Have you heard or used the saying "Riding the Ox-cart" ("Montado en la Carreta")?
A bit of history of our ancestors ... When Costa Rica organized the transport of coffee from San José to Puntarenas, mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were not hundreds, but thousands, of carts that carried coffee to the port.
At some point, Costa Rica exported up to 440,000 quintales (1 quintal = 112 pounds = 46 Kilograms), per year of coffee via the road to Puntarenas. Each ox-cart carried 10 quintales, which means that more than 44,000 ox-cart trips were needed to Puntarenas in each harvest season. A cart needed 8 days to go and 8 to return and coffee was exported during January, February, March and April. In four months, that amount of coffee had to be transported.
Counting repairs and breaks, a boyero (oxherder), then, would make about 4 or 5 trips per season, so we are talking about between 5,000 and 10,000 carts that participated in the export of coffee.
There were endless rows of carts that went to Puntarenas to leave coffee or that returned to San José and the traffic had to be organized, because of the narrowness of the road, the damages that the carts suffered and the topography. Therefore, the Government established a regulation on how the wagons should be driven and on the behavior of the oxen.
To comply with these regulations, the Government established a road horseback police, which constantly would patrol in either direction to monitor full compliance with the rules established in the regulations. One of the norms indicated was the absolute prohibition of driving the cart riding on it. This is, as if it were a horse carriage.
The regulation stipulated that the "boyero" should go in the front of his yoke of oxen, and not, as was often the case, that, when the he was tired, he would sit on the front hatch of the cart and steer the oxen with his feet resting on it. That prohibition had its logic because, if the oxen did not feel the presence of their master, they could be frightened and cause an accident in those endless rows of, really close to one another, carts.
Now, it was the usual practice of the "boyeros" to drink a lot of liquor during the trip. Whether it was the cold in the long nights, the heat in the day, any celebration, any sorrow to endure, whatever it was, but they took a lot of "guaro" (sugar cane based liquor).
When they were so drunk that they could not stand up, they had no choice but to get on the wagon and direct the oxen from there. When the police surprised them in that situation, they immediately put an infraction that implied a fine, which should be published in the official newspaper.
This is how, in the Official Gazette of the time (1870-1890), you can find long lists with such infractions, which say more or less like this: "So-and-so: "One peso fine for riding on the ox-cart". This meant that he had exceeded his intake of liquor, forcing him to abandon his position at the head of his oxen. In this way the expression "being riding on the ox-cart" was associated with being drunk, since the phrase alone has no relation to that condition.
Thus it has transcended until our days. And those who have "rode the cart" had no idea that they were emulating the action of those pioneers who, with their trips to the port, helped create the Costa Rica of today ...