San Vito

The drive through the mountains was beautiful, if hairy. The roads swoop and swirl up and around, and the trucks come at you with a force that parallels that of a major highway. On the way down to Neilly, close to the Panama border, part of the road had been washed out on a big hairpin turn, and the cars were backed up to wait for a huge bus to try to navigate the rubble and dirt and get up the hill. Of course, the whole time I am driving, as you can see, I am trying to take photographs, so if these are not the most evocative, forgive me. Solo road trips are just like this, and my fellow Costa Rican was too busy to join me...

On the way through the mountains I stopped and had lunch in San Isidro where I photographed these stained glass windows in the enormous church that lorded over the center of town; I thought the abstraction of the windows bizarre enough to share. Maybe they aren't even stained glass, but the colors were peculiar and the images were disjointed. I couldn't get much closer because there were several pew-seated men looking somber and reverent.

The town of San Vito was begun in the 1950s by an Italian man from Rome, and although my Lonely Planet said the people spoke Italian, I heard none and learned that they are in the process of changing the high school to a bilingual Spanish-Italian school to maintain some of the culture. This is a photo of the municipal hall, which had a quirky architecture and hence worthy of a photo. The town itself was full up with a conference of coffee growers, so I had to stay in a truck stop named Hotel Pittier, which was certainly clean, but when one of the trucks revved its engine until 9:30, I got up out of bed, trotted down the hill to the owner's house and requested that they do something, a difficult task when the truck was a refrigerator truck and turning off the engine meant losing the cargo! However, I thought it reasonable so that I didn't die of asphysiation.

There WAS a fantastic pizzeria, which was the original restaurant in town, and according to a 90 year old former NY actor, "really, the only restaurant in town." I ate spaghetti with squid, and the inky sauce was comparable to that I remember in southern Italy itself! Mangia, mangia!

The next day I drove on along the precarious mountain road to the San Cruces Botanical Garden, set up also in the 50s by the Wilsons. It now houses the Organization of Tropical Culture, and the gardens are magical. I seemed to walk on endless trails for 2 hours, but had to buy a book at the end so that I could remember what I'd seen and learned.

There were small Agoutis snarffling around all over the place, snatching fruits from under trees and scrambling off to eat them, all looking as though they needed diaper changing - or at least tails. There were sections of palms, ginger plants, orchids, azaleas, and other more obscure plants. Here I show only the surface of the experience:

After I left, having "supported" the institution by buying T-shirts for grandpeople, I drove down to Neilly, a rather non-descript town on the Pan American Highway. Looking for a place to eat some lunch became cumbersome because, as you remember, I was also taking window photos as I drove, but once I got on I-34, heading up to Jaco, I was on more familiar territory; right before the turn off to the Osa Peninsula and the bridge, there was a Soda Naomy. It was crowded with trucks and men, AND my mother's name was Naomi, so I was sure it was all meant to be. I walked in, looked for a menu, and the men all pointed to the kitchen, where I found an over-heated bustle of grandma and daughter. The grandson was playing with 2 broken trucks on the floor and lugging a big bottle of Coke; his teeth, I might add, were still baby teeth, but rotten so profoundly that half the two front ones had been eroded away, just the way the commercials used to show... I had gallo pinto and two eggs; she threw in some fried plantains as well, and I just KNEW the whole thing had been cooked in that same vat with all the bacon, meat and other manly things that were being consumed around me.

I drove hard to get home to my familiar surroundings and down to sea level where I feel most comfortable. The sun was warm, the clouds told of rain in the evening, and I even had some edible leftovers in the fridge.