Cobble Circles and Standing Stones: Archaeology at the Rivas Site, Costa Rica

Chapter One: Getting There

From the Coca Cola to the General The name of the central bus station in San José is derived from Costa Rica’s Coca Cola bottling plant. The “Coca Cola” is not a single building but rather a section of the city streets near the central market. Different bus companies with routes to one part of the country or another are found in separate complexes of large open-air garages, waiting areas, restaurants, shops, and the streets themselves. The place is in a constant state of high energy as everything from modern luxury coaches, as tall as the buildings, to rickety, repainted U.S. school buses arrive and depart in smoke and noise. The exhaust fumes of idling buses mix with the odors of human sweat and dust or, in the rainy season, mildew. Bus travel is the primary means of transportation for all but the wealthiest Costa Ricans and tourists. The sidewalks are crowded. Pickpockets elbow their way through clumps of prim schoolgirls and grandmothers . Long-haired Californian blonds lug their huge, sheathed surfboards down the streets. Lottery ticket sellers jostle with Canadian ecotourists, European latterday hippies, American Latter-Day Saints, and, occasionally , archaeologists. Two bus lines service travel on the Panamerican Highway south to San Isidro de El General, one of the largest cities of the Southern Zone of Costa Rica (fig. 1.1). From there, one can continue on to Buenos Aires, the other main city of the Southern Zone, or to Panama , or stop and take a short ride from San Isidro to smaller, nearby towns, such as Rivas. From early in the morning to late into the evening, buses leave the Coca Cola for San Isidro. The touring coaches are big, lumbering things. The passengers sit high above the road, perched on top of a spacious luggage compartment. The doors of the luggage compartment are carefully guarded until the last minute by the bus driver’s assistant. He shoves taped-up cardboard boxes, stuffed plastic bags, and suitcases into the space with great authority at a frantic pace, like what one might expect of an officer assigning lifeboat seats on the Titanic. People line up in the narrow space between the bus and the walls of the garage, piling on a few minutes before departure. Heat, humidity, and chapter one getting there human body odors reach record levels in the bus. Three or four clouds of different perfumes are rising off of young women to waft through the bus like small-scale chemical attacks. Pomade floats around the heads of several men like the halos of saints, though saints they likely are not. Even though seats are assigned when tickets are purchased, there always seems to be much fussing by one person or another in trying to get settled, adding to the discomfort. Babies are wailing , grandmothers are yelling out the window to the families they are leaving. In addition to the driver’s radio, another two or three are blasting several different vigorous Latin melodies simultaneously. There are 12 rows of seats, arranged 2 by 2 on each side of the aisle with 5 seats at the back, totaling 53 altogether . For anyone over five and a half feet in height, there is insufficient legroom, and one must either sit with knees splayed or extended into the aisle. The driver is the last to board. He adjusts his salsa-playing radio and his sunglasses, and the bus roars off, swinging out into the narrow street. A considerable amount of time is spent winding through the avenues of San José to reach the main highway . Depending on city traffic, about 15 minutes pass before reaching the four-lane highway that heads south. Driving through the Central Valley, after half an hour 2 | getting there 1.1. Southern Pacific Costa Rica with archaeological sites and modern towns and cities. Map by Jennifer Ringberg. the bus reaches the outskirts of Cartago. This was the country’s old capital, founded in 1563 but rocked by earthquakes and finally abandoned in 1823. Although nearby San José became the new capital, Cartago is still renowned for its famous statuette of the Black Virgin and the rock on which she was found, and it remains a center of pilgrimage for people throughout Costa Rica and beyond. Just outside Cartago, the bus veers right toward the Talamanca mountain range that is part...