and outdoor stands selling colorful textiles and balloons in the shape of whales and crocodiles. I bought dried fruit at the grocery but skipped the bottled water, since Costa Rica has a clean and plentiful water supply.