I like bus rides. I like sweating in a cramped seat next to a fat local guy with too much aftershave. I like trying to sleep on a long-haul night bus while a class of teenage girls giggles and shrieks with delerium. I even like sitting on the fold out seat with no backrest for 8 hours while the packed minibus bumps and jumps down the worst dirt road I have ever been on. Generally, I also like bus stations. All the sitting around and trying to make sure you get the right ticket for the right bus to the right destination, makes you feel like you’re a real traveller. You’re not one of those soft tourists, you can tell yourself, you’re taking the people’s transit, and you are the only white person in this station.

Later today I have to go into San Jose to meet Sarah, who has flown in for a little over two weeks. Getting from here to San Jose should be a simple matter; it’s a small country after all. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Interbus is $39 for an air-conditioned minibus, but they don’t take surfboards. Grayline charges about the same, and takes surfboards, but it’s an extra $15 for the board. The public bus is obviously much cheaper, but no one anywhere seems to know what time it leaves. I ask four people for directions, and eventually a kid from one of the restaurants takes me down to the beach at the end of the Tamarindo traffic circle, walks me past a bar, through a small assortment of dirty tents and homeless looking people, and points through a fence to a building sitting in the back end of nowhere. This is the bus station. After nearly ten minutes of trying to communicate (in Spanish) with the the guy in the ticket window, I learn that my choices are to leave at 3:30 or 5:30 in the morning. Sarah’s flight arrives at 8:30 p.m. and I do not want to spend the day in San Jose. I do not like San Jose, and would not be going into the city for anyone else. The morning buses would drop me in the city somewhere between 10:00 a.m. and noon. While this is really not such a big deal, it’s coming up on four weeks since I’ve last seen Sarah, and I had really want to be at the hotel to greet her.

Why is this not easy?

There are pitiful few options for getting out of this town. My experience in most foreign countries is that the buses are efficient and plentiful, and typically the best way to get anywhere. Costa Rica is only 280 km across at it’s widest point. This is roughly the same distance I have to travel from Tamarindo to San Jose. This is not a long way. I’m learning why a lot of people fly rather than dealing with the buses.

I’ve since made arrangements to leave my surfboard here, and have paid the $39 for the air-conditioned Interbus shuttle. I’m paying for the privilege of this leisurely breakfast, a morning swim, and not having to wake at 3:00 a.m. to catch a bus. Still, I can’t help but feeling that I’ve somehow failed at all of this. I’m supposed to be a rugged backpacker, wise in the ways of transportation and logistics, cunning and resourceful, always finding the deal that works out. This time, however, I’ve merely caved to the easy option. I’m frustrated with how this all played out, and somewhere in the middle of my second cup of coffee just now it hits me.

The last time I was this frustrated with the bus system? Three years ago, here in Tamarindo.

It was 1965 when a seventeen-year-old Costa Rican boy found himself in New York city for the first time. Not knowing what to do or where to go, he wandered through town, his footsteps coming to a halt before a dance club where pretty girls writhed and gyrated in large windows facing out towards the street. One of these girls became enamoured of the handsome Tico, and helped him find his way in what was, for him, a new and strange country. He found work quickly, and was soon ensconced in an apartment in the Bronx in a time when his rent was $140 a month, and a packet of Marlboro cigarettes cost him just 30¢. He’d never have more than a few dollars in his pocket, but over the course of the next thirty years, he would travel the length and breadth of the United States of America, meeting celebrities, stealing cars, and evading immigration.

I first met Alberto–a self-professed Costa Rican hippy with a faded peace symbol tattooed on the center of his chest–on my first visit to Tamarindo in 2007. I was laid up with feet burnt from walking on the hot pavement and sand between Cabinas Rodamar and the beach one scorching afternoon, and would hobble out to sit on the bench in front of my room. Alberto lived across from me, and, once he’d learned what happened, went out of his way to bring me surf magazines and an old Sandra Brown novel he’d dug out of his belongings. As my tender feet began to heal, he even told me to borrow his bike whenever I wanted to go into town or explore the area without having to walk. I remembered those days fondly, and over the next few years I would often look back on our long talks of his adventures in America, his insights into Tico life, or his immense respect for Fidel Castro.

