Monkeys & Chickens

Monday – 31 July

The past week has been pretty routine here in Monteverde, at least to the degree that we’re now pretty settled in to our house, Niall is comfortably in school each day, and I’m still teaching at the Institute. We did get our second set of visitors on Thursday evening, as David Myers (one of my co-faculty on our course at the institute) and his daughter & her friend arrived for the next week or so. Things are a little cramped at mealtime, but otherwise we’ve got lots of room, and the hot water even seems to hold out fine.

It has been a good week on the wildlife spotting front. We’ve been seeing quetzals with almost annoying regularity (4 years and we never say one, now they seem to be hanging out by the local coop every day in plain view!), and our local Hummingbird population is skyrocketing now that the word seems to be out about our feeders. We’re going through about ½ gallon of sugar water every other day now! I also finally got a few good photographs of some howler monkeys while working on our trail at the Monteverde Reserve. For an animal that is so unbelievably loud, and not particularly bothered by human presence, they are surprisingly difficult to get a good clear look at in range of a camera. As an example, the one living just down the hill from our house (the one that wakes us up almost every morning at 5:45) I still haven’t actually seen... /the last cool picture is of a hummingbird on her nest in the Reserve. This one is a Purple-throated Mountain-gem, and they actually put their nests of moss and lichen together with spiderwebs that they eat and then regurgitate as a kind of glue!

As usual, most of the extracurricular activity takes place on the weekend, so this week we have several interesting things to report on. The first new cultural experience was attending our first ever communal chicken slaughtering (vegetarians & PETA members may now skip to the next entry) at Russ & Noemi Danao’s house. Noemi is the director of the Institute, and when they arrived here in February they thought having a few egg laying chickens would be a great way to teach their kids about food production, etc. Unfortunately, the person who sold them the chicks either didn’t have a clue about chickens, or more than likely just didn’t care that he was selling a couple of gringos “broilers” instead of “layers” (and mostly roosters, not hens to boot!). So needless to say, they now have some very nice fat chickens that don’t lay eggs, and at some point you have to “harvest” the food in order to eat it. When Noemi “invited” us to help, a sort of morbid curiosity if nothing else was enough to elicit a somewhat cautious “uhhh sure, why not…” Besides, this is rural Costa Rica, and chickens in the yard, and eventually on the dinner table, are unquestionably a deeply seated facet of local culture. So off we went on a damp Saturday afternoon to take part in preparing two chickens for dinner.

The two chickens in question were separated from the rest of the flock in their own cage, in solitary confinement as it were, unwittingly waiting for their culinary orders. Also gathered, clearly seeing this as a festive occasion, were 7 kids, ages 5-9, the six boys at least eagerly anticipating lots of blood and gore. The parents (five of us) got all the appropriate materials and tools together and exchanged gallows humor preparing for the messy but unavoidable process of transforming live chickens into coq au vin, Buffalo wings, and arroz con pollo. The procedure for butchering a chicken on this small scale is clearly something of a lost art among most people living in the United States, including present company, and unfortunately we didn’t have a local Tico here to guide us, so fell back on what all gringos do in this situation—we went on-line and found directions! The University of Florida Extension has a wonderful set of almost comical directions that sounds remarkably like the directions for assembling Christmas toys made in China at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/AA188. Like the typical Chinese toy directions, there are, of course, almost no pictures or diagrams illustrating just what one is supposed to be slicing, grabbing, etc. in the process of “killing and dressing” your chicken. My favorite step describes the “removal of viscera” in terms that would lead one to believe that this is something most people should already know, kind of like mixing ingredients for a cake or downloading software! I’m now contemplating a new blog with real pictures and FAQ’s for the rest of us novices who need to kill and dress their homegrown poultry!

Without going into all the gory details (sorry, I couldn’t resist that metaphor!), our chicken slaughter was quite the event. As the weather deteriorated into a steady downpour for most of the afternoon, it reminded me of one of those classic scenes in the movies where everyone is waiting in the rain for the hanging to occur. The kids all watched in morbid fascination, and we used the most humane technique suggested, but it even so it was still a bit like a public execution. That said, no one swore off eating chicken after witnessing the somewhat violent demise of the two birds; and none of these kids will be so naive as to think their food just comes magically from the the grocery store!

Mostly the whole process was just messy, what with blood, feathers, innards, etc. all needing to part with the more familiar meaty sections of the carcass that typically gets eaten. It also takes quite a bit of time, with 2 adults intimately involved and 3 others in supporting roles for almost 3 hours! After the initial excitement, the kids seemed to find it all pretty boring, and managed to watch an entire screening of Peter Pan before the birds were finally ready for cooking!

