#24: An Often Depressing Paradise - Costa Rica - A Year and a Day ...

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"Ten years ago, this country was a paradise", grumped the ageing and
slightly slimy Costa Rican barrister, speaking as our bus to the coast
paused for a food break. He blamed the explosion in tourism and the high
levels of foreign migrants for creating huge problems for Costa Rica.
"When they come here ("they" being immigrants from Colombia), they bring
their problems with them, and now they are our problems."

He also despised the Americans that had come to live in the country — they
thought they owned the world. We resumed our seats on the bus and I soon
got talking to a very funny Nestlé salesman. He was taking the bus home
to Quepos because on New Year's Eve he had got drunk and crashed his
company car. We talked about the capital city, San Jose. I said I liked
the city a lot, but there were many poor people there. "Many poor people
all over Costa Rica," he shrugged. He felt the money from tourism only
ended up in the hands of a few, and the government was a bunch of idiots.

Costa Rica was one of the main reasons I had decided to come to Central
America, what I had read of its pristine beaches and mysterious cloud
forests were enticing. But I found Costa Rica a hard country to get one's
head around. Costa Rica seems certainly in a better situation than the
other Central American states I had visited. A long history of democracy,
clearly a more developed and wealthy country than its neighbours, and
well marketed natural wonderlands. But Costa Ricans often didn't seem
very happy people and often expressed concern and pessimism about where
their country was headed. For my part, I found that I was frequently
depressed and unimpressed by the very areas I had spent months dreaming
about before this trip began.

A Costa Rican home from home

Inbetween our trips to the cloud forest at Monteverde, the volcano at
Fortuna, and the Manuel Antonio park on the coast, San Jose became the
home base for our exploring, and we got to know the city rather well.
San Jose has that big city quality in that it cares nothing for you —
whether you prosper or fail, a thousand other stories of the city will
play out unaffected. It gives you that anonymity that all big cities
give, that feeling of rootlessness and possible reinvention. We liked it
a lot.

The city centre is littered with large, appealing pedestrian squares. We
admired the somewhat seedy bustle of the Parque Centrale, were served
with incredible rudeness cups of dark, rich coffee in the cafe opposite
the Teatro Nacional, and I reclined and wrote among the lovely trees of
the secluded Plaza de Espana. We stayed in the very friendly Hotel
Boston, and left the majority of our stuff there as we went on our
excursions. It was a sublime joy to arrive in a new place with only a
stuffed day bag to weigh me down, being able to meander leisurely looking
for a place to stay, rather than the embarassing sweaty crawl every
backpacker experiences when arriving with a 60 litre rucksack on one's back.

There are also quite a lot of, well, odd people in San Jose. Aside from
the young male prostitutes and beggars with long stories in the central
square, the old and spectacularly unattractive female prostitutes in the
red light district, there are some genuinely dubious characters around.
One man that perplexed us was a white haired, dark skinned Costa Rican in
a badly fitting green suit jacket, who seemed to spend his time looking
for young men to photograph against the backdrop of the Teatro Nacional.

My favourite, however, was an American man we overheard while drinking
our dark coffees in the Gran Hostel Costa Rica's street cafe. He had a
greasy blond moustache, a plump belly that hung over his belt like a self
indulgent smile and wore white socks. "I'd give my kids anything they
wanted, but my bitch of an ex-wife keeps taking more and more money! And
she's been amply provided for, many times over," he blustered reasonably
to the silent older man and young woman in a very mini skirt sitting with him. This promised to be really entertaining, so
I settled down to listen. His Spanish was amazing, he knew just enough to
destroy the language. Gari looked at me in horror as the man ordered a
hamburger, making a jarring mistake on almost every word — I'm still sure
that this was more a product of his contempt for his surroundings than a
lack of education. The older silent man left as a second woman, younger
and exquisitely beautiful, walked over to the table with a deadened
expression - the relationship between the two girls and him became clear,
even to an innocent like me. Somehow, he took offence at something the
waiters hadn't done for him, and demanded to see the manager. "I know the
day guy, I know the night guy here," he smugged conspiratorally, but no
manager was produced, leaving him grumbling about contacting his powerful
friends in the hotel. We left the table a little later, as he was
explaining to the girls, "Yo soy un lesbiano!"

