Tourist season is blooming and booming.
Tour companies pack avid nature lovers into Costa Rica’s National Parks, visit rain forests, hike deep into volcanic arenas, provide vivid sights for photographers, bird watchers and naturalists. You can do zip lines, ride up and down aerial trams, trek up steep mountainsides, or river run to your heart’s content in a natural paradise.
Yet, there is trouble in paradise too.
This morning, early, my bed moves unexpectedly. .
Earthquakes also visit Costa Rica throughout the year.
Some call Costa Rica a Garden of Eden.
When my room shakes, I don’t think about Paradise.
I think about finding the closest exit.
This rainbow is out early.
It is Sunday and two tourists with big cameras are walking in the middle of the street ahead of me with lens in the shooting position, talking French.
This rainbow is beginning to lose its colors but you can still see its bands; yellow, blue, green and pink semicircles. It is difficult to see the precise end of the legs of the rainbow’s arc with the city in the way. If you were a cowboy you would just lasso the rainbow, climb up,ride, and then slip off with a whoopee.
This rainbow is gone in a half hour, and a little man in a green suit and bowler cap, ahead of me, carries a bag of money in each little hand.
I hear him laughing as he clicks his heels down the street looking to buy a round of drinks for everybody at his favorite pub.
The Costa Rican National Museum is not world winning architecture. It is a renovated Spanish fort, and, for that reason, has little frills. Inside you see thick walls, peer through lookout holes in towers, pass through heavy wooden doors with huge iron hinges and visualize old days of conquest.
From our guide, we learn that Spanish dominance in Costa Rica was limited because there wasn’t much gold. The gold that did exist was placer gold from rivers and streams, not the huge deposits mined in Peru or Mexico. There was no Inquisition here and the Costa Rica fight for independence was short.
Costa Rican life revolves around weather, nature, rain forests, co-operation, community, family. There is no standing army and the police force doesn’t disappear people.There are over a million students in the free University system, the population is literate,their government provides a safety blanket.
One of the exhibits in the fort is an old Spanish jail, where misfits and law breakers, political prisoners, and trouble makers were confined. When you want to hurt someone, you take away freedom of movement, put them in a non-stimulating environment, control the food they eat, when they sleep, who they see.
You are always going to need jails but graffiti on the cell walls say you won’t ever be able to shut people up by locking them up.
Even Ancient Rome, powerhouse of the ancient world, couldn’t stop dirty jokes and rude pictures scratched on public bathroom stalls.
Hearing just what we want is not always what we need.
Checklist traveling has advantages.
You go to guidebooks, visit sites and attractions, book tours with an English speaking guide, get familiar with places deemed newsworthy by those in the know. You see five to seven points of interest, stop and walk, listen to an oral history given by your guide, get picked up at your hotel and dropped off. You don’t worry about driving, parking, fees. Often, you find places you want to return to on your own time.
One of the stops on this city tour is the Costa Rican National Theater that was built by coffee growers in Costa Rica in the 1800’s to showcase their progressive country. Coffee has been the heart of this economy,forever, but it now shares importance with tech, banking and tourism. It takes more cards than one to make a good poker hand and most successful people and countries have more than one revenue stream.
An expedition moment that stands out is a young man holding an umbrella over his significant other’s head while she checks her cell phone in the rain.
Which sex is boss is a question with plenty of wiggle .
Looking back, as we turn a corner and head for the next tour attraction,I see the young man still holding her umbrella, patiently, gently.
Men talk to their stockbrokers.
Women talk to their hairdressers.
Patience is a good quality to have when there are women in your life.
Half of the world is in winter with temps in the teens, or worse.
Here, it is seventies with humidity but the sun shines more often than it hides.
Jose, at the front desk, says it is busy in San Jose most of the year and his hotel has more visitors from France than anywhere else.This morning there is a large French group departing, part of a tour that will get on a bus and go somewhere else for a few days, then a new location, then another. Being a low cost provider, this hotel fills a need for tour generators who need to keep prices down to capture travelers and market share.
There is no reason this hotel formula wouldn’t work anywhere. You buy a few houses next to one another, plumb in bathrooms and other refinements, and presto – you have a hotel that is like staying in a house. The furnishings and decorations are colorful, indigenous, typical of Costa Rica. Even if you wouldn’t want to live in an old wooden house at home with bright paintings and door handles from the twenties, it makes perfect sense here.
If I could take this hotel home in my suitcase and get through Customs, I surely would.
It is simpler though to leave it and come visit when I have a hankering.
The perfect trip is where you return with less than you left with, have a full stomach, and don’t start something you don’t intend to finish.
If the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else, the weather is better.
The Temple of Music belongs in a different time and place.
This edifice is in a downtown San Jose, Costa Rica city park where music is performed and people congregate. This afternoon there is a group of young gymnasts practicing handstands under the temple dome, entertaining those who are passing through.
A young man with tattoos seems to be the leader, and, while I am watching, he is instructing another young man who is practicing handstands with wooden blocks set on the ground directly in front of him.