Sunday was a much more wholesome day. In the morning, Norma, Niall, and I all went for a nice hike up to the Catarata de San Luis, a beatiful 80 meter high waterfall that drops from the Monteverde plateau down into the San Luis valley. The hike is only about 2 kilometers each way, and the trail is very nicely maintained. Norma characterizes it as “adventure-lite,” meaning the setting is wonderfully wild, and there is clearly a mild element of risk (if you do something really stupid), but you probably won’t get too wet or too muddy, or bitten by anything nasty, or anything else that you wouldn’t reasonably expect on a hike in the woods at home. In this case, the trail wanders uphill through coffee fields to the mouth of the San Luis gorge, then upriver for a bout a kilometer of walking on boulders and over small bridges to reach the base of a rather spectacular waterfall. Even in this enchanting and relatively benign setting, Niall can always manage to find something to get our adrenaline flowing, and characteristically managed to pinch a finger between rocks when we reached the waterfall. After deciding he hadn’t been mortally wounded (you never would have known from the howling and dancing around!), and Norma and I had re-gathered our wits, we were almost relaxed again by the time we reached the car at the end of our walk… Just in time too, as the rain began to fall hard within minutes of getting home. After the midday downpour, we all spent the rest of the day planting seeds in new parts of our garden. We now have cilantro, lettuce, and green beans that we’re picking from my planting 6 weeks ago or so (at least those that the horse didn’t eat), and we now hope to have spinach, tomatoes, and basil in another month or two.

That pretty well wraps up our latest week in the cloud forest. Next week is the last of my teaching, so we’ll soon be entering a new phase of our stay here… so stay tuned!

Guanacaste Day

Monday – 24 July – Guanacaste Day

Today has been a bit of a lazy day. Niall has been home from school and my students are in Liberia helping to celebrate a national holiday --Guanacaste Day. The day marks the annexation of the province of Guanacaste from Nicaragua in the mid 19^th century, and in Liberia (the capitol of the province) they have a huge rodeo to celebrate—sort of a Tico version of a state fair in the US. Here in Monteverde, many people have the day off, and most seem to have gone to the beach for the day. We’ve been just hanging around the house, and earlier we went for a hike up a small stream just up the road from us. As we walked up the road to get to the trail, we saw a two toed sloth, along with her baby. Once again, the best wildlife seems to be right off the roads or people’s yards, not always out in pristine rain forest in parks or preserves. In this case she was close enough to even get a pretty good picture, though even a “good” picture of a sloth still tends to look like a big ball of mossy fur up in a tree.

We then hiked about a kilometer up a seldom used trail that belongs to the family we are renting from. Mostly the trail is used to get to their water supply—some springs farther up the stream, so almost no one ever goes up there. The stream was very picturesque, with lots of little rapids and small waterfalls as it tumbled down a very narrow steep valley filled with ferns, palms, vines, and many huge ancient trees well over 100’ tall, all covered with moss and thousands of different epiphytes, including a myriad of orchids and bromeliads. Finally the trail petered of into almost nothing, and we bushwhacked another 100 meters or so climbing over the mossy rocks along the small waterfalls. Even Niall was gung ho for more, at least until he was bitten by a small spider. So much for a pleasant walk in the woods; fortunately it wasn’t anything major, but hiking with an 8 year old still remains an adventure all its own ;-)

After our hike we discovered why Garfield (Niall’s lizard) is a fat as he is. Niall has been dropping various bugs (flies, moths, beetles, and even a small walking stick) into his little cage for several days, but he’s turned his nose up at pretty much everything. Until this morning; that’s when Niall dropped in a fairly large and very healthy cockroach. Zooom, crunch! If he eats only a couple of those a week, it’s no wonder he’s as big as he is! Norma has decided having a big green lizard around the house is no problem at all now.

Quetzals, lizards, & tarantulas

Sunday – 23 July

Well, as this was our first full week together here, there were lots of new things to do. On Monday, Norma and Niall, as well as the institute’s director’s kids Adrian and Anna-Sophia, all came along to the Monteverde Reserve to help some of my students and I lay out a new handicapped accessible trail. The trail is short (only about a half-kilometer long), but much of it cuts a new route through virgin cloud forest, so it is quite a challenge to work with survey equipment through all the vines and undergrowth. The kids all enjoyed the process immensely, especially the crawling, sometimes on hands & knees, through the mud & moss over fallen trees and through some of the densest jungle to be found anywhere.

On Wenesday, Niall had his first day at school, at the Cloud Forest School, a local bilingual private school (www.cloudforestschool.org). The school serves primarily local Tico kids (about 95%), and is pretty small by American standards (+/- 200 students in K-12). I’m on the North American foundation board for the school that helps to raise funds, and I’ve been involved with the school for about 4 years since our students at the institute did some design work on the school’s campus. As one of the main emphases of the school is environmental education, we’ve been looking forward to Niall having the opportunity to attend the CFS for years, but even so, there’s always a certain amount of trepidation over how he’ll react to anything new that is this much of a change. Fortunately, everything seems to have worked out well—so far, he loves it! He seems to be making friends quickly, and is enjoying even the more challenging aspects (learning Spanish!).

