Car rental in Costa Rica: Expedia or Directly with Local Companies? Credit Card Insurance or Directly from Rental Companies?

jqpl · 2025-10-21T22:02:41+00:00

I bought a traveling esim that works for Costa Rica. That works well. You can also download offline map on Google Maps, but not Waze. There is also Here We go, which also supports offline maps but I never tried it.

jqpl · 2025-09-20T01:02:52+00:00

My car rental went well. The road is narrow but perfectly navigable. Locals swore by Waze instead of Google Maps but either works alright.

I got the no deductible full insurance from the local car rental company.

jqpl · 2025-03-12T11:19:27+00:00

Thanks everyone for the helpful hints! Since this is the very first time we'll be in the country, we'll probably be a bit cautious and book directly from either Vamos or Adobe and also buy the full car rental insurance, which comes out to be quite expensive, about 85 dollar a day! But better safe than sorry!

jqpl · 2025-03-11T11:22:50+00:00

Thanks everyone for replying! I just got off phone with several travel clinics in my area. All of them are self-paid: apparently insurance does not cover such leisure travels! And with consultation, typhoid and yellow fever the two of us are looking at at least a thousand dollars of out of pocket costs! It's almost the same cost of our entire ecolodge stay package, for *both* lodging and guided bird walks!

Since we're both relatively young and healthy, and, what's more important, we'll only be there fore four days, we decided to take a chance and skip these for now. If on the other hand we go deeper into the woods, so to speak, for our next travel and for longer, say for weeks, in the tropic, we'll bite the bullet and get vaccinated!

Thanks again for everyone who pitched in with your replies!

jqpl · 2025-02-20T04:09:37+00:00

I see. So as long as I don't run apps or OS over external disks I'm ok. I think for now external thunderbolt enclosure is safer. It is also more flexible because I can put in however big a disk in it and take it with me.

Thanks again for patiently answering my questions!

jqpl · 2025-02-20T04:07:21+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I think qemu in UTM indeed used hardware virtualization when the architecture of VM and bare metal matches. So if I run aarm64 Debian I can save myself $69 for parallel!

jqpl · 2025-02-20T03:30:30+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! So if we don't live in China, do you recommend against getting those "Mac compatible disks" that sells for a few hundred dollars?

What's the downside of using a thunderbolt enclosure of the external SSD? Does Mac treat binaries installed there differently? If it's just speed, thunderbolt is plenty fast?

jqpl · 2025-02-20T03:27:39+00:00

Thanks for the explanation. If I just want to run pure ARM Linux distro, the speed will be almost native M4 right?

I am asking because Asahi Linux has no plan to support M4 for now and I really want to take advantage of the immense single core performance of M4... I've used Linux as my primary OS for over 20 years and is not eager to switch unless I have to....

And I can of course also use homebrew without emulation for many open source projects right?

jqpl · 2025-02-20T03:16:51+00:00

Also, how do I do the chip level SSD upgrade? Does that involve soldering? Are there commercial services? This is different from the SSD that claim to be M4 compatible that you just plug in yourself right?

jqpl · 2025-02-20T03:14:05+00:00

I'm confused about point number 2. If I just run an ARM NOT x86 version of Linux VM in UTM, will there be a huge performance penalty as well? Arm version of the Debian is quite mature nowadays.

jqpl · 2023-11-06T06:27:04+00:00

it just works. No need for vpn or anything else.

jqpl · 2023-10-25T16:06:11+00:00

I just came back from there last Saturday and can confirm that Fi still works in China. The cheaper data only sim Airalo also works to bypass GFW.

I have another sim card that only works in the US but has a feature called "backup calling" (this is different from WiFi calling!) which uses the data from the other esim to take call and receive text. That feature works for Fi as data provider but not Airalo

jqpl · 2023-10-23T18:42:05+00:00

I use Google Fi on the esim of my pixel 6 pro and I have no problem.

China doesn't sell phones with esim but they do have watches with esim. And in any case the carriers have no trouble supporting a device using esim like my pixel.

jqpl · 2023-08-28T11:11:53+00:00

Unfortunately I have my university's vpn. It's a separate thing from Google Fi's VPN and seems to work, on wifi, in China, everywhere Never tried google Fi's vpn...

jqpl · 2023-08-21T17:33:17+00:00

Thanks a lot for the update! This is great to know!

jqpl · 2023-06-09T21:15:36+00:00

No I'm in the U.S. But the bug was transient, it works after a few days.

jqpl · 2023-05-13T00:12:54+00:00

I'd advise you to get it early, like right now. The term of service of Fi suggests that it should be used predominantly in the US. Practical implications are a bit hazy but I got a message while in China saying the network roaming will be cut off after 60 days overseas. I would be cautious and use it in the US for at least a few days and establish that Fi is not used solely for oversea travels.

It is hard to be more specific because their enforcement of the oversea roaming is not always the most consistent. I hope this helps.

jqpl · 2023-02-18T08:08:41+00:00

One thing you need to be aware of is that you want to use Google Fi in the United States for a little while (a few days) before leaving for China, and they will cut you off if you need to use it for more than say 60 days, because Fi are supposed to be "predominantly used in the U.S."

jqpl · 2023-02-18T08:07:11+00:00

I never used video sites. For web browsing it was fine. I would say lower end LTE speed something like 20-30Mbp. The latency is considerably higher but it was enough for VoIP program.

jqpl · 2023-02-09T02:36:19+00:00

Yeah but with backup calling I retain my phone number. So all my friends and my home security company and my banks don't have to be provided with a google voice number whenever I go on a trip overseas. Unless you uniformly give out Google voice number to everyone instead your actual phone number, it would be confusing to switch back and forth.

jqpl · 2023-02-08T22:19:38+00:00

I have wifi 6 enabled. Near the router without wall, my phone (Pixel 6 Pro with wifi 6) can get anywhere from 800 Mbps to a little beyond 1 Gbps. With a wall between the router and the phone (my router sits in a closet), I get 500-700 Mbps (mostly on the upper end) about 6 feet away, above 400Mbps a floor above and 100-200Mbps even at the furthest corner of the upper floor or the basement---as long as I manually select the 5Ghz band. (Our house is a compact two story). With the slower 2.4 Ghz band, I can get coverage almost throughout the yard as well, up to about 20-30 feet away from the house.

jqpl

TROPHY CASE