SAN JOSE, COSTA RICA

Upon touching down in Costa Rica I immediately felt less uncomfortable than I had in Guatemala. It was obvious that this country was better set up for the gringo vacationer. The flight arrived about 15 minutes early and immigration and customs were well organized and efficient. There is a small office just outside of the baggage claim where you prepay the $12 flat fee for a taxi into central San Jose, which is about 20 minutes away. I had read that taxi drivers in Costa Rica do not expect a tip, so I was surprised when my driver was very pleasant.

I soon arrived at the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, which was very luxurious considering I was able to book it for only $46 for New Years Eve. The hotel was overlooking the National Theater right on the Plaza de la Cultura in the middle of the nice part of town. According to their brochure, Jimmy Carter is among the dignitaries to have stayed there in the past. The room was very nice and I was extremely happy to see the television was modern and had a crisp picture. Evidently, every hotel in Guatemala and Belize was in some contest to see who can have the snowiest picture on a hotel TV claiming to be hooked up to a cable.

After a very short rest in the hotel, I walked down to the plaza downstairs to find the central tourist office was already closed for the holiday, even though it wasn’t even 2 p.m. yet. Within a few hours, almost every business in the area except for McDonalds would close up leaving the plaza to be a bit of a ghost town.

Since it was New Year’s Eve, I felt obligated to try to celebrate a bit. Around 9 p.m. I left the hotel looking for a place to have a few beers and ring in the New Year. I eventually found a tiny bar a few blocks away called the Nashville, which I had read about in my guidebook. There were about 10 people there and more than half seemed to be fellow gringos. The bartender was a friendly and very attractive tica (local Costa Rican) who asked me the usual new-in-town questions. The guy sitting next to me at the bar heard that I had just arrived in town for the first time and introduced himself as Richard and also introduced me to the Jamaican guy he was chatting with named Lyndon, whom he had also just met.

Richard looked in his late forties, but had sort of an Elvis Comeback Special haircut and sideburns and a pockmarked face. He explained that his first trip to Costa Rica was only 11 months ago and this was already his 5th trip. He said he liked the lifestyle and was in town this time to talk to some people about buying some property. Richard, Lyndon and I chatted for a while and they both insisted I needed to go check out the bar in the Del Ray Casino a few blocks away, just to see what it’s all about. It was New Year’s Eve so I said I would at least walk through it to appease them.

I had read that prostitution is legal and out in the open in Costa Rica, so I knew what they were hinting at. At that point, Richard started buying the beers for Lyndon and me, along with mixed drinks for himself. Richard and Lyndon had already planned on going to the Del Ray for a look themselves and soon all three of us left the Nashville bar. I wasn’t wearing any cologne and I don’t think Lyndon was either, but fortunately Richard was wearing enough himself for all of us. We walked through two other casinos on the way, but neither had the reputation that the Del Ray evidently had.

The Web site of my own hotel, which was still only a couple blocks away, promised its own 24-hour casino, but in reality it was an unglamorous room just off the lobby that contained about 20 slot machines and an idle roulette table. These places looked much more like real Vegas casinos, but I was a little uneasy about hanging around there based on the fact that Richard was so thrilled to be there himself for non-gambling reasons.

We soon arrived at the famed Del Ray and the casino didn’t appear to be more crowded or special than the other places we had just walked through. We made a beeline for the bar, which is up a few steps on the far side of the casino floor. I was finally able to see what they had been talking about. It took a while to completely sink in, and luckily Richard kept buying the drinks, but it was New Year’s Eve, after all.

The bar itself is large enough for about 100 people and looked on the surface to be just like any bar that would be in any nice, franchise Mexican restaurant. The thing that was unusual about the place is the two distinct groups of people there. The men ranged in age from about 25 to about 60 and (not including me) probably averaged about a 3 or 4 on the 1 to 10 attractiveness scale. The women ranged in age from about 20 to about 30 and averaged around a 9 on the 1 to 10 scale. Seriously, these were some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in one room and it was more than a little creepy to see the group of men gathered there. If I hadn’t already expected a “flirtatious” atmosphere I would have thought I was in the Bizarro World of singles bars. The beautiful women seemed to be the aggressors and many of them had managed to pair off and were cuddling with the lecherous men.

It was pretty entertaining. Richard and Lyndon promised me that this was a very mellow night there; it’s normally much wilder and the 50/50 woman/man ratio is normally much heavier with girls. It was a little surprising that it wasn’t like a strip club in that the girls seem to wait for the men to make a move rather than trolling the room indiscriminately. Because of this, it was very easy to just sip our drinks and observe without any pressure to get involved.

Richard left the group a couple times to sweet talk some girls, but Lyndon explained he was married and was just there to look. Lyndon also pointed out that he was the only “negro” in the place, which of course, was true. He looked younger, but he told me he was 40-years-old, which I thought was interesting because he was a Jamaican guy who was evidently named after the new sitting American president at the time.

I was starting to get tired, but midnight was approaching and it seemed like a surreal enough place to be on New Year’s Eve. Richard bought one last round of drinks and the radio station that was blaring through the sound system started an uninspired countdown to the New Year. Everyone in the casino behind us and the bar itself stopped to observe the moment, except for three Chinese guys at a nearby roulette table who seemed suitably unimpressed that we westerners had made it up to the year 2005. Their body language made it obvious that the gambling could not resume fast enough for them.

I shook hands with a few nearby patrons and then asked which direction would get me back to my hotel. I went the direction I was pointed in, which turned out to be the wrong way. The streets were fairly deserted and it was a little scary, but I soon found my way back to my hotel, alone, of course.

The next day I had a reservation on a 2:30 p.m. van to Fortuna, which is the small town near the base of the famously active Arenal Volcano. The van driver appeared in the lobby of my hotel almost 30 minutes early, but the timing was perfect, as I had just checked out. I was the first passenger and we were about 20 miles out of town before we arrived at another small hotel to pick up the only other two people to join us. A young French couple came on board and we set off on the winding mountain roads to Fortuna. I was disappointed to learn that even though I paid $25 for the ride as opposed to $5 for the normal locals bus, the driver spoke no English. It turned out not to be an issue.