Alajuela, Friday

Thu 19th 2043 FFS! I was in the wrong room. I happened to check emails just before going to bed and the non-resident owners had sent me directions to find *my* room (nice enough, but just a private twin with shared bathroom and shared kitchen) at 5ish am this morning and somehow I had never seen it.

Luckily I noticed and I think I've managed to put stuff back how it was near enough and put the keys to that back on the counter in the room and in the lock box. I will keep my mouth shut and if I am asked (fingers crossed some poor sod hasn't been trying to check in - but they could have got into the *building* at any rate, so probably not) I will say that I didn't see their e-mail (which was sent stupidly late really) until I had already had a shower in that room which had a key in the lock box on street, and then I changed. This is nearly true, except I spent a few hours in there, but that's my secret.

I just hope to fuck I haven't left anything in there. I am 90% sure I haven't, and I do have my passport. It's a good job I didn't "unpack" excessively.

Anyway, if there is fallout from this a) it's not primarily my fault and I'm not going to accept blame, although probably no one will try to pin any on me in the first place b) I am definitely in the right room now and I'll deal with it tomorrow after a night's sleep.

2055 Actually in bed at last. Still bit edgy about the above, but the key thing is that I put the keys back outside and in the room itself so no one is going to be seriously fucked over. They may notice a towel is damp etc and I can and will explain if pushed, but no more inconvenience than that.

Fri 20th Jan 1704 Got back to accom maybe 30 mins ago. Went into kitchen to put bottle of water and bottle of some guarana fizzy diet drink I got (Cotiuba?? bottle is in fridge not room so can't see it) at supermarket on way back. Owner was there talking with a Canadian woman guest, had brief chat with them - apparently you need to register (on web?) to go to Poas volcano, you might only be able to go on Saturday and there might not be a bus or there might just be a bus a bit like the one I vaguely recall from guidebook which gets you there a bit late to have a good chance of a cloud-free view of crater and comes back at midday or thereabouts. Canadian woman and her brother are apparently thinking of going via Uber.

I had seen this registering business mentioned in welcome booklet here in room this morning. Not checked my up-to-date guidebook yet. I was already thinking during day (which I intend to write up later after a bit of reading and/or YT - frankly I suspect I'm in for the night now and time may hang heavy) that I might not try going to Poas, at least from here now. Anyway, wanted to note that down while fresh in my mind.

They also said it's Costa Rican school long holidays until Feb (not clear when in Feb) which means it's necessary to register for a lot of stuff and/or it's busy. This shits me up a bit. I may well look into booking next stop after these four nights tonight.

My earlier wafflings about going to Nicaragua or Panama if it's too busy or expensive in CR didn't take into account coronavirus rules; they may be no problem, but as of now I have no specific idea what rules might be in place. Still, while I'd rather not, failing to cross a land border because of a failed PCR test or whatever when I'm in no rush and can just turn back isn't as disastrous as it would be if I were flying into the country.

Incidentally the mask situation here appears superficially rather UK-like (ignoring the legal requirement in medical contexts IIRC) - hardly anyone wearing masks but a few people, the businesses I've been in today haven't made people wear masks and because presumably business owners here have the same weird aversion to taking down outdated notices as those in the UK, a good number of businesses still have "you must wear a mask" and similar signs on the door but no one - including the staff - is wearing one, and AIUI there's no legal compulsion to do so either, so the notices are utterly confusing and pontless. How hard is it to take down a bloody poster? But this isn't a specifically Costa Rican failing, as I say the same seems to be the case in the UK too.

Right, going to slack off for a bit and then continue write up. I will say that my main objectives today were to get cash, get lunch and get a SIM card and I have (subject to some possible problems I haven't investigated yet) achieved all three. I also fairly quickly got to the point where I feel pretty safe on the streets in daytime - no one seems to be interested in hassling me for whatever reason.

