As sure as the sun will shine

After my parents and I made our tearful goodbyes at the international airport, I skipped downstairs, exhausted from one week of vacation yet jazzed for another, to pick up my friends Linsley and Dave, who were set to arrive in country any minute.

Yep, just any minute.

Any minute now.

The waiting area of the airport is nothing more than a parking lot. There are no seats, no benches, no TVs, no newspaper stands, no little shops selling bottled water and candy. There are only teams of tour guides holding signs bearing American names and hundreds of gringos pouring out of the airport exit in their quick-dry pants and Hi-Tek sandals.

With the help of a payphone and a friend who was sitting in front of a computer, I discovered L and D had missed their flight and wouldn't be getting in until 8:30 p.m. With more than six hours to kill, I took the bus back to San Jose to visit some friends. I was back milling around the airport exit doors by 8 p.m., just to discover the flight had been delayed two hours. But finally, my terminal-weary friends arrived and we made our way to the hotel for some much-needed rest. So that was the first day.

The next day it was off to Manuel Antonio, a touristy beach town about 122 kilometers from San Jose. Rather than waste (I say waste, my friends may have said invest) money on a chartered bus, I opted we ride the public bus. And, oh, what a ride it was. There were two lines of people standing in the aisle, it was hot, and our window wouldn’t open. Just a few seats ahead of us, a woman lost her breakfast all over herself (her window wouldn’t open either), and halfway through the four-hour trip, the cargo doors below the bus opened, and all of the suitcases went bouncing through the overgrown highway-side ditch. Luckily, we had our bags in our laps.

We arrived in Manuel Antonio unscathed and happy to be at the beach. Our bungalow (which we shared the first night with a couple from Kansas) was fine -- a little small and with a funny smell, but we were too hungry to look for something else. We made it to the closest restaurant just in time to get out of the first major downpour of the week.

By the next night, the Kansas couple had left, but the smell in our bungalow had really started to bother us. It smelled like it was coming from the sink or the toilet or the shower. D surmised it was the smell of backed-up sewage and set out to fix the problem. And because the sewage pipes emptied not into a septic system but out of a pipe that stuck out from the front of the bungalow, we were able to watch the progress right from our deck chairs. D turned on all the faucets and let them run for a couple of hours or so while L and I played double solitaire and relaxed amid the gentle sounds of sewage water trickling down the side of a mountain.

The smell dissapated some and we went to bed quite satisfied with ourselves for solving the sewage problem. Of course, we felt a bit sheepish when we awoke to find out the hotel had no water. It was time to move on, we decided.

So, it was off to Dominical, a remote beach village with its fair share of tourists, but not so many that you don’t notice you’re in a remote beach village. We splurged on a hotel with air conditioning and headed to the beach. By the next night, we were finally getting into the vacation groove. We all commented on how relaxed we were, how nice it was to have a few days to just do nothing. Yep, this vacation was going to be alright.

Then my back went out. One minute I was standing there with a ping-pong paddle in one hand, and the next minute I couldn’t stand, sit, move, lie down, nothing. We had to find a taxi to drive me the 250 yards back to the hotel. I had toe-curling muscle spasms all night. It took me at least an hour to get from my bed to the toilet and back to bed each time I had to get up to go to the bathroom. It was horrible. I've never in my life been in such pain. Seriously.

At 5 a.m., I’d had enough and decided it was time to bring L and D into my misery. Sobbing, I knocked on their door and blurted out that I needed a doctor and ya. Bleary-eyed, they dragged themselves out of bed. A few moments later a maintenance man at the hotel informed us there was no doctor, no pharmacy, no Red Cross, no nothing in this surfer's town with dangerous rip tides. We’d have to make the hour-long trip to San Isidro.

Considering I was having a hard time getting to and from the bathroom, a trip to San Isidro seemed out of the question to me. But what else could we do? We decided to think it over over breakfast. And that’s when we met Brandon.

"You guys looking for a doctor?" came a nice, gentle American voice from the table next to us.

Turns out our savior Brandon was in town with his wife, who is a doctor, who was at that very moment working with a local doctor. So there was a doctor in town! In fact, there were two! After breakfast, Dave walked down to find the local doctor and surmise if he was up to the job at hand. He came back to report that Dr. Gonzalez, God bless him, spoke English and would see me in 30 minutes.

Eventually, I made to Dr. Gonzalez's office, where he gave me two shots, a 45-minute massage and two prescriptions. L and D and I had canceled our plans to visit a nearby pre-Columbian stone and instead cabbed it twenty minutes away to the nearest pharmacy to get my meds. By morning, I could walk again!

Later that day, I put L and D, poor things, on another public bus and sent them on their way, alone, to San Jose. They were exhausted, and I think a little curious about whatever happened to that relaxing tropical vacation they had wanted.