On Friday, Niall had a short day (all Fridays are ½ days at his school), so after school, he and Norma came up to the Institute for a lecture by a local biologist (Richard Whitten) who happens to have the largest private collection of insects and other arthropods (spiders, scorpions, etc.) in the world. He brought along lots of samples from his collection, and gave a nice presentation aimed at a very broad audience. Even the youngest kids got a big kick out of his stories. We then got to share something with him—one of our students had found a tarantula in a shoe earlier in the day, so we brought him out for a little show & tell. We then learned just how harmless tarantulas are, no matter how creepy they look. Apparently, the hairs on their bums are much more dangerous than the fangs they bite with ((they can cause a severe allergic reaction in some people, though he never did mention just how a tarantula might try to use those hairs!). By the time we were done, almost everyone had handled the little tarantula and let it walk around on their hands or arms, some even on their heads! Yes, that's actually Norma he's crawling around on in the photo... Pretty cool.

Outside of school, Niall has been a bit on the bored side at times, but that all ended late this week with the capture of a handsome green fence lizard. Instead of living in a cage most of the time, however, the lizard now travels almost everywhere around the house with him, sitting on his sholders, his head, or clinging to his shirt. For some reason, instead of running, he seems perfectly content to hang on for the ride and see what fortune brings. He has been christened "Garfield," after the cat, for two reasons. First, he is fat, like the cat; and second, he seems to have the same sly grin on his face as Garfield does in the cartoon (at least to the extent that a lizard can have any expression on his face!).

This weekend has been fairly laid back, with no big plans. On Saturday, we did some shopping and Norma began to get a hang for driving the car. After we had lunch with one of Niall’s teachers at the local coffee coop, we were amazed to see a pair of Quetzals in the trees right outside in plain view. These birds are absolutely amazing in their coloration, with brilliant scarlet breasts, emerald green heads, and two foot long royal blue & green tail feathers. Then, just as we had gotten over the shock of seeing quetzals right out in the open (Norma’s never seen one in 4 visits to Monteverde), a grey fox walked up to within 20 feet of us! Sometimes, the best stuff is right on the road, not way back on a trail in the deepest part of the could forest… In addition to the quetzal & the fox, we all saw a sloth and a whole troop of coatimundis this week too.

Today, we had a pretty lazy Sunday. We started out with our regular Sunday walk. Today we went about 4 miles out toward Canitas to the northwest. We stopped for coffee at the coffee coop again, and finally found some clothes hooks and towel bars for the house, at very reasonable prices. In the afternoon, we went to a place I had walked by a few weeks ago near Las Nubes that claimed to have trout fishing. When we first got there, Niall was a bit disappointed to find that fishing consisted of a little hand line into a pond about the size of a small swimming pool. It was a lot like fishing for catfish that he tried down at the beach in Playa Hermosa in March, and much to his dismay, didn’t catch anything. The water also seemed a bit murkey for trout, but sure enough, when he dropped the line in with a little bit of bread dough on the hook, wham! About a foot-long rainbow trout slammed into it with great gusto. Fifteen minutes and three nice trout on the bank later, and we were ready to have trout dinner. While it wasn’t exactly the same ambiance as fishing the Henry’s Fork in Idaho or the Beaverkill home in New York, Niall was one happy trout fisherman! The next best part was they cleaned and cooked our fish up on the spot, all for $4.00 a fish. And they tasted great too!

That’s about it for this week in Costa Rica, land of a multitude of surprising critters, right at your doorstep…

All together now...

Sunday - July 16

Well, we are now a reunited family! Norma and Niall arrived in San Jose on Wednesday evening, tired, but no worse for wear. The trip was mostly uneventful, both for Norma and Niall, as well as for me. The only glitches were Niall forgetting his shoes in Cazenovia (yes, he managed to arrive at the airport in only his socks!), and then Niall forgetting his jacket on the plane when they arrived in San Jose, which actually proved fortunate in some ways… Mostly in that it forced Norma to go back onto the plane & look for it, where she discovered that she had left her PURSE on the plane! Oh well—all’s well that ends well. Although it did mean she ended up in the customs line from hell. I ended up waiting for almost two hours wondering what was going on, and finally they appeared, weary but happy. After spending the night in San Jose, we drove up the mountain to arrive at our house, safe & sound about mid-day on Thursday.

Since then, we’ve been mostly getting settled, acquiring all the things that are needed for three people instead of just one (like a dining table & chairs). We’ve also now got the humming bird feeders up, and Niall has a “repelling” rope set up in the front yard, so thing are really starting to feel like home. We even tested the blender last night with margaritas, which we sipped while watching the sun set over the Gulf of Nicoya from our second floor living room! The view is just gorgeous here, as you can see about 60-80km to the west on a clear day.

