1 post tagged “ujarras”

Travis has the work van for a week or so because his boss is away attending a conference in London.  We took advantage of the transport to get out of town at the weekend.  North of here the Palmares festival is going on.  From what I can make out it's a cross between the Calgary Stampede and a huge New Year's party which involves ferocious amounts of drinking and eating, mainly drinking, with a bit of horse riding thrown in.  The road to the town is crammed with cars, buses, and the odd horse, and the town itself is jammed full of beer and food tents.  So we decided to go south.  Although I wouldn't have minded seeing the spectacle.

Just past Cartago, the site of Las Ruinas, we found Paraiso and the Valle Orosi.  Paraiso is a real Costa Rican town - only the main road, which doubles as the highway, is paved.  All the other streets are packed dirt lined with the small fortress-like houses you find here in the poorer parts of town.  There are no yards - the houses touch each other on all sides.  I wish I'd taken some photos because it's hard to describe, but I didn't think to stop.

We turned off the highway at Paraiso and drove into the valley to Orosi.  It's a tiny town set in the hollow of some steep-sided hills.  I was reminded of Waipori (the village I grew up in, in New Zealand), except that

Waipori doesn't have banana palms or coffee plantations! and liked it a lot.  Travis, being prairie boy, found the lack of sky a bit odd.  Orosi's the kind of place where everyone knows each other.  The cafe we ate lunch in was across the road from a row of taxis.  The taxi drivers lounged against their cars and most everyone who walked or rode by stopped to exchange greetings - handshakes and kisses - and chat.

We wandered around the town after lunch, found the great store in the picture, and looked at the church which is Orosi's main claim to fame.  It's a low-slung stucco affair, not very glamorous, but strong enough to withstand a couple of hundred years in an earthquake

zone.  We couldn't go inside because there was some kind of ceremony going on inside - First Communion probably judging by the number of children running around, and the glimpse I got of a woman photographing a group of white-robed children at the front of the church.

We checked out another small town in the valley - Ujarras.  We got there via an incredibly steep and very narrow road.  Parts of it had slipped away and the roading people had just put up a few warning pegs to make the road one-lane.  Good views though.  Ujarras's claim to fame is also a church.  In this case a very beautiful ruin.  It was badly damaged by flooding about 100 years ago and is now part of a carefully maintained park.

We managed to find all these towns and get in and out of San Jose without getting lost.  Which is a first - we usually get lost in the back streets of San Jose when we try to come back home.  And getting in and out of even small towns is tricky because the main streets are usually one way.  You come across a No Hay Paso sign (which means approximately "there is no through road") and get diverted into a maze of back streets.  Once that happens your chances of finding the highway again are not good!