Not to bore you all with more Costa Rica blathering. But I took copious notes while I was in Costa Rica, in fact I think I took 10 pages of notes in 5 days. (I like to take notes, can you tell?) So I’m going to share some random tidbits from my notes with you:

• In San Jose, Costa Rica there are driving restrictions to cut air pollution. Cars with license plates that end in certain numbers can’t be driven on certain days within the city. We rented our car on Tuesday night and drove to San Jose for the night. But our car could not be driven in San Jose on Wednesday!! So come Wednesday we had to sneak out of the city without being seen by the cops (we made it).
• The car we rented was a 3-cylinder Suzuki. It wasn’t powerful, but it got great gas mileage, even in the mountains on those crazy windy roads. The only problem with it was this it wouldn’t go uphill when we picked up those hitchhikers…we had to only go down.
• Driving around San Jose the first night, looking for our hotel, we almost hit the same indigent crazy, half-naked woman twice. And once when we stopped for directions we saw her a third time, and she asked for money.
• Our hotel in San Jose had a Casino across the street. Casinos are common there. Our hotel also had a homeless woman camped across the street, near the casino.
• Just like in Mexico lots of people ride motorcycles and scooters in Costa Rica; unlike Mexico they nearly ALL wear proper motorcycle helmets (the kind that can save your life if you have a wreck).
• Most homes have metal roofs, even middle and high class homes. In Mexico metal roofs are usually seen only on lower class homes.
• Outside of San Jose we saw an old white-haired man holding two big bags of groceries and hitchhiking. We saw him get a ride too.
• While we were there the average temperature was 77°F (25°C). It rained each afternoon and was sunny the rest of the time. It was perfect.
• We saw lots and lots of wood, people used it in construction and they used it nicely. The quality of the workmanship was high.
• Over and over we told each other “Costa Rica feels like Hawai’i.”
• It was often hard to take a photo in a public area without getting a garbage can or recycling bin in the background.
• We couldn’t find any dust. There wasn’t dust anywhere in any of our hotel rooms, not in the closets, not on the louvered windows or doors. We don’t know if the cleaners are that good of if there’s really no dust there.
• We saw lots of U.S. restaurant chains, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Church’s Chicken and others. But didn’t see Starbucks, which is the only big one I actually ever set foot into.
• We drank the tap water. We went 5 whole days without buying or drinking bottled water. We stuck our glasses under the tap and we drank that water. After 6 years of drinking only bottled water it was GREAT!
• One day we followed a little sign at our hotel that said Catarata (waterfall). Turned out the trail was more like a mud-slide. It was serious class 5 down-climbing on mud and wet leaves. We were surprised by how hard it was but did it anyway, me in my flip-flops no less. Never did find that waterfall, though we did get to the Arenal River and had a great workout.
• From what we could see in road cuts and such, the top soil in Costa Rica must be at least 50 feet deep! Compare that to Cancun where top soil is measured in inches when it exists.
• We saw lots and lots and lots of people mowing lawns. We saw no one cutting grass with a machete (the way they do here in Cancun).
• The paved roads we were on were in good shape. One day I decided to count potholes. We drove for over 4 hours that day, my count was 4, and all were in the town of Naranjo.
• Metal window protections (bars) are common as are metal gates over driveways. People have the culture of protecting against break-ins. Not sure how much crime there is there.
• Once we came around a corner only to find that half the road (one whole lane) had slid down the road in a landslide. There were no signs, you just had to notice in time to swerve.
• On the main highway we saw buses stop to pick up passengers. They did not have a pull-off area, they just stopped in the right lane. They must get rear-ended all the time.
• Every single bathroom I saw in Costa Rica was spotless, from the Burger King emergency pit stop we made, to the airport, to random restaurants, to our hotels. The first thing I did when I got to Mexico was to visit the bathroom at the Cancun airport…eww!
• The only garbage we saw regularly in Costa Rica was flower petals on the ground…

While we were in Costa Rica local Cancun TV show host Oscar Cadena was there as well. He and his film crew visited Arenal as well as other areas of Costa Rica. This week they are editing their Costa Rica footage and, so I’ve heard, will put their Costa Rica show on the air next week.