Our escape from the clouds

"Let's just go," said Gari, making the decision for us both. We had paid
for our room in this small Monteverde hotel the night before, but now the
manager was saying there had been a mix up and she wanted double what we
had just paid. Although it had never been mentioned previously,
apparently it was twelve dollars a person, not twelve dollars a room. I
was quite unsure how to deal with this confrontation, but fortunately
these kind of situations come more naturally to Gari, and he instantly
decided we wouldn't hand over any more money. We slung our possessions in
our rucksacks and walked out without saying a word to the people in the
kitchen. I had a nervous moment retrieving my clothes from the washing
line, half certain I would turn around to see the slight Costa Rican
owner blocking my way with a carving knife. But no one left the house to
challenge us as we turned and walked brusquely towards the distant bus
station.

The cloud forest itself was pretty fantastic, at least once we got past
the inital areas, which frankly looked very similar to Hampstead Heath on
a cloudy day. "Cloud Forest", according to my guidebook, is an area of
forest almost perpetually cloaked in clouds, and hence the wet conditions
are immensely conducive to life. There was plant life everywhere, and
most of it were plants that used the trees as homes and/or as an all-you-can-eat buffet. It is a tough life for trees in Costa Rican forests.
Vines encircle and strangle them, mosses cling to their bark, orchids
grow all over them, strange flowering plant things sprout in odd places,
birds nest in them, ants steal their leaves and termites eat their wooden
bodies. Some kind of tree pressure group probably needs to be formed.

The highlight for me was walking across a metal swaying bridge that
stretched across a gorge, a river flowing far beneath. The tall trees'
branches waved on the wind, around my eye level. Their tops were
clustered with plants whose roots had never touched the earth — one tree
apparently supported seventy different forms of plant life. We saw plants
with beautiful patterns made by their black sap, trees with deep red
wood, plants with black punk-like spikes. Each stage of life was in this
park, we saw small trees growing, immense trees weighed down by besieging
vines, and trees on the verge of collapse. One tree leant over a gorge of
a river, and as the wind swayed it back and forth, the ground under its
roots shifted up and down, as though these were the lungs of the earth.

But Monteverde town was also our introduction to Costa Rica's current
vision of tourism. Everything one could imagine doing here has been
thought of and packaged into a tour, and the prices are in dollars. Fifty
dollars to soar over the forest on high wires, eight dollars for a tour
of the Quaker cheese factory (but only before 2pm) — this place seemed
set up entirely with two week well-off holiday makers in mind.

With all this money grabbing in sight, it was hard to relax and enjoy the
natural beauty. We decided to leave. Then the final slap in the face was
the hotel bill issue. Perhaps it was a series of honest mistakes on her
part, but as we had already paid, we felt no regret about getting up and
going. But while guilt wasn't a problem, fear was. I was racked by nerves
all the way to the bus stop, and stared dolefully at each passing jeep,
sure it was her husband coming to round us up and shout at us until we
paid. It wasn't until the bus for Fortuna had departed that I began to
calm down.

The hideous volcano god

The town of Fortuna, our next destination, was the most depressing place
I've yet visited. Tourism had made something horrible and lifeless of
this small town, for Fortuna's good luck is to be situated near one of
Costa Rica's must sees, the active volcano Arenal.

We disembarked into the hot, slippery air and touts lethagically set
about pressuring us into choosing their hotel. With no better ideas, we
found ourselves inherited by a 14 year old from Idaho, whose name we
never learnt. He had come to be living in Fortuna, we extracted, because
his mother had decided to start a new life here and had brought him
along. His limp sullen words, a morose parody of a warm up sales pitch,
conveyed his utter hate for this town and this horror of an existence
that had been chosen for him. He clearly met every bus that came into
town, and no longer was able to muster a façade of friendliness for the
faceless tourists he saw for their first five minutes in Fortuna. He
clearly found his job meaningless and the town pointless — we quickly
became repulsed by his presence. After three hotels of limited quality,
we decided we had to get away from this sorry wretch, and I told him,
"Adios!" in a tone meant to convey the full depth of my revulsion for him.