1737 FWIW if I forgot to say above, owner said the cloud cover can change rapidly up at the volcano, so just because it is cloudy when you get there, it won't necessarily stay cloudy for the rest of the day.

1826 Been lying on bed reading and I've been on the verge of nodding off a couple of times. This is, I guess, fine, if a little unexpected - I did get a reasonably solid long sleep last night, although I suppose I'd been a bit short on sleep for a few nights and I've done a fair amount of walking today too.

I might go to bed early. Let me just have at least a quick poke on eg booking.com for Grecia and see how that looks, and then I might put off making plans until tomorrow - I could for example trog over to the relevant bus terminal tomorrow and ask about buses.

Oh, I investigate Three Go Roam this morning, but unless you have an old SIM (shame I didn't keep my "Guatemala" one alive, although being PAYG it may not have qualified anyway) there's a £5/day roaming charge to use your allowance, so it's practically useless for me and this is why I think I thought it had been canned - I looked it up a month or so ago and found this and wrote it off.

OK, that hostel I vaguely liked the sound of has a single private with shared bathroom for four nights for about 47k or about £17/night. They have dorms for less but this early in the trip when I'm still finding my feet I'm reluctant to do that. It's free cancellation until 22nd as well so in the (probably unlikely event) it's an utter mare to get to by bus from here I could cancel tomorrow night without having to investigate now when I'm feeling just a bit tired. Sod it, given the free cancellation I will book this.

OK, yes, quick search in Rough Guide on Kindle says buses Alajuela-Grecia every 30 mins and it takes an hour. A nice easy hop, surely. The hostel has a bar, I might meet someone and even if I don't I can maybe have a quiet beer or two instead of sitting in my room as I will here.

OK, that's booked. Feels good to have that sorted. I don't exactly like "rushing off" but until I get more confident re availability at short notice (this wasn't too bad TBH, given it's two nights before) I didn't want to take chances. Alajuela does seem OK and I will waffle about it later, but gut feeling is there's no "must see" here, I can and perhaps will come back here as a matter of convenience at end of trip, and for that matter with Grecia a short and frequent bus ride away, I can probably come back next week if I have regrets.

I am not particularly desperate to socialise at this point but it does feel like a proper hostel with staff and a bar might avoid some of the slight boxed-in feeling of this place (which feels a little transitional).

Incidentally a dorm at that hostel would have been slightly over half what I'm paying. I've been in dorms a moderate amount over the years, I think it's tolerable and I will probably do it a bit (not constantly) later in trip to keep costs down and/or out of necessity due to availability (TBH gut feeling is that availability isn't going to be as bad as I feel, especially as I have some flexibility to vary my route based on availability, it may even take me on the slightly off-the-beaten track parts of the tourist routes as a result, but I also suspect that if you're willing to stay in a dorm you can probably get something a day or so ahead in most places without too much trouble or paying an arm and a leg) but I do want to give it a few weeks first as (not that I feel too edgy right now, except wrt "too busy" concerns, but still, it is early days) I am likely to have found my feet by then.

1918 Right, let's bash out a few notes about today.

I woke up IIRC at about 1 and 4am feeling vaguely disoriented, but it wasn't that crushing (albeit short-lived) feeling I'll call homesickness (although it isn't necessarily that, as it crops up once in a while when I *am* at home). I think I finally woke up about 8am still feeling a bit tired but I just didn't seem to want to go back to sleep either. Maybe it was nearer 9, I'm not sure.

A few people around when I went out to clean my teeth, said hola, it's not a huge place obviously.

I spent ages in my room sorting stuff out (rearranging things following flight - it's different now I have a "base", stuff like that), deciding what the plan for today was (get cash, have lunch, get SIM), researching Three Go Roam, etc. I kept feeling vague "need to get out and do stuff" guilty urges but I kept talking myself out of it. There isn't any rush, I also want to start gradually and a bit of preparation (e.g. making sure my debit/credit cards are split up) could save my arse later.

