The Journey to Jaco: Insane Rental Car Adventures

After the coffee tour, we had a very adventurous trip to Jaco, a coastal beach town. We were driving down the road from the hostel in Monteverde to the main road, and we realized our GPS was not working. It would not connect to any satellites or open any maps, and that was indeed a problem. We drove back to the hostel to use their phone to call the car rental place and arranged to meet a guy from their company in a town called Orotina on the way to Jaco. The drive back to the hostel was literally less than 200 meters away, and on that short drive back we drove over a sharp rock and heard a loud noise. We didn't think much of it, but after getting back into the car to head out for the second time we realized that the back right tire was completely flat and that we were driving just on the rim. It had started raining crazy amounts by this time, which was also good timing. We went back to the hostel to ask where to go to get the tire changed with our spare, because the rental people had taken the toolkit from the car for some reason and we had no way to lift up the car by ourselves. The guy came out and inflated our tire enough to drive to the garage, which was really luckily right down the road from them. The guys there had the tire changed in about 5 minutes and it only cost 2,000 colones, which is about $3.50! We were pretty impressed by that and got back on the road and started down the pass to the coast.

About 15 kilometers down the road, a guy driving behind us flagged us down and told us our wheel that had been replaced was wobbling a lot and that it looked dangerous. Sure enough, the spare tire we had was defective, and we had to stop at another garage where they patched the original popped tire and put that back on for another 3,000 colones. So cheap! We made it to Orotina only 2.5 hours late and got a new GPS and a new spare tire from the guy that looked really bored of waiting for us, but hey, if they hadn't of given us a messed up GPS in the first place, this all would have never happened. We ate a quick lunch at Killer Munchie in Orotina, home of the Killer Sandwich and Killernacho, and made it to Jaco at 7pm or so. It was for sure an experience, but we made it and it was all good in the end.