Today we took our first walk together—about 5-6km out toward Las Nubes to the north. Norma has begun to shop property already, as we got to look at a nice piece of land just up the hill from where we are now… we’ll see ;-) The walk was a bit short, as it started to rain and we turned back a bit early. Unfortunately, we didn’t see too much in the way of wildlife, but we had quite a bit around the house lately. The howler monkeys have been calling lately, only about 50 meters down hill from us, and the bird feeders are just beginning to attract attention from the humming birds. If our last feeder was any indication, after about a week, you can’t keep the crazy things away; we we’re filling the feeder twice a day! The animal photo of the week is of the great big walking stick I found just outside our back door. He is very impressive—on the right tree branch, he is indistinguishable from any other twig.

One more thing that is now beginning in earnest is our attempt to become at least conversant in Spanish. I’ve been doing pretty well on my own, but with a house full of English speakers, it takes a bit more effort. We’ve begun taping labels on all the house parts & objects around the house, and we are trying to say almost everything we can in Spanish, particularly when we are all together downstairs in the kitchen area. For now we are mostly limited to a lot of “Yo quiero….por favor” (I want… please) or with Niall, “Ven aqui!” (come here!) or “Cierra la puerta!” (close the door!). My best language workout of the week was getting the car worked on, and trying to explain certain sounds or other things that seemed to need fixing or adjustment (it’s hard enough explaining that stuff in English, much less in a language you are just learning! – NPR and Click & Clack have made a fortune on the comic opportunities for misunderstanding). In the end, I managed to get the oil & filter changed, all the various suspension & axel parts greased, the steering belt tightened, the timing belt housing re-aligned, and the fuel filter replaced. Everything seems in good shape now, and the whole experience reinforced my understanding of the great paradox of auto ownership in Costa Rica: cars cost much more than in the US, but they a very inexpensive to maintain once you actually buy one. The whole thing, including two guys working for almost two hours cost US $35.00 (no, not the hourly charge, the whole thing-- parts and labor). Then as I drove out of the garage, the owner/mechanic gave me his home phone number and said to call if I had any problems over the weekend. Amazing…

That’s about all for this week. Next week, check in to find out how everything goes as Niall starts school!

Bienvenidos a Nicaragua

Sunday, 9 July

After leaving San Jose Monday evening (July 3) in a torrential downpour (this seems like the norm when I visit San Jose these days!), we traveled Northwest on the PanAmerican highway back to Puntarenas, and then on toward Liberia. We stopped for dinner at the bottom of the mountain below Monteverde at the new Monteverde Cheese Coop Restaurant – quite the place (it is probably the nicest, cleanest restaurant along the entire PanAmerican Highway!), and it has good pizza too! We got into Liberia about 7:30pm, and found a non-descript hotel for $30 per night; kind of a Costa Rican “Motel 6” or “ETAP.” Clean, simple, w/ AC, and only 6 blocks from the Registro Nacional offices. In the morning we had our first piece of good luck. As I was checking out of the hotel, I asked the desk clerk if she knew the location of the Libraria Rebaco (a book & stationary store), which I had been told sold some blank forms that I needed to take to the Registro Nacional. As it happened, her farther, who was sitting there drinking his coffee, happened to own the Libraria! And it was only 4 blocks away, and opened an hour before the Registro. Perhaps the stars were starting to align…

After getting the forms (a set of “Certificados Literales”), Dan & I got some breakfast at a little open air restaurant just off the main square and waited for the Registro to open at 9:00. Oddly enough, the Registro is located in an office enclosed in the Banco Costa Rica (this is equivalent to the county clerk’s office being located inside a main branch office of CitiBank or Bank of America). As was typical, a line formed outside the bank long before the 9:00am opening; this was exacerbated by it being a Monday, and apparently there had been a bomb threat at another bank in town the previous week. So it took about 10 minutes to get in side, and after passing through the security check, I got to the office of the Registro Nacional. The clerk was very nice, and informed me that I also needed copies of my vehicle title, so out the door I went in search of a copy shop across the street. Back through the line, this time I needed a set of stamps called “timbres,” available from another vendor across the street. After my third time in line, seeing that I also wanted my “permiso” to be valid in Panama as well as Nicaragua, I was informed I needed another type of certificado literate called a “boleta,” so out again I went, back to the Libraria. This time, it appeared everything was in order; the clerk actually applauded! Even bureaucrats sometimes see the humor in the ridiculous hoops they make ordinary people jump through;-) After signing a half dozen forms, and getting everything dually stamped & notarized and leaving a set of copies for their records, we were ready to go. “Nicaragua or bust!” I said to Dan as we climbed into the truck; and I hoped sincerely those words would not prove prophetic…

