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.
Tourist days come in all kinds of packages.
You are sleeping in strange rooms, surrounded by people you don’t know, eating food on the go that your stomach doesn’t recognize. There is television in a different language, obsessing with schedules, making connections, keeping up a big river ride on a little inner tube.
Your tourist day is as free as you want to make it, but limited. You don’t have friends here.You don’t work or have responsibilities. You are passing through. How involved you want to get depends on your mindset.
Standing at the hotel desk listening to three hotel employees talk is an education.They know enough English for me to understand what they are saying and I want to hear what they have to say.
Patricia is a hotel maid who lived in the U.S. but came back to Montevideo to be with family. Veronica is one step away from becoming a Doctor and is studying to re-take a final board oral exam that has to be passed before she can practice her passion. Virginia, another maid, speaks very little English but nods her head when she agrees. As a tourist, you don’t always have a chance to know people in a country you visit. People in the tourist industry are unappreciated Ambassadors for their country.
” It is hard, ” all agree. ” My paycheck, ” Patricia says, “doesn’t even pay my rent. Without family, it is really difficult. ”
Glowing reports about other countries often fall short. For people who hold Uruguay together by their daily work, economics is a daily rope climb in a daily obstacle course.
Even in Socialist countries, you still see people sleeping in the streets.
There is a security blanket here, but it has some holes.
To achieve what they want, people, around the world, still have to work hard, no matter what kind of government they have.
This coffee is cheap, but not the best.
You buy a dollar token at the hotel reception desk, drop the token in the coffee machine’s slot, slide your cup in position, choose your poison, push a button, and wait as a small drizzle of coffee fills your paper cup almost to the top. The machine knows when to cut off so coffee doesn’t go on the floor.
Things introduce themselves all the time. You go about your business, not thinking about much, or looking for anything, and then something comes your way like a present arranged by a benevolent cosmic force that knows you will be delighted. This bold colored sign by the coffee machine is such a present.
” Drink Coffee,” the sign exclaims, “you can sleep when you’re dead.”
While we are waiting for our expiration date, coffee makes the waiting tolerable.
This sign takes me back to the fifties when even the thought of traveling to Uruguay was no where in my mind. Uruguay was just a country on old stamps in my dad’s collection in a box in the garage.
When you sleep in your childhood crib, you don’t have a clue where fate and your feet will take you.
If i had known where I was going, when i was in school, I would have paid more attention.
It always feels right to return to familiar places and people on a trip. This day I revisit Jesper and Olenthe, Maria, and Gabrielle at the Urban Heritage offices, and the girls at Punta Ballena Coffee Cup who have fixed me coffee every morning and tolerated my mangled Spanish.
The shutters to my former upstairs studio apartment are open and new tenants have moved in. Fires are stoked at the Mercado.There is a tango lesson in progress and people, some off cruise ships, some not, are grouped in the square. Rain has stopped and it is sunny.
This trip is like living in a big house with a lot of rooms. You move from one room to the next, but you never get out of the house.
I would never tell anyone to pass Uruguay up.
This trip is like trips most of us have taken, long days in transit with scattered, small, personal moments that bring truths when you polish them enough.
As one of my brothers likes to say, ” going on a trip makes coming home all the better. ”
Another brother’s favorite is, ” don’t let the door hit you when you leave. ”
Another brother likes to say, ” did you have fun? ”
If I had a sister, she would most likely, give me a sister kiss and hug and say, ” Welcome Home. ”
It would have been nice to have a little sister.
Hugs and kisses cure a lot of aches and pains.
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