Road to the Highlands

We drove north and inland from the beach, making our way back to Costa Rica's central valley. At Atenas, we turned onto a narrow, circuitous road that sliced through hills into bowls of green. Bright-colored homes stood out on sharp hillsides above cornfields. We took a couple of wrong turns and asked for directions in Palmares, a town where the one-way streets and bumper-car traffic told us we were back in the populated areas near the capitol. The road took us into a broader valley where we found San Ramon, a large town or a small city with a coffee refinery on its outskirts that provides much of the local employment. The bed and breakfast where we stayed, Angel Valley Farm, lies down a dirt road in the middle of a countryside that I would classify as Eighteenth Century Pastoral. Hills are spotted with the variegated colors of pasture and trees and dairy cows.

A converted farmhouse, the bed and breakfast was painted in cheerful yellows and blues, and there was a vast kitchen where they prepared eggs every morning from the chicken coop out in front. I seem to recall the bathroom walls were built out of exposed stone, lending a cavernous feel. It was cold, and the sound of the wind was indistinguishable from the ocean waves I remembered from that morning.