Anyway, although I had a fair amount of USD I really didn't want to pay for anything except in CRC if I could help it, so cash plus a bit of a walk the first order of the day. I set off and made a point of noting landmarks near accom and did a pseudo-regular tour of the grid-based layout of the town centre. It was warm but not unpleasantly grindingly so (my mind reverts to Guayaquil here, although TBF I think it was going into a rotiserrie restaurant which added to the heat which really sticks in my mind).

At first I felt a bit "everyone is going to see I'm a tourist and hassle me" but I did my best to walk slowly-ish and I don't think it took that long (an hour or two? just a guess) before I pretty much felt comfortable walking around and that no one was going to hassle me.

I found numerous banks and had various confusing interactions with their cash machines. I also got politely told (and my Spanish wasn't good enough while feeling slightly flustered to understand at first) to take my cap off by a security guard at one of the places that had the machines in the main bank - lesson learned. In no particular order:
- one machine wanted to charge me something like ten quid as a fee, so I cancelled, although based on what I learned later it would probably have failed anyway
- at least one bank's machines seemed to insist on you entering two extra zeroes to "fill in" the pointless two decimal places at the end of the amount
- one bank's machines insisted that numbers like 160000 were too small and that the minimum amount was 2000 - as I write this I wonder if this was due to confusion over decimal points (see prev item) but I am fairly sure it wasn't
- several banks rejected the transaction and said to contact my bank
- one bank said transaction had processed successfully after a very very long wait, but gave me not cash - and this was of the machine type that takes your card in - as all UK ones do IME, but here and in other parts of Latin America some banks have machines that only take your card in part way and "locks" it so you can't take it out, but I assume these machines always release your card and can never swallow it.

I did speak to bank staff (is there a cash machine? etc) in Spanish and on the whole that felt reasonably solid, despite a wobble with the security guard asking me to remove my cap.

This was with the Starling card I'd used at the airport. I deliberately hadn't taken other cards out to reduce risk of theft/loss. In the end after maybe two hours (I was walking round and "seeing" the place and getting a feel for it etc, so it wasn't wasted time) I came back to accom and got on chat with them. They were very decent (as they were last time I tried, IIRC) and it turned out I have a £300/day allowance (which I had forgotten, as normally I'd never withdraw more than that in a day) *and it works on a UK calendar day window*. I had withdrawn USD200 at just past UK midnight at the airport so all my withdrawal attempts this morning for £200ish worth of CRC were failing because I only had something like £140 allowance left. (Another minor bit of fallout of cash machine woes at airport - if I'd got this sorted 10 mins earlier none of this would have happened today.)

So I'm sure the Starling card would have worked if I'd waited, but I wanted CRC to pay for food/SIM so I took my Barclaycard Rewards out and used that - I knew roughly where to find the machines now, and used one of the red ones I had used at the airport and got 200k out for an only slightly insane fee of about 2.8k (from memory).

Of course I then struggled a bit to find a place to eat, despite seeing loads when I needed cash first. I did see some OK ones including Peruvian and Chinese but I felt that even though I wouldn't be going for uber-typical CR dishes it would be silly not to eat in a CR restaurant my first day. And in the end I found a soda (had seen loads earlier, as I said) called Soda del Banco which had prices on the menu on the wall (finding my feet - until I know roughly what to expect, don't want to trust the prices are going to be "OK" if they aren't shown) and had pretty decent filet de pollo, papas fritas and a salad (which I asked for no dressing on and got, I felt pretty chuffed with myself - oh, I ordered at the counter, I think that was right) and a tamarind juice (I do like tamarind, it was nice but a bit small as I had a raging thirst on by this point) for something like 3700 for the food, 700 for the drink and (not remembering specifically about tipping customs) figuring making it 5000 would be an OK but not insane (unlike some of my early Guatemalan experiences) tip. I paid with a 20k note to get some small bills too.

