This is a continuation of a series recapping the past two years of travels through Latin America by car, each Dispatch is a single country summary from Mexico, through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and through South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.
Costa Rica
October
2009
My girlfriend suggested we travel through the country quickly, a nice country, well trodden with lots of Americans living in big hillside homes. A place where retirees retreat to their tropical dream houses and spend the balance of their time shopping, while ignoring both local customs and the native language. She was right, too westernized, too many gringos, too much of what we didn't want.
Costa Rica, sweet and cheery, is one country Americans can name in Latin America and feel safe traveling to. Ironically, Costa Rica has no army or military. I imagined it a place where people sun-bathed in beach-chairs and shielded their cocktails from UV light with miniature umbrellas, while feeling wonderfully rich because everyone around them is colorfully poor.
Volcanoes
Marjolein and I slept under Vulcan Arenal, a live volcano that spewed orange boulders day and night, a couple kilometers away. Lava rocks, not liquid, that made deep percussive sounds as they rolled down concrete-colored chutes. A powerful hiss of gas preceded the rocks before they popped out of the top, like a jet engine, the sound strong and precise. The hiss was tremendous, as if, three 747 Jumbo jets were taking-off at the same time, with their engines funneled into a single exhaust.
Dirty and rough. We stayed in a leaky tent and ate canned food. It suited Marjolein well, she possessed some of the 'boy gene', adventurous and rugged, machete swinging and constantly snapping photos with the biggest camera you can buy, she could also name most the animals and insects in the region.
She stands by the truck. Waiting in a safari outfit: khaki shorts, boots, high-tech synthetic clothes with raincoat and rucksack. To complete the stereotype, wears a machete sheathed in a leather scabbard cracking coconuts open with it. The expensive high-tech clothes didn't work, mosquitoes bit through them and when body odor set in, they smelled awful. An irreversible mix of smells: old sweat-drenched socks, a sour sink drain and wet dog fur. These smells wouldn't come out, no matter how much she washed them.
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| Source: Wikipedia |
We slept beneath Arenal for many nights. Night viewing was dramatic, the chutes of the volcano would light up with orange tracers. I'd be awakened in the middle of the night by a loud hiss of gas, then peer out of the tent to watch brilliant orange fireballs race down the mountain face; a newly minted rock began its life the size of a man, and when it got to the bottom, no bigger than a basketball.
Spacemen
We came to Arenal to watch it blow and instead, met Freddy, a Costa Rican wood craft artist and UFO fanatic. He sold his colorful hand-crafted figurines along a roadside that led to a mirador, lookout. We met him at an abandoned house we paid to sleep in. Freddy, tall and skinny had alive wild eyes. Those eyes, already big, became the size of small plates when we switched to his favorite subject, when he asked, if I believed in flying saucers.
Before I could realize what my answer would trigger, he had me watching a DVD filled with amateur clips of local UFO sightings, See it? See it? he kept asking, pointing to the portable player.
Latin Americans are big on repetition. Every time I answered, No., it was replayed.
I was worried, it came down to the 'correct' answer or the battery. I caught myself thinking about the battery. Marjolein deftly escaped Freddy's spaceman sermon.
Do you believe in UFOs?, he asked.
No, not really, I replied, not in the mood to lie about it.
As a traveler you are inclined to tell white lies to be more agreeable with locals, a sort of traveler diplomacy. In my travels, the most common questions after marital status are, Do you believe in UFOs? and, Are you a Catholic?, but the one that really gets them to pause is, Alone? You're traveling alone?
Latin Americans don't do anything alone, they are accompanied in pairs or groups in everything they do, except take a pee. Doing something alone in these countries borders on criminal, strange and far outside the norm. To the locals, a traveler wondering remote parts is an interesting event, something unique, when they meet a solo traveler it's an aberration. Their reactions often made me feel like I was being diagnosed with a mental disorder.
Do you want to watch? he asked.
Sure, I said, sensing a trap, Freddy, only a few minutes, I have to leave soon.
We view the clips...more than once.
Now, are you convinced? he wanted to know.
His eyes almost sold you on the UFO thing.
In my reckless thinking, I thought I could convince him with my basic and approximate Spanish that they do not exist, explaining that the samples on his DVD were anything but UFOs, proudly pointing out technical problems with the video. Either my Spanish was too vague or he chose not to take my points into consideration, I suspected the latter, as we established our opposition and stopped listening to each other, like two ignorant Missionaries who believe in different books.
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| Marjolein Groot Nibbelink |
Car Parts
While Azulita, my 1986 Land Cruiser was in the shop for maintenance, I met Enrique, a Costa Rican who recently resettled in his home country after twenty years in New Jersey raising a family and running a gardening business.
Why did you return? I asked.
Enrique tells the story, To be closer to my family. We paid the way for relatives to visit us in America and see our home in New Jersey, we can't invite all of them to visit that way. Now, we all live in the same city.
