Travelling to Uvita
The bus that came too early
For her trip from Jacó to Uvita, Charlie had booked a ticket for a public transport bus. This time, it wasn’t a tourist shuttle.
Already the ticket purchase had been an adventure. Charlie took care of that before she flew to Costa Rica and there was no option to buy the ticket on the website. The list of ticket offices showed no office for Jacó or anywhere near. In the FAQ section of the website, Charlie found the mention of an app for ticket purchases. She downloaded the Passer app and was ready to buy her ticket.
Already the first obstacle was the verification of her phone number. She did receive the verification code, but the app would give her an error. After about 50 attempts and different country code prefixes (+44, 0044, 44) it would finally work.
When purchasing a ticket in the app, you pick the boarding point and the end point of the route, no matter where you want to get off. For example, if you want to go from Golfito to Uvita, you buy the ticket for Golfito – San José. If you enter a different destination, the route might not come up. You can still get off where you want to along the route.
Ticket from Jacó to Uvita
The next problem she encountered in the app was that it did not list her start and end points. She could only choose the capital San José as the starting point, not Jacó. Luckily, they had a friendly support agent available via WhatsApp. That’s how Charlie found out that she had to enter the route first (San José to Paso Canoas) and in the next step, she could choose where to get on and off the bus. She finally managed to get her ticket sorted!
Where and when to take the bus
The bus stop for this coach was along the main road that was passing by Jacó, called Costanera, the coastal road. It was a bit outside of town. On foot, it would have been almost an hour from Charlie’s accommodation and she decided to take a taxi. She had already walked there the day before because the bus stop wasn’t on the map. Her ticket did not mention a bus stop either, it simply said “100 meters from the Maxi Pali”. That’s why Charlie thought it was a good idea to check it out the day before.
Charlie got to the bus stop about 30 minutes before the departure time and this turned out to be a very good decision because the bus came 20 minutes early. She got lucky on this occasion!
It took about 2.5 hours to Uvita and the bus station there was only a 10-minute walk from her accommodation and the place where she would stay the next 18 days for her Yoga Teacher Training in Costa Rica.