Almost three years later I have returned to Tamarindo and Cabinas Rodamar, only this time without the crippling blisters plaguing the soles of my feet. The hotel has changed, and the layout of the rooms is not what it was in 2007, but the owners remain the same, and Alberto still lives here in exchange for casual help. He looks a little older than I remember him, his brow lined with more wrinkles, and his long black hair showing streaks of gray, but the mischievous sparkle in his eyes is as bright as ever when he puts the pieces together and finally remembered the silly Canadian with the burned feet. Again I find myself lounging on a bench chatting through the intense heat of the day, amazed at the stories this man had collected. He tells me about shaking hands with Paul Newman in Indianapolis, where he’d gone for the horse races; of being taught to dress inconspicuously and to tell the immigration in LA that he was Puerto Rican to avoid deportation; and of the days when you could just walk into a government office and ask for a Social Security card, which he then used to get a New York State driver’s license.

One of my favourite tales is from the time he’d wanted to see Mohammed Ali fight in New York city. Arriving with only a handful of dollars in his pocket–as many of Alberto’s stories begin–he quickly realized he’d never be able to afford a ticket. The cheap seats were $60, with the better ones running over $100. Standing around and wondering if he should just leave, he watched a man buy three tickets and stick them into his suit pocket before returning to the beautiful woman accompanying him. Seeing his moment, Alberto edged closer in the crowd and tugged at the white ticket corner sticking out of the man’s pocket, surprised when the other two attached tickets came right along with it. Melting back into the crowd, Alberto used one of the tickets to get into the fight, throwing the other two in a garbage inside the arena. With that light in his eye shining brightly during the retelling, he looks off in the distance and says in his thick accent, “man, that was some good seats right up close. I had a great time that night.”

After nearly five years, and just a few weeks before his sixty-second birthday, Alberto got into a quarrel with one of the desk staff at the hotel that ultimately led to the owner terminating his employment, thus ending his his rent-free arrangement. He has to be out tomorrow, and with what I’ve come to love as typical Alberto style, still has no idea where he’s going to go.

His answer to what he’ll do when tomorrow rolls around?

He smiles and looks me in the eye. “I find sum’ting. This just life, you know? I just try to get by, and I don’ need much,” and I have no qualms that Alberto will figure something out, and will be firmly settled in a new hotel making friends and telling stories by the end of the week.

My first big trip overseas was two months in Thailand. Somewhere in the middle of that, a series of scheduling issues, including a friend from China coming to meet up with me, led to my spending ten days in Bangkok. Several people have told me I’m crazy for spending that much time in such a big city, but the experience taught me a lot about staying in one place and witnessing regular life in a foreign land. I ate shawarma almost daily in the Arabic quarter, wandered through the massive complex of the five story Pantip computer mall, and saw teens doing exactly what I had done in school–going to movies, and just hanging out. I spent hours each day just walking the streets and observing the everyday lives of those going through their daily routines of opening shops or going to the office.

Last summer in Chile, Sarah and I spent five days in the capital of Santiago doing much the same thing. At first the city seemed cold and awkward, but we quickly settled into the ebb and flow of the holiday closures and seemingly odd business hours, walking here and there, and finding things we might not have had time for in only two or three days. One of my favourite memories from that trip is of the afternoon we walked several kilometers through town to find the large old cemetery. We ambled through the tombs and monuments for hours, marveling at the beauty of the structures built to honour the memories of the families buried below.

Here in Tamarindo, I’m engaging in one of the slowest forms of travel possible, the extended stay. My life has fallen into a regular routine. If the tides are working in the morning and afternoon, I’ll rise around 7:00 and go out to surf for two hours. After a shower to rinse off the salt water, I’ll head to one of the nearby restaurants for breakfast, and spend a leisurely hour or more eating and drinking coffee. By now it’s hot, very hot, and to escape the intense heat at mid-day I’ll probably wind up parked on the bench outside my room to read in the shade for another hour or two. I may go for a walk through town to run errands or just explore, but sometimes I just lounge the afternoon away. By 4:00 the sun has lost some of it’s power, and the tide will be rising again, so I’ll hit the beach for another surf, coming in after watching the sun set from out in the water. Another shower, dinner, and by 8:00 I’m back at my room to read or do a bit of writing.

