Here, if you don't have All Wheel Drive, you could easily get stuck in the mud.
I rented a car here and it's my primary way of getting around. I knew about the suggestion to get All Wheel Drive, but when my car came, they gave me one with Two Wheel Drive. This made me very nervous, and as I was driving one leg from my hotel to a town called Las Catalinas, a river had formed over the road. A few other cars like mine were sitting waiting for the water to go down, but a bunch of AWD cars just plowed right through the water. They were lucky! Finally, a bulldozer came and cleared some debris that made the water drain and I was able to eventually go.
Because people don't need to travel between towns all that much, a lot of people get around by walking or by bike. Because cars are expensive, when people do need to get from town to town, many people take the bus.
And there's at least one town, Las Catalinas, that is striving to be car-free. It's called a master-planned community, meaning they knew where everything was going to go before they started building it. Because of that, they could put everything in a very convenient place (stores all in one area, houses all in another, with lots of little alleyways flled with gardens and fountains in between). So cars aren't needed at all there, and it's a very pretty and peaceful place because of it.
I was very nervous driving in a place that gets so much rain! Besides the river I mentioned, it also rains so hard that you can't even see. When I had to drive four hours south, it rained for three of those hours and my wiper blades literally couldn't move fast enough to keep the windshield clear.
