outdoors,  travel

Travel Day: GPS and Costa Rica

November 3, 2023 /

Ah, the joys of traveling using GPS in a foreign country! After this particular day’s adventure and a conversation with a local person, we now understand the struggle and harships we encountered! We traveled from Manuel Antonio to La Fortuna for the second part of our trip. We used the app Maps.me, a map system that uses your phone satellite location instead of wifi to travel since we did not want to pay international fees. At the car rental, we were encouraged to use Waze instead of Google but from what I understood, all apps would have probably ended up with the same detours.

We departed from Quepos before 9 am in hopes to arrive at our next location mid afternoon. The travel time should have been about 5 hours. Following GPS along the large national roads is very easy. But what happens when you take smaller roads? As we found out, a few years ago, the government in Costa Rica started calling all roads national roads. Google maps and other satellites then started including smaller roads (paved and unpaved) in their route calculations.

The road to La Fortuna is going to take you through mountains no matter what. These paved roads can be a little scary with drop offs, small lanes and trucks coming barelling in the other directions, but the views are quite beautiful. We stopped at this beautiful lunch area for a break and for directions after being sent up a rocky road up a steep hill (we had to back it up and it was very stressful).

The trick to not being sent on these shortcut non paved (pretty much non roads) is to know which town order you should follow, so that you can make it to your destination in one piece. We did not have this problem going to Quepos but we sure did going to La Fortuna. Once we did this, the problem was solved thanks to the lady at that lunch spot.

We arrived in one piece! By the way, I would never drive on any of those mountain roads myself,  as even the real roads were scary. At one point the tires went off the road as my husband swerved to miss being hit by an incoming truck and the side the mountain was on had very deep road side gutters.

We were rewarded with fresh juice at check in and the beautiful view of Arenal Volcano when we arrived at the resort. We were thankful to have arrived without any harm. It was easier returning as we were on the side that the mountain was and because we were able to take a main highway road to the capital after the first 1h30-2 hours of the trip. Driving back to San Jose was around 3 and 1/2 hours.

A bientôt!

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