A man tugs at my bag: "Taxi?" There’s a hectic bustle going on at San José’s airport exit. It’s 3:00am, yet our ticket says that we weren’t supposed to land until 7:00am in Costa Rica’s capital. If that were the case, the sun would be out and our guide would be here to pick us up. Instead we’re standing around, completely lost, hardly able to keep our eyes open and trying to keep the men shouting “Taxi, Taxi” at bay. An athletic looking guy wearing a baseball cap and bike shorts is making his way through the crowd towards us. It must be him. He looks as tired as us but laughs and stretches out his hand. It is him- Paulo, our guide. When we finally put our bags in his pickup, the Costa Rican explains that it was just by chance that he checked our arrival time online again before going to bed and saw that our flight would land four hours earlier.
“Breakfast?” Paulo asks as he rummages around in his rucksack with his right hand without taking his eyes off the traffic. He hands us a container of freshly cut mango. Wow, did he really prepare this especially for us…? Paulo laughs at this: “No, I stole them from my father’s fridge.”