I then sallied out to find a SIM. Claro seem to be the only game in town based on my observations. I went into one place and asked about a SIM and the guy said he only had them with no internet. I then found an actual Claro shop, went in and after queuing a bit (small place, 1 MoS and 2-ish customers waiting) I paid 1.5k for a SIM and 10k for 5GB/30 days, unlimited WhatsApp (nice if it works but as this is for G5 to carry round it probably won't) and 200 minutes for calls to CR numbers (possibly useful for taxis etc). Did all this in Spanish and although I fumbled a bit at times and felt a bit annoyed, I am still pleased with myself. I asked if I could try it in shop so I sat down and put it in G5 (had moved "normal" UK SIM to K1 that morning) and it activated but I couldn't get on internet and my balance seemed wrong. A text arrived just as I went up to the counter which said the 10k deal had been activated, but since I was there I let MoS play with phone a bit and she couldn't get it to work either. Oddly I tried it half an hour ago and it seems to work fine, so no idea what happened. I didn't intend to ask for a refund but perhaps this made me feel more flustered (with impact on my Spanish) as I wondered if I was being a bit weak. But (as she asked and I said) I did have another phone back at accom and even if the SIM had only worked in K1 it would still be kind of worth having (though inconvenient to use, as I'd like regular UK SIM available in case of texts warning me of stuff from banks, and I'd rather not carry that SIM in the G5 as it's more likely to get lost that way).

Anyway, touch wood, it seems to be working.  I haven't tried to play with WhatsApp on G5 now, maybe eg tomorrow night if I am bored during evening in.

This is a smidge more than I hoped to pay but at about £17/month it's not terrible and 5GB of data is more than I have on my UK SIM back home and should allow me to "splurge" a bit on using it if I am wifi-less for whatever reason. Also if it turns out I really should have gone with another network I can always get one after 30 days and I'm only out the fairly negligible price I paid for the SIM

There were cheaper deals but they were for 15 or 10 days and were more expensive per day, rather than there being cheaper deals with less data/calls for a lower daily rate.

I made a point of not getting phone out and playing with it/reading on it while waiting for/eating lunch and while in the queue at the Claro place; I'm trying to be a bit more present and/or just rely on my brilliantly powerful intellect to amuse me. :-)

It was about 3pm, maybe a bit earlier, when I left Claro shop. It had gone a bit cloudy and pleasantly cooler and there was a bit of a refreshing breeze. There also seemed to be a *very* light rain in the air at some points, which surprised me but wasn't remotely soaking and was quite refreshing.

It felt a little early to be going back to accom but I formed a vague resolution to walk round for another hour or so and get some water+pop at a supermarket, shove it in hostel fridge and maybe drink a bit in the kitchen (thinking that I shouldn't hide myself away too much and then I might get to chat more - this worked to a small extent tonight as putting it in there lead to that conversation already described, though I drank a couple of hasty and awkward glasses solo in the kitchen 10-15 mins later). As it happened despite feeling I'd got the rough hang of the geography and the numerical avenida (W-E) and calle (N-S) street naming, I got lost - *probably* because the avenida numbers decrement as you go north to the centre, then start to increment again, but the street signs don't say "avenida 1 *N*" or "avenida 1 *S*" , just "avenida 1" , so when I thought I was heading south because the numbers were increasing I was actually heading north. This is speculation but I'm moderately confident.

As a result - and vague worries about the darkening sky threatening heavier rain - that was the one time today I resorted to using the phone GPS, which is how I twigged I'd actually gone right out to the NE corner of the main "square" central-ish area. Walked back zig-zagging through the centre and by the time I got to the supermarket I'd previously seen near accom it was relatively late anyway.

General impressions of Alajuela is that it's quite pleasant - I don't know if the whole of CR is like this, but I did feel safe (even from random hassle) on the streets - but not (although there are certainly some cool looking buildings - but I resisted temptation to pull camera out today as I had eg wodge of cash i'd withdraw in camera pocket, and even ignoring that, I didn't want to advertise my tourist status by photographing stuff while I had all that cash and one of my good travel cards on me) on the whole amazingly attractive. Nice enough but not "beautiful" .

