We travel a lot — our careers demand it, our lifestyle facilitates it, and our wanderlust encourages it. Most of the time when we write about our travels, we focus on the highlights — the fun adventures we managed, the beautiful places we visited, the amazing birds we found and wildlife encounters we experienced. This, of course, is a conscious choice, driven as much by our yearning to share the adventures that define our lives as by our desire to shape the narrative of those experiences. When we look back on our photos and recount anecdotes from our travels, we focus on the positives: the amazing places we visited, rather than the logistical hurdles of getting there; the beautiful trails we hiked, rather than the screaming children we struggled to mollify and motivate just to set foot on those trails. Most of the time, things work out more or less according to plan, but not always. This is a story of a day during our recent travels with D's parents when things most certainly did not go according to plan.
It should be noted that things have gone completely off the rails during D's parents' visits before. When his parents visited D in Ecuador during his Peace Corps service, their trip coincided with countrywide political protests. D and his parents nearly got caught up in a violent confrontation in a remote Amazonian town between indigenous protestors and armed police and had to alter their itinerary on the fly. In Kenya, we similarly had to make last-second travel adjustments when a roadblock and angry protesters forced us to amend our safari plans. Nothing that dramatic happened last month in Costa Rica, but we did run into road closures again, which scrambled our carefully made plans.
The plan had been to break up the drive between the Monteverde cloud forest where we spent the first four nights of our trip and our subsequent stay at Flamingo beach in Guanacaste with a brief visit to Palo Verde National Park. Palo Verde's floodplain and marshes comprise one of Costa Rica's most important bird sanctuaries, so D in particular had been looking forward to this stop on our itinerary. When we checked the route our final evening in Monteverde, GoogleMaps showed a two-hour drive, but when we plugged in the coordinates into our GPS after check-out the following morning, the two-hour drive had morphed into a four-and-a-half-hour nightmare. A key bridge had been closed overnight for repairs, which forced us into a roundabout route that far from breaking up the drive would have taken us longer to navigate than driving straight to the Pacific coast.
We made a few calls, cancelled the Palo Verde reservation (which we had pre-paid in full) after securing a promise that we'd be able to transfer it with no penalty for another weekend, and headed straight to Flamingo beach after confirming that our AirBnB could accommodate us for an extra night. For a couple of hours, we felt pretty good about all these changes S had managed on the fly. Then, half an hour from our destination, we turned off the asphalt road onto a rough dirt track and, after a few minutes of jostling, came upon a wide, fast-moving river. After watching a couple of locals ford their way across in high-clearance vehicles, it became pretty clear that while our SUV might have managed the crossing, our sedan would not have (as we were six, we had caravanned in two cars). We should have known we'd be in trouble when the GPS directed us off the asphalt onto a road literally called "the Monkey Track," but there seemed to be no alternative route to Flamingo beach from the river shore where we were temporarily stranded.
Another sedan pulled up behind us and its driver reached a similar conclusion: crossing that river in a low-slung vehicle would be utter folly. We chatted with the other driver, flagged down a few locals, and eventually learned that a paid river crossing existed on private property nearby. An enterprising entrepreneur had stepped in where the authorities would not wade and erected a makeshift wooden bridge across the waterway in addition to clearing a roadway through the woods to connect the two shores of the Monkey Track. We happily paid our "toll" and completed the rest of the drive without incident, arriving at Flamingo beach as the sun began to set on a long and hectic day.
We had to wait for the property manager to dispatch someone to show us into the condo we had rented. It was only after we had parked outside the building that we realized why it had been so easy to adjust our AirBnB reservation for a beachfront condo during the peak of high season. The listing had mentioned construction of a new condo building across the marina, which was to wrap up before our check-in. That construction continued apace, but it was far from our greatest worry. The listing had failed to mention entirely that there would also be construction in the unit right above ours. "You'll hardly be able to hear the noise from inside the unit," the property agent assured us as we walked together into our condo to find the workers above pounding on our ceiling with sledgehammers and running an ear-splitting circular saw.
This was far from the idyllic beach vacation we had envisioned, but with darkness approaching there was not much we could do about it at that moment other than complain vociferously. There is a Russian adage that, when literally translated, says "the morning is wiser than the evening." We couldn't solve our problem after working hours, so we did the next best thing — head to the beach, drown our frustrations in fruity rum drinks while watching the sun set, and develop a plan of attack for the following morning. It took some additional effort — several rounds of phone calls to the property manager, videos of the noise emanating from upstairs, etc. — to arrive at a mutually agreeable resolution (partial refund and limited construction hours that would overlap with the times we were away at the beach).
We are firm believers that things tend to work out eventually, even if they don't work out exactly according to plan. Not everything came up roses, but when all is said and done, our memories of the four nights we spent at Flamingo beach will be positive ones.
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