Category: Costa Rican Rambles

From Vancouver it’s a two-day journey to Costa Rica. Although BC shares the same coast, it’s much simpler for people from Toronto or New York to get here than for Vancouverites. My trip involved an overnight in Houston. For my flight to San Jose I was at the Houston airport early. For check in I engaged with a machine to get my boarding pass and discovered my credit card was missing. Probably left in the hotel lounge the night before. A quick flush of mild panic ensued. I’m about to fly to a foreign country for a two-week vacation with unpaid car rentals,etc. but no credit card. I feared the worst. As it turns out, a debit card and ATMs are all that’s needed.

Once in San Jose, my clever plan was to meet Sophie in the airport (SJO). I’d booked her flight from Mexico City – where she’s been based since we completed our bike trip – and miraculously found a flight scheduled to arrive two minutes after mine. It didn’t. I spent the next two fretful hours scanning crowds of people filing in from various flights, looking for a familiar face – all the while anxiously pondering the possibility that she missed her flight and that I truly was “on holiday by mistake.” To finally see her smiling face down the corridor in the distance was a huge relief.

The car rental place is 20 kms from SJO. With the added complication of my having no credit card, it was 3:30 before we were in our Yaris and on our way to the remote mountaintop “finca” my wife had booked – 60 kms from San Jose. As I now know, you do not want to be in a car anywhere near a city in Costa Rica at that hour. In all my life I’ve never seen so much traffic congestion. It took us two hours to travel 17 kms, and almost five to reach our destination. It was fully dark for half that time, road signage here is famously inadequate, and our finca – “a hidden jewel” – is difficult to find by design. It seemed a miracle to me when we finally arrived.

Among my discoveries about Costa Rica gleaned from our first day’s drive was the relaxed attitude of “Ticos” (Costa Ricans). In the chaos of all that traffic and continuously merging lines of vehicles, I didn’t see any frustration among the drivers around me. Under similar conditions in Canada I would expect to see glowering faces and violent acts of road rage. Here, it seems nobody is in a hurry and nothing is worth getting bent out of shape for.

Our home for the next five days is in the mountainous Orosi Valley, in central Costa Rica. We are staying in a guesthouse on a hobby farm owned by an American couple. They have goats, chickens, geese, ducks, guinea fowl, three dogs and a cat. They’ve been here for eight years and cleared the land and built the farm from scratch. Ray, our host, tells me when they first arrived they brought dogs from the US, but with all the poisonous frogs, snakes and other dodgy critters in these parts they didn’t last long. He now has three very friendly Tico dogs. These dogs, he says, know instinctively what animals they should avoid. “It’s in their DNA.” This is a fascinating notion to me – that animals can be born with such knowledge. Obviously they haven’t evolved that way. But apparently it’s possible for learned behaviours to be passed on through generations. I want to learn more about this.

The road up to Ray’s farm is single lane and roughly paved in concrete. It’s 1.5 km long and is the steepest stretch of road I’ve ever driven, with many hairpin switchbacks and very few places to pull over if you should encounter a vehicle coming the other way. As I’ve subsequently discovered, this type of road is not unusual here. It’s a very mountainous country and apart from the main “highways,” roads seem built to minimal standards.

Driving anywhere in this country is a challenge. The main highways are just two lanes, and with all the challenging terrain, are also very twisty, with very few straight sections and no passing lanes. That means if you find yourself behind a truck lumbering along at 30 kph for miles through the mountains – which are everywhere – you cross your fingers and pass on long curves, taking risks you’d never take at home. Everybody does it here, and somehow it works. If you always know that around any corner you might find a vehicle speeding toward you in your lane, you drive prepared for that. It seems to work. I haven’t seen any accidents yet.

I came to Costa Rica with a Lonely Planet guidebook. I first used these books many years ago, on travels through Asia. They were a traveller’s bible. Not any more. In this edition, there is a section that lists the “most venomous critters” in Costa Rica. The list includes two snakes, neither of which are deadly to humans, a scorpion, vampire bat and wasp. Just five. I suspect the publisher is cooperating with the CR ministry of tourism and intentionally avoiding the lethal truth here. Don’t scare the tourists!

The truth is that just in the category of snakes, there are 168 species here, 22 of which are poisonous. And they aren’t all out there in the deep jungle. Ray tells me he sees coral snakes on his property about once every three months. He suggests I wear proper shoes, not sandals, when I walk around. Looking into this further I read an account of someone who survived a Coral Snake bite. Apparently you have five hours to get to hospital for anti-venom treatment or it’s all over. In her case, treatment lasted three weeks. And it’s painful.

Coral snakes are colourful, so they’re easy to see. They’re also, small, reclusive and not agressive. The Fer de Lance is the opposite on all these points. It’s two meters long, aggressive and coloured to blend into the ground. It’s bite is as deadly as the Coral Snake’s. It accounts for the majority of snake bite deaths in this country, partly because it reproduces in huge numbers – 18 cuddly, not-so-little cuties at a time. And partly because it lives close to where people live.

That’s just two of the 22 you want to avoid. And not the most venomous. Those would be the massive Bushmaster (3 meters) and the Neotropical Rattlesnake.

