Soon the weekend came around, so Richard became available to help entertain our guests, and Jane suggested that we take the Jungle Train over to the Caribbean Coast. “I haven’t been on it myself, but everyone says it’s an awful lot of fun,” she told us. In fact, she hadn’t traveled over to the Caribbean side of the country at all, but I could only imagine that it would be just as delightful as the western coast. Richard and I both love train travel, and Jerry and Renee thought it sounded like a good idea, too.

 

I had gotten over wanting to kill Jerry even though he never once exhibited any remorse over what he put me through that day on the mountain. I now merely derived satisfaction from finding him irritating. Apparently, he had gone up the second trail that Richard had found, and when he came back down, he missed the side trail that led back to his original departure point. He eventually came to a road where he ran into some people. Since he didn’t speak Spanish, his strategy, of which he was extremely proud, was to come up to people and say, “Escazú?” while pointing in two different directions. Unfortunately for his brilliant strategy, there were two villages with the name of Escazú. One was the town we lived in, but the other, San Antonio de Escazú, resided in the mountains in the opposite direction and happened to be a little closer. When he got to the wrong Escazú, he realized his mistake and somehow, by employing his same bone-headed approach, managed—amazingly—to stumble into the right one. “God looks out for children and fools,” Jane said more than once when referring to Jerry’s adventure.

 

At any rate, personal drawbacks notwithstanding, we were all primed to take a trip on the Jungle Train. And actually, his traveling partner, Renee, was a perfectly charming guest, considerate and easy to get along with. When we arrived at the station that morning, we saw that a festive crowd had turned out both to ride it and send off loved ones. After boarding, we checked the schedule as we settled into our narrow, molded plastic seats and puzzled over the listed departure and arrival times. We knew that it was only 100 km. to the coast, but the schedule said it took over four hours before we arrived in Limone. We figured that it must be a typo, but in any case, it didn’t matter. The morning was cool and lovely with a sweet little breeze, and the windows to the train were all open to the inviting air outside. Vendors swaggered up and down the aisles and alongside the train, selling fried dough, sno-cones covered in sweetened condensed milk, and tamales. We each bought a fried fruit pie and devoured it before the train took off, everyone waving like mad when we started up and began chugging down the tracks.

 

We passed through the heart of downtown San José, with its tall apartment buildings sporting back porches where the residents had set up clothes’ lines and hung their colorful laundry out to dry. People sitting out on their porches waved cheerfully as the train rumbled past, and we waved enthusiastically back. Then we passed through the suburbs, where simple white-washed houses flashed by, surrounded by lush greenery. Residents who couldn’t afford flower pots used old coffee cans in which to plant riotously beautiful flowers and adorn their porches. We climbed into the mountains, where the air became cooler and spicier, and we rumbled over tall, romantic train trestles where blue-green canyons stretched away to infinity below us. Oh—and we made stops along the way. Lots and lots and lots of stops. We must have stopped every kilometer, no exaggeration. We began to realize that the listed departure and arrival times were right on target.

 

Still, we were having fun. Whenever we stopped, vendors would scramble up to the sides of the train and hold aloft whatever it was they were selling: some of the godawfully sweet pastries that the Ticos love so much, shaved ice doused in sugary fruit syrups with or without sweetened condensed milk, soft drinks, tortillas … We bought some boiled ears of corn at one point, disappointed when we bit into them to find that the kernels were encased in tough little husks fashioned, it would seem, from recycled baskets. If only we could have managed to eat them, we probably would have gotten enough fiber to last for a month. The scenery was gorgeous, as usual, and the temperature extremely pleasant. Once we stopped at a place where there was nothing but jungle. We watched in amazement as a passenger disembarked and walked over to a tree where we saw that he had tied his horse. He grabbed up the reins, mounted, and road away into the forest.

 

We were halfway into our journey, creaking along at about five kilometers per hour when all of the sudden the train came to a lurching, shuddering halt. None of the stops had been what I would call smooth, but this was more lurching and shuddering than the others. When we sat for quite some time and nothing else happened, people began to get up and mill around. We joined them and followed them off the train to stand along its sides. Soon, word came that the train had derailed. The crew was working on getting it back on the tracks. We went up to the front of the train to watch them struggle with a piece of machinery that they carried along with them for just this purpose, and in the crowd I glimpsed a large, white North American couple totally outfitted in safari gear, complete with pith helmets. Their shirts had pockets and their shorts had pockets and I wouldn’t have been surprised if their socks had pockets. They looked very grim.