Central American border crossings do not have a great reputation in terms of their speed, or ease of transit. There seems to be the general opinion that if you “wanted to enter the country easily, you should have flown into the airport.” Borders are somehow an old fashioned nuisance and seem primarily reserved for truck traffic. Clearly no one at the chamber of commerce has considered the impression crossing one of these borders has on the typical tourist! It isn’t as though there is the foreboding that used to be present at borders between eastern & western Europe. There doesn’t seem to be a real effort to find “bad” people or catch smugglers, it is mostly just confusing. One doesn’t just drive up to the border crossing booth like most places and have a Customs official examine your documents. No… you arrive at a set of unidentified buildings with cars and trucks parked haphazardly about on every spare inch of semi-level ground, and many people wandering around somewhat aimlessly (the sheep) in search of where to go. Scattered among the sheep are a small number of well organized but entirely unofficial “helpers” or “expediters” (the wolves). If you are among the lucky sheep, you will only be slightly fleeced by the wolves, as they guide you through the maze of lines to acquire your exit stamp in your passport, and your approval stamp on your vehicle’s Permiso documents. They will also help you get more photocopies to leave at the appropriate stops. In our case this cost $21 per person. My guess is there is too much opportunity to use the border as a revenue generation opportunity- it’s actually a thriving cottage industry. Live & learn we decided; and this was just the Costa Rican side of the border!

After the Costa Rican side, you drive across about half a kilometer of no-man’s land and reach the Nicaraguan frontier. First you have to drive through a fumigation booth that sprays your car to kill whatever it may have picked up in Costa Rica (I think this is for Hoof & Mouth Disease), for which they charge you about a dollar. The Nicaraguans (Nico’s) then at least have a few signs identifying a building that all cars need to visit. Here we were greeted by the Nico expediters, who tried to convince us we needed their help again. This time I refused; actually I was out of cash, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice! I at least knew I needed to enter the building in front of me and I figured once inside there was a reasonable chance I could figure it out. Fortunately, inside the building was a desk manned by a wonderful staff person from the Nicaragua Ministry of Tourism. I wish I had written the man’s name down, because someone should give him a raise, or a promotion, or both! He explained everything I needed to do (buy Nicaraguan insurance for the truck ($12), get a Nicaraguan version of my truck’s Permiso ($2), get an inspection of the truck and our bags by a policeman (free!), and get a tourist card with the entry stamp in our passports ($5); best of all, he charged no fee, so I tipped him 50 cordobas (about 2.50)) he then even made us a hotel reservation in Granada a a place that turned out to be fantastic.

All went well with the recommended tasks until the person examining my truck’s documents noticed that one document said the truck was blue (the title), while another document (the registration) said it was beige. She asked to look at the truck. Sure enough, it isn’t blue, it’s beige (with a teal green stripe). Sorry- “No es posible a permiso entrar en Nicaragua” she says. I managed to decipher all this (NO isn’t too difficult to figure out), and haltingly get out in my Spanish that I don’t know why the document says it is blue, but the VIN number and engine numbers all match- that’s what’s important, right? Fortunately, the policeman who signs the final approval on the paperwork was watching the whole episode unfold, and asked to look at the documents. He looks out the window at the truck. He then says (as best I could translate) “Well, there are many shades of blue, perhaps the person who completed the original title document felt this color was among them.” Almost everyone in line began to laugh, and the clerk making the fuss even decided this was pretty funny, so ultimately, everything got stamped, notarized, sealed, etc. again, and finally, after about 2 hours at the border, we were officially and legally in Nicaragua!

Our first destination in Nicaragua was Grenada, the oldest colonial city in the western hemisphere. To get there, we crossed about 80km of picturesque countryside, mostly lush, tropical ranchland or rice paddies along the edges of Lago Nicaragua. Like the Great Lakes between the US and Canada, Lago Nicaragua is BIG, so big, you can’t see the other side. There were 3’ breakers blowing in onto the western shore as we drove north along the coast. Unlike the Great Lakes, Lago Nicaragua also sports a couple of volcanoes in the middle of the lake, at least one of which is active. It is also the home to the world’s only freshwater sharks (the lake is connected to the Caribbean Sea by the Rio San Juan, and I guess the sharks swam up and adapted to the lake). We saw the volcanoes, but I can’t say as we saw any sharks!

As we approached Granada, signs of Nicaragua’s poverty became more evident, as many of the houses (if one can really call them that) along the road were little more than one or two room, dirt floor, mud-brick huts with rusty corrugated steel roofs. Chickens, pigs, and cows roamed freely in the road (now I know what that big brush guard on the front of my truck is really for!), and the odor of burning garbage and waste mingled with the heavy tropical air. Over the past several years I have heard a number of complimentary accounts from travelers visiting Granada; several favorably compared it to a smaller version of Havana, Cuba, with its historic architecture gracefully suffering from a certain salutary neglect. I was optimistic after these reports, but not at all prepared to find Grenada in the midst of a small tourism & restoration boom! While Nicaragua clearly still struggles with chronic poverty and the lingering effects of the long civil war (hostilities between Contras & Sandinistas officially ended only in 1990 ), Grenada’s heritage tourism boom offers a light of hope for the region. Costa Rica, which in my opinion has neglected its built and cultural heritage in its efforts to capitalize on ecotourism, could learn a few things from Grenada’s example too. Over an area of perhaps 20 or 30 blocks, Grenada’s historic Spanish grid is lined with superb examples of small scale shops and houses (many meticulously restored and maintained), interspersed with grander structures (such as the nearly completely restored 16^th century cathedral) at important intersections or facing onto the Parque Central. Good hotels, restaurants, cafes, and interesting shops abound in a wonderfully walkable atmosphere that is both comfortable and, at least in the center of the city, safe from most crime.

