Skinny drug dealers in tight jeans roller-skated around the main square, selling joints. Two-door Datsuns with flame decals on their hoods spewed exhaust onto the narrow streets. Our cabbie didn’t bother to stop for pedestrians. Dink hardly fit into the taxi. He pinched his nose to avoid the fumes. “We’re headed for the eighties,” he hollered nasally over the driver’s Bee Gees tape. “I can’t do it again.” There were no street signs or addresses in Costa Rica. Directions were given in relation to landmarks, some of which had been destroyed by earthquakes long ago. Thankfully, Big Tim, our sportsbook tour guide in the passenger seat, knew where to take us. Big Tim used to work for Dink in Vegas. But in 1997, when online sports books began popping up in the Caribbean and Central America, he headed south in search of employment. We picked him up at the Hotel Del Rey, which Fodor’s travel guide described as “the city’s most notorious gambling establishment … swarms with prostitutes … avoid it.”