As I said last night, v "Latin American" feel to the streets - lots of small-ish businesses which on reflection can also be true in parts of London, but it feels more intensely "small businessy" here - but also oddly and sort of coolly but also sort of confusingly when you're walking around the fairly compact centre - there seemed to be pockets of residential stuff kind of mixed in. This is probably a slightly confused perception based on my somewhat random walking.

Fairly serious looking hills/mountains to north and south horizons; I did try to use these for navigation a bit, but except for E-W v N-S they weren't that useful - I couldn't tell them apart, at first I did think the southern ones were noticeably higher but whether or not that's true, I think in reality the more local up-down of the streets and buildings in the way make this initial judgement of mine a bit unsubstantiated.

Fingers hurting a bit and though I'm not actively tired I suspect if I did lay down I'd fall asleep so I would like to stop. I think I've covered most stuff but can always add more in another day's entry.

It does feel - and I may be being unfair - that scope for using Alajuela as a base for daytrips (ignoring Poas and its awkward buses and registrations - oh incidentally not that I was specifically looking, but I didn't notice any businesses offering tours to Poas, despite an old guide book saying many companies did offer it) feels limited. This accommodation is nice enough but it also does feel a smidge "lonely" and ideal for a transitory stay but not more. There are obviously bars etc in town but nothing looked super tempting/unthreatening and the idea - in my current fresh off the plane state in particular - of going out solo for a few beers and maybe some live music feels a bit impractical. It's a fine line but somewhere a smidge more touristy and/or smaller - like grecia? - feels like this sort of thing might be more doable.

And as I think I've already said, I may well be back here at the end of the trip, and even if I'm not, it's far from impossible I'll return to CR in the future and again Alajuela will be there right by the airport and a natural place to put in a night or two, or longer if I subsequently discover cool stuff here I'll wish I'd known about now, etc.

Going to go have a shower, shave and clean my teeth and then I think I'll move towards bed. I suspect/hope I will naturally be up fairly early again given that I am feeling tired enough I'll probably be asleep quite early. No major plans for tomorrow, probably just wander a bit, maybe check out bus station, probably photograph some of those cool-looking buildings and maybe go into any if they are open, or visit some of the sites listed in guide book. And probably ditto, except bus station, the day after (Sunday) as well.

2039 That went fairly well, the shave (first with a disposable razor I had spare at home) felt OK, naturally some blood but not too bad. Still feeling my way back into the routines associated with shared bathroom, eg I should use a carrier bag to take everything over instead of my hands.

Nearly said earlier re altering plans based on availability and this forcing me slightly off the beaten path that this is probably true, but anything on sites like booking.com is still on a somewhat beaten path. But I didn't because there were entire apartments multiple km outside Grecia available for less than I'm paying for my private room in town. These do feel a little off the beaten path. A bit intimidating maybe but also worth bearing in mind if (more likely on a future trip, with a laptop) I just want to hole up somewhere peaceful that there are possibilities there. For all I know such places might also be a decent base for nearby activities/hikes/whatever, although current gut feeling is that if I do use Grecia as a base for even a week or so I'd want to be in town (not nec at hostel booked tonight) as the extra convenience of buses in all directions and facilities is probably better.

Was going to say one other thing.

2048 Still not come back to me. Will post this and then bed. Can always add forgotten stuff to next entry of course.

Feeling broadly OK. I haven't "done" much by the standards of eg someone making the most of a two week trip, but I've got done what I wanted to do, I'm mostly not pressuring myself and minor jitters aside I'm not feeling terribly uncomfortable and while eg trogging round trying to get cash for two hours wasn't exactly "fun" , I didn't feel I was wasting my time and I didn't get worked up (just quietly a bit frustrated, but I knew I had other cards and some cash and no rush etc) and I could probably say overall the day has been quietly enjoyable in a slightly strange way.