We were told the show will appear on Unicable in Cancun (often channel 10) on Monday, September 29th at 5 pm. I have not been able to confirm this airing on any published TV schedules. But we heard this from someone in Oscar’s crew so the rumor source has merit. If any of my readers finds confirmation of this airing schedule please post a comment. I’ll be looking for the show next Monday at 5 pm.

Until recently in order to fly to Costa Rica from Cancun you had to make a connection at another airport, but now you can fly direct from Cancun to San Jose, Costa Rica. The flight is less than 2 hours long.

The company behind these direct flights is a Costa Rican charter tour company called Destinos TV. Destinos TV is bringing Costa Ricans to Mexico for vacation and also the reverse, they are bringing Mexicans to Costa Rica for vacation.

Destinos TV arranged our trip for us including hotels and transportation (you can buy only a plane ticket from them if you wish). It took a little doing to get everything set. But in the end we decided to rent a car through them and drive ourselves where we wanted. Destinos TV also can arrange for group transportation (the group tour route) but we decided against that.

Because our trip was so short (5 days only) and because of our flight times we spent the first and last nights in San Jose, which is close to the airport. Next time I do a trip like this I won’t stay in San Jose proper, instead I would stay closer to the airport in Alajuela.

Our hotel in San Jose, the stately Hotel Balmoral, is smack in the middle of this busy city and is surrounded by one-way streets. Had we come in on a package tour, with a bus driver who knew his or her way to the hotel I think we might feel differently about staying in San Jose again. But we rented our car and set out for the hotel in San Jose thinking we had maps and the hotel address and that we would find the hotel without trouble. HAHAHA! We drove in circles for over an hour, always close but never quite finding just the right one-way street. The hotel itself, when we did reach it, was nice and comfortable. It has a decent restaurant/bar and the staff is really attentive. But I do think that next time we won’t brave the streets of San Jose.

View of Arenal Lake – taken as we were coming down from the Hanging Bridges

Our second day in Costa Rica we drove to San Ramon and then up into the mountains to La Fortuna and Arenal. The drive is lovely. Even though it was rainy and overcast it was absolutely gorgeous! We were completely in love with Costa Rica after just a few minutes on this road. Once near Arenal we found our hotel, the Hotel Arenal Paraiso. We would stay in this hotel again, and again. There was nothing not to like about it. It has hot springs on the property. It has a good restaurant and we enjoyed all of the meals we had there. And the view from our room, well, we came home with so many photos of that same view that I’m embarrassed. Every room at the Hotel Arenal Paraiso overlooks the volcano. And the volcano changes every minute. The clouds descend, then they lift; the light changes, then changes again; the volcano smokes more and then less. We had no choice but to take photo after photo of that volcano.

What I didn’t realize until I got to Arenal was that the volcano is active, as in actively making noise. We kept hearing what we thought was thunder and finally found out that the noise we were hearing was not thunder, it was the volcano rumbling and rumbling. I’ve seen active volcanoes before (and I’ve even seen flowing lava from 5 feet away, which is an amazing experience), but I had never heard a volcano rumble before. All I can say is “Wow,” it’s really something to have the earth make all that noise, makes you feel like the insignificant speck in the universe that you are!

Orchids being grown at the Butterfly Conservatory near Arenal Volcano

The next day we set out to see the area. We decided to visit the Hanging Bridges first. We took the 2 mile hike that crosses all the bridges and fell in love with Costa Rica all over again. We saw no one else while we were on the trail, which made it more intense, it was just us in that rainforest.

The hanging bridges are wonderful. Neither of us is scared of heights, I think if you were you might have trouble crossing the high bridges, some of them are way up in the rainforest canopy. I have a touch of vertigo and it came on while I was on the bridges but I found that if I kept one hand on the railing of the bridge that I didn’t get that vertigo disorientation thing.

