When she announced to my sister and me that we were going on a family vacation to Costa Rica, our mother didn’t lead with the possibility of seeing the still-active Arenal Vocano glowing in the evenings, nor the country’s vivid wildlife, nor even the opportunity to learn to surf on the beaches of Tamarindo. Instead, because the mere thought of our renting a car to transverse the knotty roads though the rain forest gave her the vapors, mom’s take on the novelty of our all-girls holiday was to be found in these two words: “private driver.”
Thus it was that the three of us we were buckled into a large mini-van by Alejandro, the cheerful driver charged with taking us the 4 hour drive from landlocked La Fortuna to the Pacific coast. As the road climbed up and down around Lake Arenal, our itinerary promised sweeping vistas of green and blue, plummeting waterfalls, and the occasional glimpse of a monkey or sloth.
But Alejandro had other plans for amusing his guests. Once we were away, he pressed a button extending a small screen from the van’s ceiling. Picked up from the airport in a similar van a few days earlier, we’d watched a welcome video offering us a few useful phrases in Costa Rican Spanish, and assumed we were in for more of the same. We continued to stare out the windows with our cameras in hand, reveling in the equatorial landscape and scrutinizing the tops of tall trees for swinging mammalian shapes.
Then Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” flooded the speakers, and George Michael’s 80’s pompadour filled the screen on the van’s ceiling. The hairdo had pulsed through only a single chorus before it was replaced by Blondie’s Debbie Harry urging “Call Me,” a sentiment barely uttered before it was replaced by Cindy Lauper’s maxim that “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” We stopped looking for sloths.
Over the next 3 hours, as our van chugged its way though the ends of the rainforest, past farms and fields and the provincial capital of Liberia, the Costa Rican scenery competed with singing along to the best of English New Wave. The Human League, Culture Club, and Modern English all took their brief turns, punctuated occasionally by Meat Loaf or Celine Dion telling us that their hearts will go on or that they’d do anything for love.
And, conducted by our trusty private driver, we sang through it all. The tourist’s incongruities were palpable: instead of properly appreciating colonial architecture, we belted out “we’re only human – born to make mistakes”; instead of stopping to explore small villages in the 90 degree heat, we crooned “we’ll stop the world and melt with you” from the comforts of our air-conditioned minivan. In favor of bopping along to “Karma Chameleon,” we missed countless opportunities to spot local reptiles clinging to the trees.
We perhaps did not do justice to the beauties of Costa Rica in that four-hour drive. But mom was right – that private driver was worth every penny.
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