Faith is driving up a dirt road to a mountain town you cannot see. I learned this as we made our way to Monteverde a couple days ago. We had all heard that the road would be rough, but when we actually saw it, calling it a “road” seemed to be a rather optimistic description.
When we didn’t see any signs for awhile, we stopped and asked a man walking by.
“Is this the road to Monteverde?”
“Yes, you can go this way, but the road is ugly and it’s better to go back to the highway and take the other road.”
Turning around sounded daunting since we’d driven for three hours already, coming from Nicaragua. Plus, none of us really understood his Spanish description of how to get to this “prettier” road. So we continued on.
From that point on, our only indications that we were going the right way were two spray-painted arrows on a brick wall, one man on a horse, and one farmer who stopped us to ensure that we didn’t make a common directional mistake that evidently had left many poor tourists wandering lost in the mountains.
Every time we trudged up another steep, rocky hill in our Daihatsu, I thought we’d see some town or sign of life in the distance. But every time, all we saw were more rolling hills and the long, winding dirt path we had come to trust as our guide.
As the sun sank lower into the valley, I couldn’t stop my mind from conjuring up images of the four of us huddled inside our tiny jeep in the dark, rationing our water and portioning our the remaining Ritz crackers and Oreos we had, waiting for morning to come. At one point we reached a ridge of a mountain that fell to both sides of us. We were on top of the world and the only thing we could see were cows grazing on the hillsides. But we kept going—no turning back now.
Four men on horseback, 3 pee-breaks (for poor, pregnant Shannon), 2 hours, and 1 spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean later, we rolled into the beginnings on the town of Santa Elena. To our amazement, a whole slew of amenities from a big Super Mercado, to a tree-house restaurant, to wireless Internet were available in this middle-of-nowhere place. We even ran into Chris, our former British roommate from back in Antigua. The next day we spent the day hiking through one of few remaining cloud forests in the world—and all because we stuck it out with our little dirt road.
-Jessie, March 22nd, 2007