Most of the restaurants have wireless internet, and I’ll often bring my small computer to chat with Sarah, or to write a few emails and browse some of my favourite websites. It’s not uncommon for people to respond to my emails with “what are you doing on the computer? You’re in Costa Rica! You should be out doing something!” The reality is that I have just as much free time as anyone back home does, if not far more. In a small town like this, there is a limit to how often you can walk through the shops, or wander up and down the long stretch of beach. The same thing occurred in South America this past summer, and I had to wonder what people thought I should be doing all day. After eight or nine hours of walking through a city or touring churches and historical sites, I’d get a bit of internet time to upload photos or write emails, and I was getting the same sort of responses. There is a limit to how much living one can do in any given day. Here in Tamarindo, I may spend two hours online to escape the noon sun now and then, but I’m doing so with a cup of coffee in hand and a clear view of the beach from an open-air restaurant.

If circumstances force me to do so, I’ll go out and hit the sights every day and wring every last bit of fun and adventure from a short trip, but given the chance, I’ll take my time and move slowly from one place to the next. I’d rather leave a few things out than rush through every day trying to cram in every temple and museum I can find.

What about you? Are you happy to have spent a day in a city and consider it done, or do you feel you need months just to get to know a place?

The recent flooding and stranding of hundreds of people in Macchu Pichu and Aguas Calientes, Peru, has wondering what Tamarindo would be like if it was hit by a natural disaster of epic proportions. What follows is a fictitious account of this alternate reality.

When the first wave rolled in high off the horizon on that fateful morning, the surfers hooted and hollered, and began paddling further out from shore. No one wanted to be caught inside of the large waves building up in the distance, and soon they were heading out to sea through the biggest waves Costa Rica has ever seen. Later that day, as people moved through the wreckage from the waves, trying to pick up the pieces of their broken lives, the stories would begin to circulate of one heroic surfer who’d turned and dropped into a wave so big, he survived only by riding it all the way in and landing in the third floor balcony of a room in the Hotel El Diria, several hundred meters in from the shore. No one knew how he’d managed to paddle into a wave of such size, but everyone who repeated the story would go on to praise a higher power that must have been watching over him.

By the end of the day, the death toll in Tamarindo would be reported at a grand total of four. Many had been injured and were lying in emergency care facilities set up in aisles of the Super Compro grocery store, but the only fatalities seemed to be a group of down and out Ticos sitting on the beach when the largest of the waves came through. One witness saw these men as she was running for here life and later told reporters that they’d been pulling from a bottle of cheap guaro while the killer wall of water headed right for them. “They were just laughing and pointing,” she said. “I yelled at them to run, but one of them just, he just whistled and gave me this gross look like he was trying to see through my clothes.”

On the second night, things seem to have regained some semblance of normalcy. Many of the bars are full of revelers, cheering their survival and recounting where they were when the wave hit. The electricity hasn’t been down long enough for the beer to go cold, and the surviving restaurants are selling tickets to all-you-can eat barbeques in an effort to use up their meat before it goes bad. I’m eating as much as I can, because I know that food will become sparse in the coming days. The only real road into town has been washed out, meaning no one is able to leave, and no supplies can be brought in. I’ve stocked up on dry goods from the local store, and have a large stash of cookies, chips, and bottles of drinking water to get me through. People don’t seem to have realized the extent of our isolation out here, and only a few of us have begun to hoard supplies. Things are going to get rough here, and I plan to be prepared.