Howler monkey at the Butterfly Conservatory – he was howling at us like nobody’s business

After visiting the hanging bridges we set out for an Arenal Volcano observation area, but soon decided it was cloudy enough that we wouldn’t see much. So we bumped our way up a steep, windy, bone-jarringly bumpy dirt road until we got to the Butterfly Conservatory. There we learned exactly how completely impossible it is to photograph butterflies. You can be looking at 20 butterflies but by the time you take the picture they have all left the photo area or closed their wings for a second, effectively disappearing from your picture. Christ, you could not pay me to photograph butterflies!

We also saw the howler monkey in the photo above at the Butterfly Conservatory. He did not like us, not one bit. I think he is not so used to strangers. There were a few folks there while we were there, but they all worked there. I think the monkey knew we didn’t belong and wanted us out of there. So we obliged him and left shortly after he started haranguing us.

Another view of the Arenal Volcano

On the way down from the Butterfly Conservatory we drove into a heavy rainstorm. It was pelting down rain so hard it would hurt your head if you were out in it. And then we came around the corner and saw two figures out in the rain with ponchos on, they were hitchhiking. We stopped for them (I have a serious case of rained-on hitchkiker sympathy). It turned out they were from Europe and were both backpacking around the Americas. Both of them were involved with CouchSurfing and after spending a few hours with them, and eating lunch with them we’ve decided to looking into CouchSurfing ourselves (I’ve been hearing about it for a while, so this was my tipping point).

A plains view from the area southeast of Fortuna – we saw cows everywhere in Costa Rica

After meeting up with the CouchSurfers we headed back to soak in the hotel’s hot springs. I adore hot springs, having once gone on a hot springs tour of Colorado that took me to at least 10 different hot springs. There’s nothing like a good soak. And hot springs are great regardless of weather, it came be raining or snowing on you but if you are in a hot spring the weather is fine.

The next day we made our way at a leisurely pace back to San Jose. This time we took the other road down, going through Quesada and Zarcero and finally spending some time in the town of Sarchi, which is known as a hub for crafts. This road was not quite so windy as the road up from San Ramon. But this road had something the other road didn’t have, trucks. It had big huge trucks and little trucks and busses and more trucks…and even cars. At least 7 times we came around a corner only to find a semi-truck bearing down on us from OUR SIDE OF THE ROAD! Husbandito remarked over and over that “the car accidents in this country must all be head-on collisions.” But he’s a great driver (learning to drive in a taxi cab in Mexico City will do that to you) and we were never actually in any danger, though I did scream a few times.

All in all we absolutely loved Costa Rica. It’s infrastructure around cars and roads is not the best. The roads need shoulders. The trucks need emissions testing (they ALL stink). There are not enough road signs. But these things are minor compared to the enormous natural beauty that Costa Rica has. We will be going back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

We returned from our (way too short) trip to Costa Rica on Saturday. But have had no phone or internet since returning, so I’ve been slow to get a blog post together (am stealing an unreliable unsecured wireless signal now).

In short, we loved Costa Rica and will return. Costa Rica was never on my short list of must-see places. I was interested but had heard too much good about it, I smelled a rat, I figured it was over-rated, I figured all those people who were ga-ga about Costa Rica were, you know, brainwashed or something.

Well they weren’t.

When people in Costa Rica ask if you like their country they always continue the question with “do you find Costa Rica to be clean?” We saw almost no litter in Costa Rica. And people there are intensely proud of this fact. Over and over we saw workers picking up garbage, or rather they were walking along looking for the rare piece of garbage to pick up. And everywhere we went we saw recycling bins and trucks loaded with materials to be recycled.

Costa Rica seems to have it’s garbage under control. And the sense of pride about this is palpable. You see poverty there, it’s a poor country. But the people I met were proud of what they do have. And they were proud of their land and their beautiful countryside.

There is a sweetness in Costa Rica that I have only felt in a few places. I’m not sure how to describe it except that I felt that people didn’t have their defenses up somehow. Perhaps this was an artifact of my being relaxed and on vacation, but I don’t think so; I’ve been on vacation in lots of places and never felt this kind of peace in the places I’ve been. I think it’s bigger and I think it’s connected to the fact that Costa Rica abolished it’s army more than 50 years ago. Most people in Costa Rica have grown up having never lived in a country with a military presence. They don’t have enemies and they don’t put up defenses. It’s truly a peaceful country.