We arrived at the old center of Grenada in mid afternoon, and easily found and checked into our hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Patio del Malinche, which I heartily recommend to any other trevelers, located just a few blocks off the Parque Central. The entry onto the street is very unassuming, however, the interior and its courtyards are beautifully restored examples of Spanish colonial architecture. A new wing with very well designed veranda, patio and pool have been added recently, and our room was in this section. After getting settled, Dan and I wandered the streets of the old city until dark, and then headed back to our hotel for a swim before dinner. While we relaxed by the pool with a local Cerveza Victoria, the entire city went dark- apparently a complete power failure. Our hotel owner soon appeared with emergency lights and assured us this was typical, nothing to be worried about. As he later explained, electrical power generation and distribution in Nicaragua is provided by a private Spanish company which is currently in the midst of a dispute with the Nicaraguan government. The preferred method of negotiation to resolve the dispute seems to be a kind of tit-for-tat brinksmanship. Each day, all the lights go out at a slightly different time, usually for several hours in the morning, then for about an hour each evening. I’m told during these periodic blackouts they then sell the unused power to Costa Rica at a nice profit! Perhaps the Spanish are trying to capture a particular bureaucrat in an elevator and get him to blink and finally pay their bill… “Quien sabe,” as they say here (who knows!). By the time we headed out to look for a place for dinner, many stores and restaurants had lights running by generators or had simply lit candles all over the place.

In the morning we got up early and walked around taking photos of busy streets with children in uniforms heading for school, men on bicycles heading to work, and the general bustle of a city coming to life for the day. After a few hours wandering and a little shopping (prices for all kinds of things were very reasonable!), we packed up, checked out of our hotel, and headed out to our next destination, a day at the beach in San Juan del Sur, just shy of the Costa Rica border. Unfortunately, Dan needed to be back in Monteverde by Thursday evening. So off we headed in good spirits and under sunny skies.

San Juan del Sur is reputed to be one of the up and coming destinations for tourism in Nicaragua. It has a booming residential real estate market, driven, just as in Costa Rica, by adventurous Americans and Europeans looking for a California beach house on the cheap. While the prices in San Juan del Sur are probably a bit less, my advice for those considering a central American beach home is: stick to Costa Rica. San Jaun del Sur has all the right physical characteristics—a gorgeous crescent of beach, about half a mile long, between two rugged headlands providing a nice protected harbor for boats. All this with a small village nestled below a ring of rugged, tropically vegetated hills with great views out over the bay and ocean beyond, complete with envy inducing daily sunsets. Unfortunately there is another side to the coin; the same poverty that, while present but not overpowering in Granada, is much more evident here in San Juan del Sur. Even with all the sprawling gringo mansions and condos springing up on the hillsides around the town, very little economic benefit seems to be trickling down to the average Nico resident. In similar boom towns in Costa Rica, every able bodied male seems to be employed building things, to the point where many travel significant distances to supply the labor needed. Here unemployed homeless vagrants and panhandlers seemed to be everywhere, sleeping on the beach, even wandering in to shops and restaurants to pester the patrons. And unlike many places, these people weren’t the old, or the physically or mentally handicapped, but able-bodied young men in their teens and twenties who seemed to have decided hustling a living at the beach suited them. While poverty and behavior like this exists in many places around the world, here there seemed to be an unspoken threat in the eyes of many faces: “you’d best give me some money, or if you aren’t careful, I’ll just take it.” Perhaps we just got a bit more exposure than average gringo as we stayed in one of the less expensive hotels along the central beachfront, as opposed to in one of the pricey gated and secured resorts at the edges of the town. Needless to say, when we left on Thursday morning, we were happy to be heading home and counting our blessings that neither Dan nor I had managed to get pick-pocketed or worse.

While we were happy to see San Juan del Sur in our rear-view mirror, I can’t say we really looked forward to the border crossing to get back into Costa Rica a half hour down the road. A certain sense of foreboding seemed to gather as we approached the frontier, complete with the obligatory black cloud on the horizon. About a kilometer from the border, it started to rain, complete with a few strikes of lightning! This time, I figured we could manage without the “expeditors,” and aside from needing to wander around finding a place to get yet another photocopy of one of our documents, we got everything taken care of in Nicaragua in only about 20 minutes. Much easier in this direction! After going through the fumigation again, on to Costa Rica… We drove along a narrow section of highway lined with trucks and no signs or directions through the no-man’s land again, and then passed through the customs check point where the officer glanced in the back of the truck and pronounced us fit to proceed. We then drove another kilometer or so… and we were in Costa Rica! Unfortunately, something was too easy, and we hadn’t gotten our passports stamped with entry stamps. We stopped at one of the many police checks along the PanAmerican highway about a kilometer later and asked about our passports and if this was a problem. The policeman rather emphatically directed us back to the border to get our passports stamped! Somehow in the snarl of parked trucks we had missed the appropriate driveway that lead to the building with the Immigration authorities in it. This time, however, once we found the building, I knew where to go, and what line to stand in, and avoided the extortionary expeditors. In less than 5 minutes we had our passports stamped and ready to go. Home, sweet home, Costa Rica- Pura Vida!

