A visit to Orosi

   
On New Year’s Day, our last day in Turrialba, we had the luck of a sunny day New Year’s Day, so I had in mind to get back to the area of Ujarrás, hoping to visit both the ruins and the Igelsia de San Jose de Orosi, the oldest still-in-use church in all of Costa Rica.   We got a late start, though, not heading out the door until about noon.  The first part of the trip entailed retracing our steps from our return from Ujarrás – the hills and valleys were as lovely as they had been previously, as we passed little towns folded picturesquely into the hillsides

— and then we turned in towards Cachi and Orosi.  By the time we approached the lake, after 1 PM so we paused for lunch at La Casona del Cafetal,  which combines a boutique hotel with a restaurant.  The food was fine: on Sunday, in addition to their usual, moderately-priced menu (mains around $12 to $15), they offer a $24 buffet.  Nancy opted for tilapia with mushrooms from the menu, which she felt was well-prepared, while I sampled the buffet.  There was a broad variety but the food was strictly adequate, except for the desserts which were good and, again, in a broad selection.  The cool wooden frames with bags hanging over coffee cups, used to serve freshly-brewed coffee at the table, made Nancy wish she could handle caffeinated coffee at that time of day

But the location was very nice, indoor dining, verandah dining and, indeed, there were a few concrete tables with mosaic tops, and overlooking Lake Cachi. 

The trellises along the edges were strung with vines bearing flowers looking very much like trumpet vines, with a few flower inside but many of them outside.  There were also some stringy leaves  hanging in the air

The white linen hangings between the trellises made me think of weddings, and indeed there was an area beside the dining facility that was plainly set up for a wedding, The clientele was overwhelmingly Costa Rican and we were pretty much the oldest couple there

We left lunch before 2:30, and I was thinking that we had plenty of time to get to both the church and the ruins on Ujarrás.  What I did not count on was the traffic.  As we drove along the lake, the road was lined with families that had pulled off the road and were having picnics and barbeques in the fairly thin berm of long grass running along a barbed wire fence barring then fro entering the bluffs overlooking the lake or the lake front.  Traffic was moving slowly as cars were pulling into and out of parking spaces along the road.  This pattern continued as we passed the end of Lake Cachi and drove beside, first the Orosi River and then the San Carlos River.  Here people were picnicking not only by the side of the road but down by the river itself. 

                               
Then traffic slowed to a crawl, and then a stop.  A few hundred feet ahead, we could see a bridge across the river, with a single line of traffic moving across it very slowly, then turning left when reaching the bluff on which our road was located.  That traffic was passing us but also stopping as it backed up because of the picnicking activity that we had just passed. 

As a quarter hour passed, I was wondering if it would ever be our turn to cross the bridge.

Finally, the traffic directors on the other side of the bridge were halting traffic, and it was our turn to cross – and this was a narrow bridge!

We could see down to the river itself with families picnicking, and wading

As we wound our way back up the other side of the San Carlos River, we passed two or three hundred cars that were backed up, waiting to cross that little bridge.  It made sense that this line of cars was given so much more time to make their way across than we were.  There had been only dozens of cars backed up on our side of the river.

Finally, we  made our way to the small town of Orosi and Iglesia de San Jose de Orosi.  The church was built simply in Spanish Colonial style, first constructed in 1743. 

There were surrounding buildings with a garden suggestive of a monastery

The inside was fairly simple as well, but lovely. 

Old wooden doors, and a simple brick floor

A sign told us to quiet our cell phones – “Jesus is calling you, but not by cell phone”

A series of paintings, dark with age, represented the stations of the cross. 

Much of the artwork in the church was apparently done in Mexico.

The altar,

and the statuary beside the altar

There were lovely carved pews

A map showed that we were only a couple of kilometers from the Ruins of Ujarrás, as the crow flies, but there were no roads going directly there.  Instead, this mountain loomed across the river;

our map showed no apparent way over the top and down to the ruins.  Instead, we would have to drive around that valley and come in from the other side. As we drove out of Orosi and into the mountains toward Ujarrás, it was apparent that we would be arriving just after closing time, as we had done the previous week.  So instead of trying to make that, we drove toward the town of Paraiso, from which the road back to Turrialba would be more straightforward.  But first, we paused for a view over Orosi Valley from a viewpoint. 

The Ruins of Ujarrás will have to await a later trip to Costa Rica to spend time with the Levy Jiddawi’s (assuming that they spend more years in this lovely country).