Pura Vida (pure life) is something of a national slogan in Costa Rica. Not officially perhaps, but in every other way. It is used everywhere on signs and in everyday conversation with different shades of meaning depending on context, but generally can be summed up as “Life is Good” – but with an emphasis on simplicity/purity.

Pura Vida also sums up the pride of Ticos for their country and its natural beauty, and serves as a rallying cry for protecting the local environment. A relatively large part of the country is environmentally protected under a seemingly well-organized national park system. Galvanized by their belief in Pura Vida, Costa Ricans seem willing to accept the economic trade-offs required for resisting massive tourism development. In fact, a significant part of the tourism industry here is focused on eco-tourism, e.g. guided jungle excursions.

A further sign of Costa Rica’s national commitment to Pura Vida and environmental protection is the declaration of the country’s president that CR will be carbon neutral by 2021 – the first country in the world to achieve this distinction. The country’s power system is hydroelectric, which helps makes this goal realistic.

Sophie and I enjoyed some Pura Vida fun with a river rafting trip on the Rio Pacuare – one of the few major rivers with no hydro dams, so it runs free and wild. We spent four hours crashing through rapids with a local guide and three 40-ish American men from Utah, visiting CR for this kind of eco adventure. Our guide, Fabio, tells me Costa Ricans have been declared the happiest people on earth by some international agency that measures such things. After a day of wild rafting and river swimming you could also include a raft-full of visitors to Costa Rica in that tally.

We went for a walk through the jungle today in Tapanti National Park, located just 20 kms from our finca guest house. Tapanti is the wettest spot in Costa Rica, with 7,000 mm of rain per year. That’s seven times as much as we get in rainy Vancouver. However, here it buckets down for short periods between sunny breaks. And it’s warm.

Standing on big boulders by a river in the midst of a sub-tropical jungle, Sophie and I were struck by the same thought: the scene here is not much different from what you see standing by the river in Capilano Canyon in North Vancouver. Lots of green all around and lots of water, with low-lying clouds shrouding the hillside.

 

To enter a national park like Tapanti, there is a fee. For tourists it is $10 USD per person. This seems high in view of how far you can actually go into the park. The road is just four km long, and the various walking trails are 2km at most. Although the full extent of the park is massive, the part you can access as a visitor is not. Ten bucks seems like a lot of money for a stroll down some groomed paths with picnic areas all about. Prices for everything in Costa Rica are higher than I expected. Admittedly, those expectations stem from my experiences in Mexico. And as I’ve discovered, the differences between CR and Mexico outweigh the similarities. This holds true for what they eat, what they drink, and how they live. What else is there?

We have been buying groceries at the Mega Super. This is not a tourist-oriented grocery chain. There is no signage in English and you won’t find items like peanut butter. At the Mega Super a dozen beer costs $20. The final tally for my groceries, much of which was produce, was $80. This is not far from what I would pay for the same in Vancouver. And these are the prices that Ticos pay. Ray tells me people in the Orosi Valley region – an agricultural area – earn about $5000 a year. So the cost of living here is high. But then, so is the standard of living.

On the roads, many of which are rough, the vehicles are all fairly recent models and in pretty good shape. Even the trucks hauling farm produce. This is one big point of difference from Mexico. Another is the state of the dogs you see along the roadside. They all look cared-for and healthy. For that matter, the Ticos all seem healthy, relatively well off and content. The relaxed Tico attitude even extends to the touts in the touristy areas with their roadside souvenir shops – nobody badgers you to buy what they’re selling.

There is no military in Costa Rica. So no taxes are spent in that area, which translates into better funding for other services. The army was disbanded in the late 1940s by a politician who laid the foundation for the socialist democracy that Costa Rica is today. Another hallmark of that shift – from exploited banana republic to full-functioning, democratic and equitable society – is that for the past 65 years Costa Rica has been the most stable democratic nation in all Latin America.

At the risk of oversimplifying, it would seem the model of democratic socialism here – comparable to what we have in Canada – fully accounts for Costa Rica’s relatively high standard of living. Ticos enjoy state-funded medical care. Their electricity, car insurance and telecommunications are provided by state-owned corporations. Taxes are high. Prices too. But the people enjoy a pretty good life. And as a tourist to this country, I find it hard to begrudge the relatively high costs when I see how well the system seems to work for the benefit of Costa Ricans.

They don’t use addresses in Costa Rica. For that matter, very few of the streets have signs. Perhaps they don’t even have names! It makes for interesting times for tourist drivers. Our hotel for our last night here, located on the outskirts of San Jose, gives its address as “9 kms N from the airport toward Poas Volcano.” It also provides GPS coordinates. Our car rental agency does the same. So too, the places we stayed.

I didn’t really understand that specific addresses are non-existent here until today, our last day. I used Google Maps to guide us from the south coast to our San Jose hotel, using its name – which came right up. Google brought us to the middle of the town where the hotel is located, but nowhere near the hotel itself, which turned out to be 6 km away. It took phone calls and local knowledge to get us where we needed to be.

For lunch we visited our first “soda” – Soda Trini. Sodas are tiny little roadside cafes, typically with just a couple of tables and plastic chairs. Trini, a cheerful Costa Rican woman, served us the typical Tico meal of beans, rice and chicken. Costa Rica has many charms; unfortunately Tico cuisine is not among them.