VI
Five years earlier I had visited Costa Rica—after my flight from Mexico—and it was good to see it again.
We threaded our way among the reefs of Limón harbor, toward a sickle of white beach fringed with graceful coco-palms. In the distance rose lofty mountains, verdant with forest and jungle, towering up and up toward the filmy white clouds. Over it all was the bluest of skies. This was the land which admiring Spaniards, years ago, christened “Rich Coast,” and no country has ever been more aptly named.
Limón itself was merely an average East Coast port—a city of rickety wooden houses behind a large banana wharf, with a population of Jamaican blacks imported by the Fruit Company, which owns this Caribbean shore. But the railway—incidentally a Fruit Company possession, and one of the three most famous scenic routes in Latin America—carried me inland through an ever-changing panorama of cane fields, banana plantation, thatched villages, and untrammeled jungle, through forests of magnificent big trees festooned with moss and vine, through rugged gulches beside a foaming river, up mountain sides where the stream dropped to a mere white ribbon far below, along winding cliffs that looked out upon endless vistas of waving palm tops, up into the exhilarating coolness of the altitudes, among rolling hills of luxuriant coffee plantation, past the red-tiled roofs of ancient Cartago, and down again into a fertile valley dotted with little farms, into San José, the most delightful capital in Central America—a city of quaint Spanish architecture, yet with every modern comfort—a quiet, peaceful city slumbering beneath a warm sun that never burns—a city with the loveliest climate, the most attractive plazas, and the most beautiful women in the world. Every town of any note in Latin America claims these superlatives as its own. Every traveler I have met joins me in awarding them to San José.
SAN JOSÉ CONTAINS THE MOST DELIGHTFUL PLAZAS, AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD