Finding the lost city was not easy.
Several people told us the way to go and we found signs pointing us from the town of Turrialba to Guayabo National Monument. The descent to the archaeological site was death-defying. We inched our way down a gravelly one-lane road. That's when I wondered if we were going to survive.
We were slowed even more when the car of Costa Ricans in front of us stopped and everyone except the driver poured out to walk the last couple of miles to the site.
For a different side of Costa Rica, La Costa de Papito offers bungalows near the laid-back village of Puerto Viejo, where there is no bank but lots of beach time.
(La Costa De Papito)
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Guayabo is a 50-acre park. Only a small percentage has been excavated. Historians believe that the city was inhabited by 10,000 or so people from 1000 B.C. until A.D. 1502. No one is sure why the inhabitants left. The abandoned city was reclaimed by the jungle and lost to the known world for several hundred years.
A little over a century ago, Guayabo was rediscovered, between two rivers and in the shadow of Turrialba Volcano. An ancient stone road runs through the site. The bases of various structures, such as a temple and a market, have been preserved. Archaeologists also found a complex aqueduct system.
When we finally eased our car into the welcome center's parking area, there were a handful of tourists and a few guides waiting to show people around the monument. Fortunately we were paired with Edgardo Soto, a gentle-souled student at the nearby University of Costa Rica.
As he walked us through the reconstruction, he said, "I always talk about the structures, but that is not what I like the most."
He said there seems to be in Guayabo a "door to a spiritual world." He spoke of the religious vibes. And as his soft voice searched for the right words in English, the site had the feel of holiness, and there was in the constant breezes a sense of otherworldliness. A pair of brilliantly bright toucans zipped from one tree to another. Gorgeous butterflies flitted about.
Soto explained that Guayabo may have been a cultural bridge between the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. More than 60 petroglyphs have been found so far at Guayabo, most taken to a museum in San Jose. Soto showed us a couple that remain, one depicting water and another of a man's face.
Little is really known about Guayabo, he said.
And in many ways, it is still a lost city.
I felt like that about the whole country. There is much that is known about Costa Rica; there is a lot that is not.
We weren't sure, for instance, how to get the hell out of Guayabo.