On the way home, we stopped for a detour at Liberia to do some shopping at the big “Do It Center” hardware store near the airport. Most hardware stores in Costa Rica, like those in the US fifty years ago or more have a front counter and then shelves stocked with everything from screws and nails to power tools receding into the back of the store. If you want something, you ask the shop clerk for what ever it is, and they go find it. This is fine if you know precisely what you need, including its exact size, color, thread pitch, etc., in Spanish. While my Spanish vocabulary is increasing daily, asking for many things is almost impossible, and often in Monteverde, even if they know what I’m asking for they don’t have it anyway. Eye bolts larger than 1/8” in diameter, for example, just can’t be had… Well, the “Do It Center” is the Costa Rican equivalent of Home Depot, and they had almost everything. Plus it is all laid out warehouse style, so if you're not sure what you are after, you can just browse until you do.... Curtain rods, check; screw eyes, check; small barbeque, check; even comfortable pillows, and a pasta ladle!

The other excuse for heading 20 kilometers out of the way of the PanAm highway was to keep going another 5 kilometers to the Playa Hermosa catfish farm for lunch. While visiting in March we discovered this place and ate there several times it was so good! Fish tacos similar to Baja style with sort of a Louisiana Creole sauce… mmmm! I then drove the remaining 5 kilometers into Playa Hermosa to show Dan what a beach on the Pacific should look like, without feeling like you should have someone watching your back all the time. It took about 30 seconds for Dan to decide next time he went to the beach, this was the spot for him!

After an uneventful ride back down the PanAm highway we arrived safe and sound in Monteverde. The car performed flawlessly, and after filling the tank with fuel, we calculated our trip mileage at an amazing 32 miles to the gallon! Not bad for a car almost as big as a Chevy suburban (it seats 9). I guess the engine overhaul did actually get done, and it seems to have been done pretty well. Even with a diesel that’s remarkably efficient for a car with approximately 120,000 miles on it. With luck, it’ll run just as well when we set out for Panama at the end of August.

Well that’s about all for this week. The past two days I’ve spent installing curtains, and other chores to get ready for Norma and Niall to arrive on Wednesday. I’m really looking forward to them getting here and having a family around the house! To finish up this post, I can also add one new animal sighting, which I managed just today on a nice walk to Las Nubes (about 8km north of here): a “tayra” or a “tolumuco” is the local common name. A tayra is a BIG member of the weasel family, sort of like a fisher or otter. My first reaction was that it almost looked big enough to be a wolverine! It was about a meter long, and they weigh as much as 10-15 pounds. The one I saw was grayish brown with fairly long fur, and he crossed the road only about 10 meters in front of me about a kilometer from our house. Pretty cool!

More from Monteverde after Norma and Niall get here…

To the Beach!

Saturday - July 8, 2006

After a week’s wandering, I’m back in Monteverde, with a number of interesting adventures to recount… As promised last Saturday, I set out with Dan Pugh, and older student in my course from Maryland (he’s actually the same age as I am) with the ultimate intent of getting to Nicaragua. Our first setback turned out to be the car itself, not the documents. On Friday before I left the Institute I heard from Russell my car broker who informed me that the mechanics had run into a bit more work than they had expected on my car and it would not be done until Monday, hopefully about midday. C’est la vie. It really didn’t matter that much in the big scheme of things anyway, especially in light of the “permiso” issues, etc…

So we hatched our back-up plan- first to Playa Naranjo for a weekend of sun & warm after a week of damp weather in Monteverde. We took the public bus to Puntarenas at 6:00am, which was the usual- unbelievably cheap ($2.00), but hot, crowded, & slow. The same trip by car would take a little over an hour, whereas we spent more than 3 hours! In the city of Puntarenas itself, the bus acted like a local public bus, picking up and dropping passengers at every stop. We finally decided this was how the driver supplemented his income—no tickets were issued for these folks, and no receipts provided, and all the cash (most were charged only about a quarter) just went onto a small box on the dashboard. Seeing as dozens people took advantage of this opportunity, it could definitely add up to at least a pretty good pool of beer money at the end of the day!