 

I wondered if this might be a good time to use the loo, as it turned out that the toilets were four-inch-in-diameter metal pipes that came up out of the floor, leading to an opening to the outside where the tracks lay underneath. It was very interesting trying to aim properly at this pipe, which wasn’t nearly tall enough to serve its purpose, while the train was rolling and swaying. Then I realized if I used the bathroom on the train, everyone standing alongside would be treated to this activity, so I decided to avail myself of the woods, feeling nervous the whole time that this would be the moment that they wrestled the train back on the tracks, starting up again with great vigor to make up for the time that they’d lost.

 

I needn’t have worried, however. I had plenty of time. Finally, the crew did get the train back on the tracks, accompanied by great cheers from the passengers and a wonderful feeling of camaraderie. We settled back into our seats, which were starting to feel a little hard and unyielding at this point, and began the descent off the mountains to the eastern, Caribbean coast.

 

This is when things started to get ugly.

 

You know how mountains often have a steep side and a long side? Well, we now dropped off the steep side very quickly, despite several stops and soon we found ourselves at sea level with all the attendant steamy, wilting heat. But we had two-and-a-half more hours to go on our journey. U.S. fruit companies had long ago bought up this part of the country and we chuffed through banana plantation after banana plantation after banana plantation. The monotony became stultifying. Poor-looking, patch-work houses built up on stilts looked sad and subdued, in need of paint and repair. The residents who sat on their steps or porches gazed at us without expression as we passed by, perspiring in our molded plastic seats that now felt excruciatingly rigid, and nobody waved. Nobody even smiled.

 

This part of Costa Rica had been settled primarily by Jamaican slaves imported to build the railroad, and after the railroad’s completion, to work in the plantations. I wish I could say that no dark side existed in this beautiful, playful country, that there is a part of the world where humans always treat each other with kindness and generosity, but in fact, Costa Rica possessed a history of racism. No significant Indian culture existed to discriminate against, so the population remained quite homogeneous for a long time, one of the reasons for its famed egalitarianism. But eventually African slaves were imported by the European settlers to make up for the lack of coerced native labor, and when the Jamaicans arrived, they were not even allowed to set foot in the Central Valley until 1949 (unless, I presume, they were working on the railroad). Consequently, there was little love lost between the light-skinned and dark-skinned populations. Add to the mix a generous helping of continuing exploitation by powerful foreign interests along with a great deal of poverty, and you end up with a pretty dismal, unfriendly environment.

 

When we finally arrived in Limone, the largest city on the east coast, we felt beat. Our bodies ached from the long, jouncy ride on hard seats and the air was so turgid that breathing felt like a chore. We once again glimpsed the safari couple, looking determined and prepared for anything, but they soon disappeared into the city, which was primarily a collection of cinder block stalls with tin roofs. Fish guts lying in the gutter here and there gave off a putrid aroma in the rank closeness, and no one looked welcoming. At all. Not many white people roamed the streets here, and it felt uncomfortable to find ourselves the distinct and unwelcome minority.

 

We had booked rooms in the nicest hotel in Limone, but as we looked around, we realized that this might not be exactly the Hilton. We felt relieved when we spotted a former classmate of mine from language school, David, the poli sci professor from Newfoundland, and his wife, Alice. David and Alice had also ridden The Jungle Train and they were staying at the same hotel where we were lodging. David said he thought he knew how to get there. It was outside of town and a bit of a walk, but after riding six hours on a train, we thought a walk sounded fantastic—even if we did have to lug our bags the whole way and the sun had set an hour earlier.

 

David advised us to keep a sharp eye on our belongings, as petty theft was rumored to be even more rampant in this area than it was countrywide (violent crime, on the other hand, was extremely rare in Costa Rica), and one student from the language school came back from Limone with his backpack slashed. Someone had slit it open as he walked along with it on his back and he didn’t even realize it until he took it off at his destination. Leaving town and heading into the rural darkness, we had our heart rate accelerated by a few vans with throbbing, bass-heavy sound systems that slowed down, passed by, and checked us out rather menacingly. They left us alone, though.

 

It was an unnerving enough experience, however, that by the time we reached the hotel, I was prepared to like it no matter what. Okay, so it looked like a concrete parking garage. So the hallways were so dimly lit it felt like the House of Usher. So the sea smashing into the rocks below our tiny, sterile, concrete balcony had a rather crazed, demonic energy about it! I felt convinced that a couple of piña coladas were all I needed to give this entire experience the charming aura of exotic travel. Richard agreed. Fortunately, the garage, I mean hotel, had a bar/restaurant, so we didn’t even need to go out again tonight if we didn’t want to. I changed into a pretty dress, braided my hair, and headed to the bar while Richard showered before meeting me there.

 

We were in paradise, right? How could we not have a good time?

 

 

Above: A stop along the way of the Jungle Train’s route, taken by Webshots.com member Photoplo.

 

*Intro:

 

At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.

 

This is Chapter 16 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.

 

This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.

 

 

**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.