We went to a Monteverde bakery recommended in every guidebook, Stella's, on our way out, and got some really good banana bread. Then we got back into the car and set off for San Jose.

We weren't sure the route, exactly, but figured if we went to Santa Elena and left town going the opposite way we came in, we'd be on the right track. We followed the dirt road out of town, past increasingly scarce farmhouses and through the countryside.

We came out overlooking a huge valley, and gradually descended in a series of switchbacks and sharp drops. We passed the occasional farm, farmer on horse, school, church and cemetery. The tombs in the cemeteries were made out of tile.

Along the side of the road, fences were made with "living fence posts," branches from other trees planted in the ground and strung together with barbed wire. An Internet research report said that 95 percent of Costa Rican farmers use living fence posts.

The route out seemed easier than the route in, and after only 25 km or so, we hit paved highway. In the town of Sardinal, we reached Highway 1, and after making a left turn toward San Jose, we drove back into the city.

The real adventure began there. Our rental car salesmen had a vague idea of where our hotel was, which he had circled on the map. Hari, thoughtfully, found the hotel in the guidebook, which listed an address, although the streets had no street names. We found the street on the map, however, and drove down the streets counting the number of blocks, so we could find each turn.

Our route took us down the second avenue, one street over from the bustling center of the city. There were people everywhere, and tons of shops and restaurants crammed together in narrow buildings. Our previous drivers, when going to this hotel, had come in and out a back way through a more run-down part of town, and our direct route had more traffic but also looked more like a normal city.

Miraculously, we found the hotel without difficulty, counting the number of streets until the turn and turning the wrong way up a one-way street to get to the hotel. We missed the "No hay paso" sign, which must have been hidden behind a bus or something. We actually didn't notice it at all, until our taxi driver later that night wouldn't drive up the street.

We parked the car right in front of the hotel, and carried our stuff inside, then set out to explore downtown San Jose. We went in search of a bakery highly recommended by the guidebook, in the middle of the pedestrian-only Avenida Central.

It was Saturday afternoon, and there was a mob of people out, filling the pedestrian mall. Vendors hawked bracelets and watches in the center of the walkway, while kids handed out fliers for local events and parties. In the store openings, salesmen stood and yelled at passerby to come into the store. Some stores even had speakers systems set up, facing the walkway, blaring radio announcements.

Eventually, we found a (the?) bakery, which had either changed its name or was not the same one as in the guidebook. Either way, we found a bakery, in approximately the location the guidebook said the good bakery was, and ordered some pastries for lunch.

Since it was now crunch time for souvenir buying, we headed to a hotel that the guidebook claimed had the best souvenirs in town. According to the guidebook, the hotel was on Calle 9, in between Avenidas 7 and 9 (the wisdom of having all the north-south streets be named calle 1, 3, 5, etc, while all the east-west streets are named avenida 1, 3, 5, etc., is debatable). This turned out to be wrong.

We walked down Calle 9, starting at the Avenida Central and working our way up, counting the streets, until it seemed we ought to be at least at Avenida 7. There was no sign of a hotel anywhere in the vicinity, except for a huge Holiday Inn. As we stood and wondered, it started to rain. We were soaking wet fairly quickly, which didn't make wandering around lost any more fun.

We found a street sign, finally, for Avenida 9, indicating that we were in the correct location, and that the guidebook was wrong. We walked up the street to another tall building, which we thought might be a hotel and would at least be in the vicinity, but turned out to be a government building.

Finally, to get out of the rain, we walked down to a Holiday Inn and into a connected travel agency that advertised free tourist info. We asked where we could find the Hotel Don Carlos, and the guy pointed us up past the government building and down a side street. The approximate address would be the corner of Calle 11 and Avenida 11, which wasn't so far off from our guidebook.

We walked around dripping in the Hotel Don Carlos' gift shop, and did find some useful things. They had, essentially, everything from all the other souvenir shops we had been in combined. The only downside was that they had muzak on, playing the same three songs over and over. One of them was "raindrops keep falling on my head," played on the keyboard, which we must have heard five or six times while in the store.

Since it was still raining, we called a taxi to take us back to the hotel, where we napped for a while then changed to go to dinner. We called a taxi, thinking the restaurant we wanted to go to was on the opposite side of town, then actually looked at a map and found that it was a block away, then tried unsuccessfully to cancel the taxi.

So the taxi driver, owing to one-way streets, drove us around in a big square, ending up in sight of our hotel.

The restaurant, Tin Jo, was an "Asian" restaurant, offering Thai, Indian, Japanese and Chinese dishes. Amazingly, they had picked our favorites from each kind of food to put on the menu. We had 40,000 colones left ($100), so we tried to run up as big of a tab as we possibly could with drinks and appetizers, and made it to roughly 15,000 colones.

We walked back to our hotel and watched the second half of a local soccer game, between Alajuela and Saprissa (from San Jose) on television. The game ended in a 0-0 tie, and although the quality wasn't up to European standards, it didn't dampen the fans' enthusiasm at all.