We reached the station at about 9:15, and set out on foot for the ferry terminal, about a mile or so away. Puntarenas is a very old city, among the oldest of the Spanish colonial ports on the Pacific coast of the Americas and dating to the early 16^th century, but unfortunately without a very good eye, you would never know it from what you see today. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by Puntarenas. It has been variously described to me by other travelers as ugly, disgusting, dirty, and smelling of dead fish. Well, the slight fishy smell notwithstanding (hey- it’s on the water and commercial fishing is the main industry, so what do you expect!), it really wasn’t that bad. The town is laid out in a traditional Spanish grid along a long narrow peninsula that is essentially a big sand spit. It is only about 4 blocks wide, and the ocean side has a gorgeous view to the west with the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula in the distance. The buildings are mostly one & two story structures and many show traces of their Spanish colonial heritage. Like San Jose, however, there isn’t much emphasis on building maintenance so many places look a bit neglected. The city has suffered economically in the last couple decades since a new container port was built down the coast a ways, but still, there is a prosperous bustle about the place that seems to suggest things are now rebounding.

We reached the ferry terminal about 9:45 to find our ferry was just about to leave at 10:00. The schedules on line had all said 10:30, so we had walked fairly leisurely—now we rushed and managed to get tickets and board with a few minutes to spare. The ferry was a pretty seaworthy looking vessel of about 150’ length or so and able to carry about 30 or 40 cars, plus a couple hundred pedestrian passengers. Judging from the various labels on fixtures, and even an old interpretive display that had yet to be updated, this ship was a secondhand acquisition from Germany where it looked like it once plied the Baltic or North Sea. The ferry was even less expensive than the bus- only $1.50, and only took an hour to cross the gulf to the Nicoya Peninsula and Playa Naranjo. Playa (beach) Naranjo is a small, sleepy town on the gulf coast, consisting of 3 or 4 hotels, a couple of restaurants, the ferry terminal, a gas station, and a bunch of small fincas (farms) owned by both locals and gringos. Once the primary destination from Puntarenas, Playa Naranjo is now a bit of a backwater, ever since a second ferry began operating to the town of Paquero farther to the south (and closer to the popular Pacific beaches). Locals all talk of an economic resurgence as plans are afoot to build a big marina, but nothing seems to be happening too rapidly yet…

Dan and I headed up the road on foot for a hotel we had heard about from some other travelers – the Oasis del Pacifica. Located just south of the ferry, the “Oasis” looked just that! Set in a grove of coconut palms along a gently curving crescent of sand, with thatched roof shade structures scattered around a pool, etc. -- just what we needed after all the news about the car, etc. Dan and I spent much of the next two days resting around the pool, reading, or walking along the beach. The hotel also had a bunch of resident parrots, several of which would look for handouts from the guests as well as try to start a conversation with repeated chants of “hola, hola!” One bird, named Charlie had quite a vocal repertoire when one of the hotel employees would get him going, rattling off strings of Spanish that left my vocabulary in the dust. The again, based on the tendency toward off-color words & phrases many parrots seem to know, maybe I’m just not familiar with part of the Spanish language yet! Just as well…

While having breakfast on Sunday morning, we ran into two different local characters at our hotel, One, Larry, had run into a number of my students the previous weekend and actually drove them back to Monteverde after they missed the last ferry out. Larry is the quintessential gringo beach bum/real estate speculator. He lives periodically in Florida, here in Playa Naranjo, and in Jaco (another beach town farther down the coast on the mainland). The second person was a German ex-patriot named Horst. Horst is one of the most fascinating people I’ve met in a long time… he is a former academic, with PhD’s in both Philosophy and Physics! He was a student of both Werner Heisenberg and Martin Heidegger in the 1960’s, and is a former professor at the Max Plank Institute. He’s spent the past 20 years in Canada working in real estate development and owns a bottled water company in Vancouver. You never know who you’ll run into. After discovering I was a landscape architect, Horst invited us up to see his house, which was a fantastic 5,000sf place with 360 degree views from a hilltop above the town. As it turns out, he has been in the house about a year, and while the interior of the home is just about complete, he needs designs for the gardens. With luck, it will be a first paying commission here ;-)

On Monday morning, Dan & I packed up and headed out to catch the 7:30am ferry. In this direction, it turns out the ferry runs 30 minutes behind the posted schedule! Schedules are kind of optional on Tico time. We caught the bus to San Jose at 10:00, and pulled into the main bus station at just before noon. This was an express bus, and much nicer and quicker- and still cost just $2.00! After taking a cab to Auto’s Kim, we were pleasantly surprised to find our car almost ready! We ate lunch while they wrapped things up, and got back to find the in-house mechanics had just completed a total engine overhaul, including all new pistons & rings on our 2.5 liter diesel. It certainly sounded much smoother, and not even a hint of smoke came from the exhaust. All the other little things seem to be fixed too. They mounted the new license plates while I ran down the street and made a copy of the ignition keys at a local lock shop, and we were ready to go. Unfortunately, it was already too late to deal with the “permiso salida del pais” issue, so we headed out toward Liberia figuring we would figure that can of worms out in the morning. Tomorrow, on to Nicaragua!