While doing a handstand, the student lifts his right hand off the right block and supports himself with his left hand. Then, he drops his right hand back to the right block, supports himself, and lifts his left hand in the air, off the left block.
It takes practice to learn to stand on one hand.
Passersby take pictures and one girl says she only wishes she could do half the things these gymnasts are practicing.
Pigeons, roosting on the outside edge of the dome, an upside down bowl, are nonchalant.
They don’t have to work on their balance and keep people below them on their toes.
This little gift shop is not far from the Holiday Inn in Old San Jose, a hop skip and jump from the Municipal Square, a stone’s throw from the Gold and Jade Museo’s, several blocks from casinos.
Browsing, I come across an authentic bow with arrows with hard wood points and bird feather quills for stability and distance. Woven baskets from Panama and crazy masks peer down upon me as I shop the shop.There are imitations of pre-Colombian pottery on the higher shelves, safe from little hands, and carvings of birds and animals made from the Tigua nut.
I buy the bow and arrows and make arrangements to have them shipped home, paid for with my credit card. It is rather amazing that someone in a foreign country would give credit to someone they just met and will most likely never meet again. Combining trust with money has always been a touchy job..
How the hell did those ancient hunters hit running animals in rough terrain, in questionable weather, with these questionable weapons?
Their dreams were lots deeper than mine, all about life, death, spirits and Gods.
I’m going to hang the bow and arrows on one of my living room walls to remind me how easy I have it.
There are some days I can’t even hit the ground with my hat.
One of the draws of this San Jose, Costa Rica hotel is a serve yourself buffet breakfast.
It is not only a buffet breakfast with choices, but you get famous Costa Rican coffee, deep, dark, flavorful, in a big cup. The breakfast runs from seven to nine every morning. Guests pick up their meal pass at the front desk, present it at the dining room door, and bring their appetites.
There is just about anything here a picky breakfast eater could want. You have rice and beans, omelets cooked on a grill with your favorite ingredients, papaya, pineapple, bananas, bread and sweetbreads, ham and cheese slices you can turn into sandwiches, fried banana slices, juices, hot coffee or tea, and other chef specialties to fill gaps on your plate. You can go back multiple times.
The times I have stayed here, in past visits, the menu has been different each day,but always with an eye on basics. Travelers need a good breakfast. Growing hungry in the morning, halfway up a rain forest mountain trail, is not where you want to be.
This morning is gratifying because food in Uruguay was not one of its stronger points..
Knowing what you are going to get at the Hotel Aranjuez buffet, and getting it the way you like it, is worth getting up at six thirty in the morning.
Even though airline food is made for a small eater, in a miniature container with small utensils,it is appreciated.
The passenger seated next to me feels like talking, listening costs me nothing, and, at 30,000 feet up, since I’m not going anywhere except where this plane goes, I listen to my fellow traveler.
One pleasure of travel is meeting other people who are travelling too. Some people travel for business and have little choice about their trips. Other people travel because they like thrills and can pick their destinations. Some lucky people manage to combine both business and thrills.
Luis confides to me, as I peel back my lunch container’s cover, that he immigrated to the U.S. from Uruguay thirty years ago, and became an American. He self finances trips to Central and South America to take medical supplies to small towns and country folks who don’t have access to medical care. He runs medical training sessions for leaders, in little remote villages, so poor people learn to take care of their health crisis themselves.
When our plane reaches Lima, Luis transfers planes to make connections to San Salvador and New York.
On the runway, waiting for passengers to leave and others to board, I close my travel book on Uruguay and open the next Scotttreks chapter which will be Costa Rica.
Why, still stuck in this plane’s belly, waiting to lift into the air again, do I sometimes consider giving up a perfectly good life in my own country to be an outsider living in someone else’s country? Is there really a country better than the one I always return to?
After talking with Luis, another question, I ask myself, is why do some people feel such a heartwarming need to give back, while others just obsess on taking?
Being in transition is being a traveler.
You have one suitcase with clothes and an extra pair of walking shoes in the cargo hold. You have a carry on bag in the overhead with computer stuff, headphones, extra pens and paper, schedules, an umbrella, toothbrush, personal items. Your wallet and passport are in your pants left front pocket for safety. You hate to carry items you don’t need because odds and ends make your trek heavier and less simple.
Leaving Uruguay, en route to Costa Rica, our plane is thirty thousand feet up. We fly west out of Uruguay, then up the coast of Chili with the Pacific in view, then cut back towards the Andes for a stop in Peru. There is no such thing as a flight,these days, that goes “straight as the crow flies.”
Transit time is thinking time, sleeping time, re-charging time.
Uruguay is in my rear view mirror and Costa Rica is dead ahead.
All I have left of Uruguay is what went on between my left and right ears and what I got down on paper or on my camera.
Lingering on the past, while barreling into the future, is behavior I don’t want to be guilty of.
I don’t ever want old places to spoil new places.
From the air, oddly enough, I don’t see any dotted lines that mark borders between countries.
I guess we make borders up because we need them.
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