Costa Rica, Continued

The cheque had been signed, but the night was still young. I caught our waiter's eye as we left the restaurant, and flagged him down with my best broken Espanol.

"Hola, Senor? Can we come back here later, and have you call us a cab?" I asked, as I squeezed forward to accommodate a large American family on their way to the back of the restaurant.

"Si," he replied graciously, "Just come back when you're ready to go."

With a little practice, we'd grown accustomed to the procedure required in order to order a taxi in Costa Rica. You would ask the nearest proprietor to order one for you, and he or she would return with a number. You then had to wait for the taxi with that number, and only that number. I'm not sure if it was because they'd had tourists stealing cabs, or if the cabs had been stealing tourists. But we had enough common sense to obey the rules laid out for us.

I nodded, and we moved out onto the streets of Quepos. It was after dark, but the town had too many tourists to pose any more than the smallest of threats. We casually fended off the many street vendors with a simple "No, gracias" and meandered our way through souvenir shops. Nonplussed by the astoundingly uniformity of the offerings, we ventured further in search of a late night watering hole.

The nice part of downtown Quepos spans about three square blocks, and we had no intention of leaving the nice part of downtown Quepos. Sweat clung to our skin, the night air little cooler than the brick wall we walked into when we stepped off the plane. Each block offered its own assortment of dive-bars, replete with flicking fluorescent lights, dust-covered bottles and a hodgepodge of tourists, locals and grizzled expats, The music of some eminently forgettable cover-band echoed off in the distance.

We meandered on, determined to find a suitable venue for an evening aperitif.

*

We were having lunch when we heard the news. Ivan told us when he came up to the Anaconda Restaurant to pick up a meal. We flagged down our waitress, signed the bill to our room and made our way down the hill as quickly as we could. We hoped, the most fleeting, briefest of hopes, that Ivan had been wrong. Let it be that little Toyota Yaris parked on the other side. We should have known better.

Once the Rio came into sight, we wondered how we could've walked past on our way to lunch without noticing it. The driver's side mirror was hanging on by no more than three electrical wires. What the hell had happened? What on earth was Avis going to say? And how the hell were we supposed to get home?

I ran through the list of horror stories that I'd had to initial beside before Avis would let us leave their compound. Stories of tourists being extorted by police, stories of tires being punctured and cars robbed by "helpful" bystanders. I looked at the wires. It looked like a big sign that read, for all of Costa Rica to see, "Stupid Gringo in Need of Robbing."

We made our way back to the main office, and set ourselves to waiting for the General Manager to arrive. After days of slowly adjusting to the heat, we hovered on the brink of shivering in the sudden shock of the air conditioning. We stared up at the clock and watched our last full day in Costa Rica evaporate to the tune of a ticking second hand.

Twenty minutes later, we were standing back over the poor, bedraggled Kia Rio once more. Miguel, the manager, had brought out the bulk of the staff that were on duty that morning, all of whom seemed to have no more of a clue of what had happened to the car than we did.

The gardener turned to Miguel, and offered a possible explanation. My Spanish wasn't great, but it was sufficient to understand what he was getting at.

"For the last time, a monkey did NOT throw a coconut at our mirror."

I wasn't sure how that theory first been raised, but it had stuck with a vengeance. Both the manager and the gardener looked dubious. I sighed.

"Okay, look. There's no dent on the top of the mirror," I said, gesturing at the Kia's wounded wing, "And there aren't any coconuts on the ground. Plus, the mirror is perhaps a half of a percent of the car's exposed surface area. What are the odds that a thrown coconut would hit the top of the driver's side mirror?"

The gardener and the manager both shrugged. I'd tried to imply that, maybe, perhaps, a member of the staff had been responsible. Miguel refused to bite on that one, and insisted that the only man who had been down that way was honest to a fault, and that he claimed that it wasn't his fault.

I looked over at Andrea, and did my best to keep the frustration from my face. No new guests had parked on that side of the car. The staff claimed that it wasn't their fault. It was NOT a damned coconut.

What the hell had ripped the mirror off of our car?