The road out of Nosara, like the road to Puerto Angel in Mexico, "isn't even paved with good intentions."

We headed out of the "beachfront" hotel section of Nosara (a congenial maze of gravel roads with variously rusted signs at each junction) toward the north, looking for the village of Nosara proper, which we had not seen in our three days there. Shortly we came upon it, dusty ramshackle buildings stretched along its approach with few if any side streets, and nothing like a central settlement. A couple of bars, a couple of 'sodas', an auto repair, a couple of shops, and then the obligatory soccer pitch (this one extra large, but barren) with various tin-roofed businesses arrayed around its perimeter. Finally at the far end we found the correo, and pulled up to buy our postcard stamps.

After that odd transaction, we set out again.

Now here was the dilemma - Joy knew of a certainty that if we retraced our path - some 3-4 km - we could be on the "main" road to Nicoya, by which we had come into Nosara originally. Three factors inhibited me: one, I disliked backtracking; two, the map (well, one of the maps) showed a different road heading northeast; and three, despite our prior experience and Joy's certainty, I couldn't get settled in my mind's eye just how the road back to the southeast connected to the main routes northeast.

In any case, I was driving. This settled the discussion for the moment ("Let's just try this way"), and on the logic that we could still backtrack if the road ended, we proceeded out of Nosara on a new route northward.

Now, determining if the road has ended is exactly the problem. Since Arenal we had left behind all our comfortable notions of what constituted a developed thoroughfare for public passage, and the threshold for that distinction had dropped still lower in Guanacaste. Consequently, when we shortly found ourselves on a rutted path along a fence (with grazing cattle on both sides of it), the car heaving slowly over giant lumps and stones, it was difficult to be sure that the time to backtrack had come. We pressed on.

The next thirty or forty minutes (after a while even backtracking didn't seem a viable option, as we could hardly imagine that the rigors to come would exceed those we'd endured) were in retrospect a thrilling adventure (if you count a steadily sinking lump in one's stomach as a thrill). It became plain that the road we were trying to follow was indeed used by vehicles, though perhaps only rarely, and perhaps only locally, and without a doubt only by 4WD trucks. It meandered more or less in the riverbed of what I think was the Nosara River (to be confirmed when some large-scale maps I've ordered arrive), and we were grateful it was still the end of the dry season - I very much doubt this route is passable from May through August.

The path would hump through a wooded section, perhaps with signs of human activity - a fence, a shack, a tethered horse - but usually with none, and emerge onto another bend in the stream. It might be a steep little dip on a hairpin turn, through the water and then back up into trees; or it might be a wide open gravelly flood plain (see photo), punctuated by last season's uprooted trees. In the latter case, the road would sometimes divide - once into three forks - but we realized these were not really choices, but variations on a theme. Apparently when one trail floods out, the locals blaze another, and invariably we found the courses rejoined each other after the crossing.

Large sections of the riverbed appeared completely dry - there were dozens of iguanas, some impressively large - but then we'd reach running water again. The car itself never had a problem with these wet crossings.

Referring constantly to our three maps, and to the compass, we comforted ourselves that we were indeed traveling steadily northeastward. It looked as if the next settlement might be Pilas Blancas, so we took to asking if we were on the right road. Well - we asked twice. Once, a campesino nodded happily in recognition, and then broke into a wide foolish grin and said "¡Clara! ¡Sí! ¡Pilas Blancas!" This did not particularly reassure us, as it sounded as if he might have meant:

"This is the only road, so of course it's the road to Pilas Blancas (it's also the road to Texas, you silly gringos)."

...or...

"Sure, this is the road, but why you're on it, or why anyone would take it to Pilas Blancas - or indeed, go to Pilas Blancas at all - escapes me."

Later in Alajuela, we were watching an American movie with Spanish subtitles on Costa Rican TV. In it, a character says sarcastically, "Yeah, sure..." and the subtitle read, "Claro." If we had understood this idiomatic usage, we would have been even more concerned.

The second person we asked appeared in an extraordinary tableau in what seemed to be the middle of literally nowhere. We had come down one of those dips into the streambed, this time with steep ravine walls on either side. For a moment it seemed as if there was no road at all (time to turn back yet?) and we were simply driving along the rocky stream. As we rounded the bend, we were confronted by two figures on our right, as surprised at the mirage of a lumbering silver four-by-four as we were at them. A man and a woman, frozen in mid-gesture, looked blankly across at us as we slowed and rolled down our window to ask our way.

More remarkably, while she wore a conventional skirt and white blouse with lace collar, he wore bathing trunks, an open shirt, and snorkeling goggles. I think he also had on some sort of footwear - sandals perhaps. As we stopped, he pushed the goggles up onto his forehead. We could only imagine that he had been fishing - crayfish maybe - but the creek there could only have been inches deep.

I was transfixed by the oddity of the scene. There were no other clues - no habitation nearby, no horse, no bicycle, no basket or bucket - and it took me an endless awkward moment to lean across Joy in the front seat and eventually spit out the question - was this the way to Pilas Blancas? Sí, he answered, with a gesture; the woman remained impassive.

For all we know, of course, he was a biologist researching caddisfly larvae - but to appearances, they were country people, to whom our extravagant transport, superfluous possessions, transience, and ignorance must have seemed ... bizarrely inappropriate.

Not far past that point we reached a fork in the road - a track led steeply up on each side of the stream - and this time it seemed that our choice would make a difference - surely both roads led to the highland, separated by this deep ravine. Which side of the ravine did we want to be on? Fooled again! I think we went to the left, and after driving straight up (we needed the ultra-low 4WD gear) we just as abruptly swooped straight down - back to the stream bed. This was getting ridiculous.

But it was a taste of things to come. We finally left the increasingly narrow ravine behind and rose permanently into the hills. And rose, and rose. Still on very questionable dirt tracks, we arced and looped across a memorable landscape, climbing ever higher. The hills were lumpy rounded peaks jumbled in every direction, with awkward scrunched valleys falling off first to one side and then the other. The contrast of this precarious height to the blind meandering in the ravine was exhilarating.

The thing that struck me later was that the road followed the ridge line, from peak to saddle. It was a road charted by people on foot or hoof, not by vehicular engineers, who would have found an isocline and cut a ledge into the hills for a level road to follow, however labyrinthine. But such a work assumes you have the map in mind and furthermore know where you're going - and have committed to maintaining the carved hillside - and to begin with have an interest in level travel (i.e., heavy loads, equaling commerce). The people who plotted these roads just stood on a hilltop and headed for the next hilltop.

And what of Pilas Blancas? Not too far into these hills, we came upon, and just as quickly passed through, a cluster of buildings that we only inferred as Pilas Blancas because of a sign on one of them. If we'd been admiring the view in the other direction we would have missed it. A little later on, we suddenly noticed electrical and telephone lines more-or-less following the road, but the thrill we got from that was nothing to the thrill of arriving at a paved intersection!

I could write pages more about these impressions of "relative" industrialization, and our reactions to feeling isolated and lost. Just "knowing where one is" (in what context?) is a fascinating phenomenon. We were very careful, too, about our use of the term "civilization." It was tempting to say we'd returned to civilization when we saw power lines and macadam, but this idiom has its own dangers.

Everyone we encountered was essentially helpful and happy to deal with us - even when sometimes we could tell we were being overcharged or "assessed" for our gullibility. But in the same breath there'd be a flush of real generosity, such as at the truck stop where the proprietor made sure we were given the special galletas for dessert, and not charged.