It is now three days after the wave hit, and I’m walking through the remains of the main stretch of town. Most of the buildings are still largely intact, lacking only the glass that had been shattered by incoming water and floating debris. Shop owners sort clothing and cheap souvenirs into piles of salable and ruined, and the restaurant staff try to locate the tables and chairs that were swept into the street and smashed to pieces. The only real road into town has been washed out, and with no one able to get out of town, and no supplies coming in, things are getting a bit desperate. The armed guards normally standing with shotguns at the ready outside of the banks, have been relocated to the stores with the largest remaining supplies of alcohol. Once cheap prices for beer and hard liquor have now soared as availability of those bottles and cans not smashed or lost has dwindled to a meager supply. Long lines of surfers stretch out of these shops, with those who’ve just made their purchases clutching bags to their chests and scurrying back to their rooms under the hungry gaze of the line-up. A cute girl wearing tiny cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top wanders aimlessly among the crowds, handing out fliers to last week’s ‘girls drink free’ night at Club Aqua. A makeshift bandage covers her head, locks of blonde hair flowing out behind it, and when she hands me the flier I notice that her vacant eyes seem to look through me, as if she doesn’t know where she is.

I’ve spent most of the four days since my last outing hiding in my room. Feeling that someone has to document this tragedy of human suffering, I decide to go back out into the town. The initially hopeful air of those trying to rebuild after the disaster has been replaced with the sour stink of fear and desperation. By now, most of the shops are empty or boarded up, having been looted of merchandise. From the window of a store where I search for food, I see two surfers stepping out of a surf shop with arms full of board shorts. “These shorts were seventy dollars before the wave,” one of them said when he saw me watching them. “They were practically robbing us at those prices, so now we’re robbing them!”

A block past the empty food store, I come upon a real-estate agent sitting in the street with his head in his hands. Between choking sobs, I can hear him repeating, “my listings, all my beautiful listings…” again and again. With no new influx of foreigners, he hasn’t made a property sale in days. At the sound of my sandals slapping the pavement as I walk past, he lunges up with a hungry look in his eyes and rushes across the street to me raving about a new condo presale. “It’s a really great location, good price, hardly any water damage, and you can take possession in just six months. Can I book you for a viewing? I have pictures!” he yells as I run away from him.

Closer to town now, and the scene is even more disturbing. People are wandering from garbage bin to garbage bin, picking up empty bottles and cans, looking for dregs to drain into their collecting bottles. Dreadlocked hippies are scavenging the grasses for any plant they can dry out and roll into something to smoke. Vendors wave pieces of cardboard with Costa Rica written in marker and trying to sell their ‘postcards’ at three for a dollar. One Tico stands next to a burnt out hunk of smoldering car remains asking “Taxi, man? Taxi?” when I approach.

Many of the hostels sit far back from the water and although the buildings hadn’t been affected by the destructive force of the waves that rolled through town, their residents are suffering immensely. I enter one and immediately notice the lack of loud music and sounds from their television. Travelers sprawl on the hammocks and in the couches, staring off into space. Every few minutes someone will absently begin with, “this one time, I was at this full moon party in Burma…” and drift off into oblivion, head slumped onto chest. I can’t take any more of this. I’m going back to my room where it’s safe.

We’ve been stranded in this town for two weeks, and I’m down to my last package of cookies. I need to go out and find food, and furthermore, I’m impelled to document the chaos that has consumed this small town. I’m standing on the balcony of my second floor room, steeling myself for the trip, when I hear the whump whump whump sound of a helicopter in the distance. I scan the horizon, and spot the small dots that are the first of the rescue efforts flying in over the hills. As they approach, I can see the markings on the side of the large cargo helicopters, and recognize it as the Imperial beer company logo.

The choppers are heading for the center of town, and I rush back down to meet them. Keeping a low profile, I dodge scavengers and looters, and briefly hide behind a tree when the real estate agent looks up from his wailing. Below the first aircraft is a large pallet of crates, and as I reach the landing spot at the main intersection, I can see that it has already deposited its cargo, and the first of the stranded have already emerged to start unloading the crates and handing beer to those who continue to arrive.

The helicopter touches down a few hundred feet away, and a crew of medical staff emerge, ducking beneath the massive rotor blades still churning the air and kicking up dust. An aid worker yells for me to come nearer and when I’m close enough to hear, he turns his head to the side and says in a low voice, “you wanna buy some weed man?” and I know our ordeal has come to an end. At long last, we have been saved.