Sharing the road… or hogging it all

I have enjoyed driving in Costa Rica. I have mentioned before how it has opened up some aspects of the way people live to me, but it is also just fun because it is continual active driving.

I have a theory that on one hand Costa Ricans (or Latin American drivers generally?) certain don’t know or disregard some norms of the road (fast traffic on the left, for example). However, because everyone is ignoring norms and because there are lots of potholes, etc., they are all more careful/defensive drivers than the typical U.S. driver. This is certainly true for me: in some ways when I’m driving in the U.S. I assume the other person will behave themselves, and someday I will probably pay for that assumption.

Add the fact that I’m driving a standard here, which I enjoy, and driving is a sport instead of a chore. You can still feel like a rally driver while heading down a road at 30 mph if you’re slaloming around potholes, randomly-stopping buses, and weaving motorcycles and also actively working the gears so that the caged hamsters can get you up and down the hills.

Here in Costa Rica you’re also dodging bicyclists and 4-wheelers that people take on the freeways. In Nicaragua you have to watch out for the horse carts.

There are also a lot of painfully slow drivers. There may be all sorts of reasons, but a Tico added this one: many people either take a rental care to their car inspection or probably bribe the inspector, so there are a lot of cars that simply can’t perform well enough to do anything more than crawl up hills.

But sometimes driving in CR can be a different experience in a different way, when you take over the whole road. While coming back from the coast (read: beach) one weekend I stopped to pay a toll. Kids were playing soccer on the other side just past the tollbooth, which I thought was a pretty gutsy move to jump in/out of the street when someone comes up to pay a toll.


Like a racing videogame.  Except that I'm driving a Toyota Yaris. 

After that someone pulled into the left lane to pass me on the undivided, 2-lane highway (and, by the way, this is one of their major national arteries) but then just hung there. The longer he sat there the more nervous I became. But then I saw others in the left lane, and then I watched as people stayed in the left… even when the two lanes became divided by a concrete barrier. I realized that they had redirected the entire freeway in one direction toward San Jose, so I spent a good bit of the rest of the trip driving on the wrong side of the road.

This clearly isn’t a fluke, because the road is designed for this: I noticed that the tollbooths have signage both ways, and there are “lane ends/yield” signs on the left side of the road where they are clearly marking lanes ending only if you are driving against traffic.

PS: I wish they had mobile credit card readers here like they do in South Africa. That would make me a lot more comfortable sometimes.