Day 54: Alajuela, Costa Rica

You know how last post we wrote that Alajuela is a pretty sketchy place and that overall, it really sucks? Well, let´s revisit that for a moment. It´s our last day in Central America, after a (mostly)very lovely time, and we were just trying to get our things in order and ready to fly to Brazil for Carnival tomorrow afternoon.

It was a pretty bad start anyway with some minor food poisoning from that horrid Chinese food last night (yeah yeah, it should´ve been obvious right?). We spent the day organizing lodging for Carnival and getting our paperwork straight, etc. Nothing terribly exciting to report anyway.

We were at the hostel (unnamed because we do not want to taint an otherwise ok hostel) doing some work and decided to head out for dinner before coming back and turning in for the night.  We were gone for 1-2 hours at the most. Got back to our bunks and our room and bags had been completely ransacked, stuff lying all over the place.

We surveyed the room and immediately realized that we were missing both our laptops and our electricity converters and Lin was also missing her camera, mp3 player, and her bag of electronics cables, and extra memory cards.

Seconds after fully realizing what had happened, we rushed out to the hostel owner and spanglished what we had just found and tried to figure out who did this and where that bastard was now. We spent the next 5 hours dealing with the police and OJI (a separate investigation unit kind of like the FBI) through the hostel owner who spoke no English and his very helpful daughter who spoke some. Neither police officers spoke any English and our Spanish is poorly equipped for dealing with police reports and robberies.

What ensued was the hostel owner repeatedly explaining to the police that he had no idea how it could´ve happened but it was a dorm and people are in and out of rooms all the time and we should´ve told him we had expensive electronics so he could´ve put them away and blah blah blah. It was 2 hours of covering his own ass which monstrously hindered us from getting the police (who were busy telling stories and jokes most of the time they were at the hostel) to actually do something to help us.

By 11pm, we´d accomplished nothing more than massive headaches and severally mounting anger with probably life threateningly high blood pressure. Later, one of the officers told us that we were lucky we didn´t come back while the robber was in our room. Actually, we would´ve both been ecstatically insanely happy to have met face to face with the asshole who robbed us. But, we would also be in prison now for the horrible things we would´ve done.

What´s worse is that earlier that morning, some fat bastard opened our door and started to come in with an air of purpose while we were in there and acted like “Oops, wrong room.“ There were only a couple of other guests who were staying at this particular hostel. And, this particular fat bastard had booked two nights and only given a driver´s license as ID at check-in and the hostel owner hadn´t bothered to get his travel companion´s ID at all! The thieving bastard left just an hour before we returned with his backpack, telling the hostel owner that he was going to do laundry.

Of course when the police arrived and heard about the suspect, they opened his room and saw everything was gone. I can not put into words the amount of anger we experienced at being robbed. It wasn´t so much the stuff as it was all the photos we took over the course on 2 months in all of Central America. Overall not a great way to end an otherwise great time in Central America.