That said, we did hear a local say that the Mexican mafia has a presence in Costa Rica and is trying to control the drug trade there. So obviously things in Costa Rica are as complex as anywhere else.

Still I think that the fact that this poor country doesn’t spend money on military must be great for the government’s budget. I can only imagine what good could be accomplished with all the money the US and Mexico spend on their militaries.

One thing I loved about Costa Rica was being in the mountains. I am not a flat-lander by nature and Cancun is difficult for me to live in partly because it’s flat here. We spent 3 days of our trip in the area near Arenal volcano and Fortuna. And the trip up there and back was on windy, hilly, mountainous roads. We loved every minute that we were on those roads. Around every corner was an “oh-my-god-view!” We filled the digital cameras with photos, then deleted as many pix as possible and then filled them again. We simply could not take enough photos.

Below are some photos for you, and I’ve got another batch to share another day. And I will write some more about Costa Rica soon. As they say in Costa Rice “pura vida.”

Inside the cathedral in San Ramon

Tire Toucan painted by the Artisan of the Zone: Erian

The view from our hotel room: Arenal Volcano

Orchids near our hotel

A Hanging Bridge

Dear Readers, I have been neglectful of you these past weeks. As you know September is my (crazy insane) busy month. And so I’ve been celebrating it’s busy-ness by working on Saturday nights, working on both Mexican and U.S. national holidays, sleeping 5 hours a night instead of 8, working some more and by not blogging.

But today it all stops. Today we pack the bags and find the passports and walk away from our lives. Today we fly to Costa Rica.

Since making the decision to take this trip we’ve been greeted with various reactions from others. Some people say “ooohh Costa REEEKaaa!” As if it were Mars, as if it were the most exotic place on the planet, as if it’s streets were paved in gold. Others say “[pause] oh, well, uh, have you BEEN there before? Well, it’s OK once but I wouldn’t go back.” (By the way, we have not been there before.)

But the best comment I’ve heard is “los Ticos no existen” (the “Ticos”, meaning the Costa Ricans, don’t exist).

Apparently some visitors to Costa Rica feel there’s something lacking in the culture there. Well, I live in Cancun, where it’s easier to find a plastic surgeon than a bookstore, so you don’t need to explain a lack of culture to me. And it’s true that Costa Rica doesn’t seem to be known for its music or art or food or for its cultural traditions.

But other visitors to Costa Rica think of it as an ecological wonderland. Costa Rica has coasts on both the Caribbean and the Pacific and it has volcanoes and mountains of over 12,000 feet (3900 meters). Costa Rica has only about 0.1% of the world’s landmass but it has about 5% of the world’s biodiversity. About 25% of Costa Rica is protected land. And Costa Rica has set a goal for itself to become the first developing country to become carbon neutral, a goal they hope to achieve by the year 2021.

In learning what I have about Costa Rica it looks to me like the Ticos do exist. It looks like they are busy setting lofty goals, passing forward-thinking laws and protecting their land. Maybe that’s why they are not known for making music and art, maybe they are busy doing other things?

Anyway, I won’t know if they actually exist until I get there. So I’ll let you know.

– NPR Story: Costa Rica Aims to Be a Carbon-Neutral Nation
– Wikipedia: Costa Rica

If I have cell phone coverage in Costa Rica (not holding my breath given how mountainous it is there) I will be sending text Tweets to my Twitter account so stayed turned:
– Twitter: RiverGirlCancun’s Tweets

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Alison Chase and I have released her web site. We’ve been working on it for over a year, a lot of energy has gone into it and it’s a nice feeling to finally have it out there.

Alison Chase is a choreographer and was co-founder of Pilobolus Dance Theatre. Alison’s new dance theater production company is called Apogee Arts. Apogee Arts’ mission is to “combine innovative choreography, dance training, performance and educational programs to create an experience that engages and informs audiences in unusual performance spaces.”