What do you miss most about life in the United States?
In the States it is easy to get stuff. Like at Napa Auto Parts, you can get this distributor rotor in every shop, right now, I can't locate one in Costa Rica, he explains, holding the broken part.
So, you miss the shopping convenience?
Yeah, here in Costa Rica, you go to one shop and a tire costs $49, then down the street the same tire is $32. In the States, the prices are pretty much the same everywhere. It's a lot of work to buy stuff here.
The mechanic who services the truck looks like a fat beer-swollen version of Tuco, the bad-guy, played by Eli Walach in the spaghetti western, The Good the Bad and the Ugly. If you like bad-guys, his character is at the top of the list. Tuco greased the chassis and adjusted the clutch.
Odds and Ends
San Isidro. The market city, where I met Enrique is noisy and colorful. A 'hotel' off the main plaza has bored looking prostitutes that linger on wood benches in the lobby. Worn-down women who've seen too much and cared too little for themselves. Haggard faces and pear-shaped bodies, heavy in the wrong places. The women, with no claim to beauty, look garish in their ill-fitting clothes and thick pasted make-up. Everything a size too small. Faces hard as steel.
Years back in Bangkok, I met a Buddhist monk in-training who said, David, it is the last profession, in the world, a woman chooses.
Down the coast at Trey's place, a comfortable hostel in a sleepy village, I watched a young Swiss woman, who traveled alone, shy and odd, she mixed little and was usually penning in her tiny diary. I looked at her and saw myself.
Osa Peninsula
The German is good company, his Greek wife is a terror. A woman of anger, agitation and pettiness. A female powder keg in a petite body. She trembles with frustration when she talks about the weather while lifting another cigarette out of the pack. When she calls him 'Darling' in German it sounds like she's cursing him. He's a chess player and works for the United Nations in Afghanistan as a police trainer. We debated that war and he told us it was about Democracy and Afghan women winning the right to vote.
I thought, If those are the reasons, then we should occupy ½ the world's countries.
It was, as if, geopolitics and oil (pipelines, there's no oil in Afghanistan) were never a part of the occupation's principal aim.
The irony! Germans working in an American quagmire.
We met them on the magical Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, a stunning coastal rain forest full of rare birds and mammals, set on the Pacific coast with big surf and abundant animal life. The country was well named, the Rich Coast.
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| Marjolein Groot Nibbelink |
On morning walks I was overwhelmed by exotic bird sightings, unable to keep track of them all, let alone know what I was looking at. Many sat on low tree limbs fearlessly staring with the same patience I would study them. It was one of the most pristine natural reserves I have set foot in, second only to the Upper Amazon in Peru, where I spent twelve-days living on the waterways in a dugout canoe.
I was the accidental wildlife tourist. Marjolein was a mammal and bird enthusiast and only through her was I able to appreciate the rareness of the birds I would spot. She took me on night walks to see a whole other world of strange nocturnal insects and mammals.
The Rains
It was rain season in Osa and the rivers swelled. John the owner of Kapu, where we stayed, gave tips on how to traverse the many rivers on our cross-peninsula drive. The rain stopped, but water still poured from the mountains, turning streams into rivers. On the return we used an ad hoc crossing that forced us to drive 'up-river', heading straight into the oncoming waters. I almost lost it here, the river was high enough to flood the engine, the truck struggled against the current and depth as cafe au-lait water rushed over the hood.
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| Marjolein Groot Nibbelink |
Here at Kapu, animals would come close to our room. Scarlet Macaws, Capuchin and Squirrel monkeys, Great Curassows (ground bird), humming birds, a common black hawk (who stared and stared at us), a pair of Toucans eating berries with their enormous beaks and Blue Morph butterflies. An Agouti (a short stumpy hopping mammal), the long-nosed bat that stayed in our room during the day, black turtles crawled about, and leaf-cutter ants defoliated whole trees, carrying their green booty down 'highways' they constructed on the jungle floor.
Something Between the Third World and a Little Better
While Costa Rica was a pleasant country to visit and easy to navigate it lacked something, it ran smoother and was more orderly than neighboring countries. They cut their grass with weed-whackers instead of machetes, building projects were completed and curiously absent were the rebar spires that adorn the rooftops of every Central American city. There were no flies and the majority of roads were paved. Clean water flowed and the electricity always worked.
Gone were the colorful characters, like the shoeshine boys and other hustlers I'd meet in main plazas of most every town visited before it. I could not find street food and when you took a beer, they gave you the option to have it poured over ice. The remarkable part was that you could even get ice. Costa Rica was advanced compared to its neighbors, but I wasn't looking for that kind of order, I was still excited by the rough-shod, happy-go-lucky ways of its neighbors.
For Select Past Dispatches on Costa Rica hit these select links and look for the Panama summary in next Dispatch Number 90.
Errant Thoughts on Central America-
Errant Thoughts-
After a Year: Short Reflections-
David
Paracas, Peru
