During my senior year of college I managed to convince the University of San Diego that it would be worth their while to sponsor me on a week-long trip to Costa Rica and Panama to examine their tourism infrastructure as research for my senior thesis. Not sure how I pulled that off but I do remember spending several hours chasing a paper trail all over campus. Anyway, this lucky strike let me skip a week of school in April to travel whirlwind style and alone to Costa Rica and Panama.

My first stop was Manuel Antonio National Park and Playa Espadilla Sur. It was pure paradise: empty beaches, iridescent sunsets, toucans, and ocean water as warm as bath water. Perfect and pleasant would be an understatement. Like a good college student, I opted to take the local buses between San Jose and Manuel Antonio. It's about four hours overland travel, so not a big deal. At four dollars each way, it is also highly economical compared to the 45 minute flight. The bus ride to the beach was a breeze (minus the part where I left my bag on the bus and had to chase it down on its return route) and buying the ticket went smoothly, as well, even after several warnings about the grittiness of the Coca-Cola ticket station.

It was a dark, stormy night on my bus ride back. Ok, that was a little melodramatic. The day was nice and sunny, literally just another day in paradise. The buses give assigned seats, and I ended up next to a British man reading the same book as me. That made conversation very easy for the first three hours of the bus ride. As it started to get dark around six pm, it did indeed start to rain and storm. And then the bus broke down. I had NO idea what would happen next. Everyone was speaking Spanish, and an awful lot of men were arguing, grumbling, and poking at the bus engine. One of the fun parts about being in a different country is that you don't know how the system works, but when you have an overnight bus to Panama to catch, it is much more convenient to understand how the system works. So I didn't know if they intended to fix the bus, and get us to San Jose that night, wait for another bus to come pick us up, or just sit and continue to fuss. I also didn't know how long any of the above might end up taking. GC was supposed to pick me up at the bus station and we were going to have dinner together before I got on the bus to Panama, and I did manage to borrow someone's cell phone and tell her what happened, and that I would call her when I had a better plan. John, my British seat mate, asked me if I wanted to hitchhike. All my life I have been told that hitchhiking is a bad idea. It was so deeply ingrained me that ordinarily I would not have even thought twice about it. But in this case, my other option was to sit on a bus, in the rain, without a friend, not able to speak Spanish well enough - was this a better choice?  Hell, no!

John and I hitched a ride to the airport, and we did have to pay for it, but everything turned out fine. The driver let us borrow his cell phone to call our friends and the whole thing was smooth and simple. I had to wait at the airport for a little while and definitely got some strange looks but I still managed to have dinner with GC and catch my bus to Panama.

My favorite part about this experience is how obviously it broke down preset ideas I had. Right afterwards I had this entirely new faith in humanity (ahh, naivety at its finest) but still it was incredibly refreshing. To do something I was deathly afraid of, and then everything turned out alright, gave me this intense feeling of being alive. It also opens the door to flexibility in a lot of other world views...