I had the best of intentions. I would go to Puerto San Jose, do the charter boat marina, go to Puerto Quetzal for the cruise ships and talk with captains/boat drivers and get the story of being on the waterfront, hooking up those sail fish….alas…the shuttle from Antigua dropped me off at the offramp for San Jose and along came a ‘chicken bus’….hopped aboard, the gringo with suitcase and panama hat, and for 2 quetzals…downtown San Jose! whoopee…no, less than whoopee…my hotel was a ways further and the tuk-tuks in town are not motorized…they’re pedal powered. ..add 200 lbs of gringo, a suitcase of maybe 30 lbs and the poor bastard had to huff and puff. The hotel, the Posada Quetzal, wasn’t quite what the photos on their web-site offered…a decent pool, good staff but the room I was given was reminiscent of a summer time campsite…thatched roof for a ceiling, bare fluorescent lights and a few bugs..rough wooden floors, no glasses, no ice and no towels: malo…I found a store/tienda across the street that had a dust-covered bottle of Ron Botran Anejo…so old that the cork broke off..half in the bottle, half out..a dip in the pool and a snooze later, I woke up in the early evening. Across the black sand of the football field were the lights of another hotel, right on the beach…Posada de Don Carlos…my kind of place.
I love beach scenes
I moved the next morning…my driver w/the 9mm and co-conspirator in nocturnal adventures, arrived about noon. A friend of his called, with an assortment of women to meet…we met, we drank another bottle of old rum(but with a good cork)and retired for a nap before meeting them later at their work place…I assumed, wrongly, that they worked in a club, a bar or such…nope…red lights, nude dancing and propositions of the more personal type…we’d stopped at the store for their last dusty-covered bottle of rum: by this time, the widow in black had seen me buy three bottles in 24 hours….hmm…a serious gringo….off to the club, which opened at 8 pm…no sign, no clue of the action inside…locked gate, admission only by permission…ah, good car, gringo..must be money inside…to be continued..must sleep and rest.
