An Unexpected Central America Trip ✈️ Part 2
San José and an Unplanned Nightmare
After a few fantastic days, we flew to San José, Costa Rica.
We didn’t have very high expectations for the city based on what we had read, and that turned out to be accurate. There’s a beautiful national theater and a small but interesting museum, but overall it’s not a place we would spend much time again.
Unfortunately, this was also where things changed.
We stayed at Hotel Presidente, one of the better-rated hotels in the city. We had dinner there and breakfast the next morning. A few hours after breakfast, we both started feeling unwell. My joints were aching, I felt nauseous, and I had diarrhea. For me, it passed after about five hours.
For my husband, it was just the beginning.
He developed severe food poisoning that, even after eleven days, still hasn’t fully resolved. We spent the second night in San José mostly in the hotel room. The night before we were supposed to drive two hours to Jacó, he fainted while sitting on the toilet. Thankfully, he didn’t seriously injure himself.
Imodium didn’t help.
We managed to postpone the drive by a few hours. That gave him enough stability that the bathroom visits were about two hours apart. Fifteen minutes before arriving in Jacó, we had to urgently find a restroom again.
On the fourth night in Jacó, at 4:00 a.m., he was so unwell that we had to go to a local clinic. It wasn’t a big hospital, just a local clinic, but the care was excellent. We communicated using Apple’s translator app, and it worked surprisingly well.
The rest of our time in Costa Rica was quiet. No big adventures. Just lying on sunbeds, reading, and waiting for him to recover.
This wasn’t the trip we planned. But it’s the trip we got.