Driving in Costa Rica: Navigating the Challenges

I’ve now completed the travelling, so it is a good opportunity to talk about the main issues of getting around. The options are limited. Fly, bus or car, so I decided to rent a car, all the advice seemed to suggest the roads were safe and it would give us the independence with our travel schedule – and that proved to be correct.

It’s not for the nervous to be honest, driver or passenger, and you need a sense of humour to survive the jams. Generally, this has all worked out well, but a couple of the days we’ve spent driving have been pretty tough.

Don’t be put off, driving is generally safe and you be fine.

Some of the roads are great and others are disaster zones, the problem is you don’t know which or when a good road will completely lose it’s covering and become gravel or convert from a motorway into a single lane back road.

Some of the things that we didn’t expect include:

1. Satnav – Apple Maps doesn’t work at all, luckily Google Maps does but it gets lost easily. We’ve been sent all over the place unnecessarily, especially in remote locations. Sending us down dead end roads and then halfway down telling us to do a u turn. It often thought the best route through a remote village was to turn off the highway, go down the back lanes and rejoin the highway again half a mile ahead.
2. Lorries – There are giant lorries everywhere, it is their only form of logistics, and they take up a full 50% of the road, when they pass another lorry in the other direction, there is probably a max of 1m of space between the vehicles, so it is tight.
3. Unmarked speed humps and by potholes – they were probably marked at some stage but the yellow colour has gone so they are sleeping saboteurs. Unexpected bangs and bounces are never more than a few seconds away.
4. Lane widths, apart from being narrow, and having to watch out for lorries in particular, the edge of the carriageway is often the edge of the embankment and if a wheel goes over the edge the drop can be anything from 0.5m to 3 or 4 m, basically if you go off the edge you are stuffed.
5. Road markings – these are range from brand new to nonexistent, but mostly the latter. On older roads they have normally been worn out, and on new surface they seem to have given up, so there aren’t any. I didn’t try it, but driving at night must be an absolute horror show.
6.  Drains and Culverts – they run their drains and culverts down the sides of roads, so even if you are not on an embankment, it is not safe to pull of the road as there could be a deep drain or just an inspection hole, either way you are going to have a bad bump.
7. Petrol stations – there are plenty of them, probably about 25 miles apart on the main roads and they all have the same prices. They are also quite nice places, with toilets and a shop. They have an attendant that fills up the car with fuel.
8. Motorways -there is only one and that is currently being constructed between Limon and San Jose. This is a horror show as they are building it on the existing road so. At anytime you could be travelling along a brand new dual carriageway and then come around a bend to find a huge queue as you hit the next construction sight, which will also involve you hitting lots of potholes and craters.
9. Junctions – as the roads seem to have no lines, junctions seem to have no rules. No one is going to give way, but then they also seem to be waiting for something to happen, so I just took the initiative did the turn and waved apologetically to everyone !
10. One-way bridges – these are a hoot as you can see from the image. As you travel along a main road at 100kph you will suddenly come across a bridge which is one way at a time. So you suddenly have to stop and wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic. These are everywhere in the country and seem to be the source of most of the major traffic jams, as there is no way around them.

So, in summary, driving is OK as long as you have strong nerves, have a sense of humour, don’t have a nervous passenger, and you are not on a tight schedule. A lot of the Costa Rican cars that you see appear to date back to the 90s, newer cars seem to be rentals, and the rest are 4x4s of various vintages.

A quick summary of our trips.

1. San Jose to Port Viejo (Green route)– we were grateful that we had a day off as this was a tough trip, not helped by it being a national holiday. It was around 218km, should have taken 4 but it took 6.5 hours. Getting out of San Jose with Google Maps was bad enough, then there is the road through the mountains which seems to be a graveyard for broken down lorries. After that you hit the road to Limon which is being turned into a motorway while you are on it and as Limon is a major port, it is also full of container lorries. Finally, you hit the road that runs along the Caribbean coast down to Porto Viejo. That road is a lot easier, but it is still slow because every 10 minutes you are confronted by a narrow bridge and a contraflow system for traffic.
2. Porto Viejo to La Fortuna (Blue route) – unfortunately this involved the bad bits from the San Jose trip until you reach Squirres, where the San Jose traffic turns off and you head north. The bad news is that it is along the first of the narrow carriageways we had come across, and these are often raised. Overtaking is very difficult, so you end up sitting behind a lorry and letting that driver take the strain. When the road swung west towards La fortuna at Guipiles, things got easier and we had wider as we ran through the foothills of the Arenal Volcano, this journey should have been 4.5 hours, and not surprisingly, it took us over 6 hours to cover the 277km
3. La Fortuna to Jaco Beach (Black route) – well this one really did take the prize, 142km but the warning sign from Google Maps was it would take 3.5 hours weaving across the mountains. What we didn’t expect was to pass through a cloud forest at the highest point and have roads that were only partially surfaced. I don’t know if this was Google Maps being weird, but we went over some remote mountains and at times felt very lonely and lost. When we did finally rejoin civilisation, we discovered that people had been killing each other in cars and we joined a 2 hour queue because of a major accident, so we finally made it to Jaco after nearly 7 hours to cover 142k, so an average speed of 20kph, or 12mph. By this time, Wooksie, my long suffering wife, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown trying to follow Google Maps.
4. Jaco Beach to Porto Jiminez via Uvita (Orange route). Finally, a normal stretch of road, with no major roadworks or traffic jams and we actually arrived on schedule. 309km in 5.5 hours and that is roughly what it took. Along the way we had plenty of the narrow carriageways with lethal 10m drops on each side, we had the crazy culverts down the side of the streets in Udita, and as we approached Puerto Jimenez the roads were winding and slow, but that was what we expected. What we didn’t expect, when we arrived at Puerto Jimenez to explore the OSO peninsular, was that we had wasted our time. The roads to any of the beaches are only suitable for 4x4s, and we only had a saloon, so a very long way with not a happy outcome.
5. Jaco Beach to San Jose (Purple route) We then returned to Jaco Beach for a the beautiful sunsets and a chance to surf the perfect longboard break at the south end of the beach, then our final road back in San Jose which we had been dreading, but turned out to be quite straight forward in the end, other than the confused satnav and some missed junctions, but we got there in the end.

So, there are the facts about our experiences of the roads, I am still happy that driving was the right approach for us, and we did leave plenty of time on each trip, but it was always a huge relief to get to the hotel, have a recovery beer and swim.