– Take a look at the web site here: Apogee Arts Dance Theater
– Look at the video sample of Alison’s choreography here: Alison Chase Video Sample

Enjoy!

Recently we had an experience with our Mexican bank (Bancomer) that just is so ridiculously stupid and asinine that I can’t make peace with it. What happened is that someone wrote a check to my husband from a bank in Canada.

Sounds like no big deal right? But the bank would not take the check when we tried to deposit it. My husband spent over an hour trying to convince the bank to take the money, he went to two bank locations and talked to several people in management. But no amount of talking would convince them that they wanted our money.

Because the check was from a foreign bank it was likely to take 4 weeks to clear. But in Mexico, I gather, once they accept a check as a deposited item they give you access to that money, even before the check has cleared.

The bank made it clear that if we kept more money in that account they might have been able to make an exception and take this tainted, evil foreign check. But because we think that Mexican banks SUCK and so barely use that account, we don’t qualify to PUT MONEY INTO IT! Good one! Brilliant!

Now in the U.S. I’ve experienced that in a similar situation my bank would do one of two things. They would let me have access to the money, before the foreign check cleared, because they look at my long banking history and see that I’ve never been overdrawn one single time, ever. Or they would simply show that deposit as PENDING and not let me have access to the money until the check cleared.

There’s something inescapably logical about simply not letting us have access to the money until the check clears. And we do not need that money now, so waiting 4 weeks for access to it would have been fine. But no, logic seems to escape Mexican bankers.

And so I called our bank in the States, and I asked them if there would be any trouble accepting this check. They said “no, the check should clear in less than two weeks, but we’ll give you immediate access to the money.” Now that’s more like it.

So then the only remaining problem was that we needed to get the check to our bank in the States, without using the Mexican postal system (which is even more useless than Mexican banks). Fortunately I’ve got a friend who has promised to courier the check into the U.S. Postal System for us, so I think we are good to go.

I just don’t understand why on earth it has to take this much work to simply put money into the bank? Imagine that we didn’t have that U.S. account, in that case we would simply be out of luck. No wonder Mexico has a cash-based economy.

In my humble opinion Mexico will not join the first world until it has banks that actually want people’s money.

About a million years ago (who me, exaggerate?) I owned a computer store. And I noticed that year after year the store’s busiest months would be September and January. You would think December would be busy for a retail store. But not for us, our primary clients were businesses and from what we saw businesses make decisions to spend gobs of money on computers in January and in September.

For the last (What year is it? Oh yeah.) 12 years I’ve been getting paid to make 1’s and 0’s look good in a web browser…and in that time I’ve noticed that my web design clients have the same “buying” pattern that my computer store clients had. My busiest months are always January and September.

It makes sense. People get done with the end of year holidays and think “I need to finally update that web site.” And they do the same at the end of their summer vacation. September is a time to get down to business.

But then when you live in Cancun September takes on another meaning. Here September jokingly gets called “Septihambre” which is a running together of the Spanish “Septiembre” (September) and the Spanish word for hunger which is “hambre.” The reason for Septihambre is that this is the slowest season here. The tourists do not come. The normally-full planes come with 10 or 20 or 30 passengers in them. The hotels are empty. The restaurants are empty. And so all those people here who live paycheck to paycheck and depend on tourism to keep them in the black end up suffering.

We get more crime in September here. People here are hesitant to travel in September because they figure their houses will be more likely to be broken into in September.

The other thing that happens in my house in September is that my husband’s job gets much more relaxed. Instead of needing to work 14 or more hours a day he is suddenly getting out early and is working many fewer hours. He is a bureaucrat so he gets paid the same whether he works a 24-hour shift (as occasionally happens) or a 6-hour shift. But what this really means is that he’s home a lot more in September, home bugging me (sometimes) and home distracting me (usually).

So while I’m running from one end of the day to the other, while I’m struggling to keep up with all the details of my business, while I’m rushing here and there, while I barely have time to eat or sleep or take a run, my husband is just hanging out.

Like right now…right now he’s here in the office hanging out in the hammock (along with the dog, who loves the hammock) blathering on to me about something or other. Good thing I’m not actually working right now.