After a peaceful flight with Condor and a rough stopover in Santo Domingo, we are arriving Costa Rica in the early morning. The entry is running quickly. Only for our luggage we have to wait for. After all, we are at the exit of the airport awaited and arriving a little later San Jose. Unfortunately, our room is not ready yet. Therefore, I go to get money near the Gran Hotel. Visa-Card is no problem and on the cash machine next to the Costa Rica-Colon I can get the necessary dollar for my later leaving.
Luckily, the agency of our organiser is near the hotel, too. Unhappily, we are missing the voucher for our city tour. So quickly the city map studied, realised that we can see the first checkpoint (a photo shop) from our hotel and let’s go.
Beautiful at the capital is: the streets are divided up in Avenidas and Calles and they are all, except the Avenida Central, numbered. On the one side there are the straight numbers and on the other side there are the odd numbers. So it is easy to navigate. What is missing are the house numbers. Instead, addresses are more like descriptions starting in marked places. It’s quite helpful if these marks are still visible, for example on an old tree. Indeed, this tree could have been felled twenty years ago, as we get to know later.
The office of Ecole Travel (if you’re in the cultural centre it’s on your left hand side, right in the pedestrian precinct) is easy to find, though. After arriving there, a woman explains as that someone had forgotten to book the sightseeing tour for us and that she couldn’t find any German guide at the moment. She adds that we could complain about this at “Erlebe Fernreisen”. When I make her understand, that we didn’t come to Costa Rica in order to complain later and that we just need someone to guide us around she starts calling again. A cup of coffee later Yvonne picks us up. So where’s the problem?