Later on, we sat and considered his situation, and we felt a lot of pity
for him. We felt pity for the town in general — all these tourists coming
to the town, no interest in it beyond it being a temporary base for
volcano viewing, then moving on a day or two later. We got speaking to a
man who worked in the town, he turned out to be a Nicaraguan, and was
looking forward to heading home later this year. Even the workers of the
town were transients, it seemed; who actually gave a shit about this
place, who saw it as a home, beyond some of the old people and young
children?

The type of tourism here also repelled us both. We overheard an American
shop owner instruct a group, "You guys will like the hot springs, yeah,
you'll go to the hot springs tomorrow morning, then you'll want a couple
of beers back in the town, then take a taxi to..." The jowls of the
tourist's neck bobbed in agreement as it was all set up for him. If one
entertains some notion of being an independent traveller, of travelling
to see new cultures and test oneself in some way, then Costa Rica can be
a trying place at times. It was hard to think of anything we could do
that hadn't already been prearranged and prepackaged: it cost six dollars
to view a nearby waterfall.

This vision of travel just seemed to me to be wholly external. Where was
the sense of choosing this place and not others for reasons personal to
oneself, where was the reflection, the sense of challenging oneself in
tricky situations, of travelling to places because for whatever reason
they appeal to some sense of longing? This was mindless travel, show up
at a recommended locale then look around for something to do — "Wow, you
can white water raft here too?"

Oh, and the volcano Arenal? It was covered in clouds the whole very short
time we were in Fortuna, so it wasn't possible to see any of the flowing
lava, in fact it generally wasn't possible to see the volcano at all.
There was no question that either of us had the stomach to stay more than
one night in the town, so we quickly returned to San Jose.

Remi

This is a part of my and Gari's travels that I had very little
involvement with, but I wanted to write about it as it made a big impact
on our trip, and was an important episode for us both.

As we had travelled together from Guatemala to Costa Rica, a lot of the
poverty we were passing by was having a strong emotional effect on Gari.
His reactions made me realise how jaded I have become: like I suspect
many long term travellers with a more or less fixed budget, one develops
a kind of "them and us" mentality towards beggars or in fact anyone
asking for some generosity. The standard response is to think, if I gave
to everyone, I'd have to end this trip next week, but I often wonder if
things are that simple.

One point I remember, in Grenada, was where I watched a golden haired
young teenager, clearly from a wealthy foreign family, sit down at a
table in the Parque Centrale and order food for a whole collection of
street children, beggars and shoe shiners. He sat among them, blond hair
glowing in the sunshine, and as they ate he silently got up and left. I
must confess that my first reaction to this contained a fair amount of
"How sweet! How naive!", but when I told Gari about it, he was very moved
and started to wonder why he wasn't doing anything similar.

Gari met Remi a week or two later, in San Jose's Parque Centrale. Gari
enjoyed talking with this teenager from the Costa Rican town of San
Carlos, and they met a few times during our returns to San Jose. Remi
clearly wasn't sleeping in a bed most nights, and Gari let him sleep in
our hotel room during the day. He bought him food, which Remi devoured,
and got him some clean socks, but didn't want to just give him money,
especially once he learnt more of this sixteen year old's situation. Remi
had come to the capital from his home town, had starting taking crack
cocaine, and was hanging around the Parque Centrale, working as a
prostitute during the day to pay for his addiction. His dealer sold him a
small lump of crack for 1000 colones (about one pound and thirty pence);
Remi charged men 1000 colones to wank them off, and five thousand if they
wanted to fuck him.

Gari was unsure what do to, but felt it was terrible that this teenager's
life was already heading for a very sad and probably very early end. He
spent a while worrying about whether he was being tricked by someone who
just wanted his money, and he could tell Remi was lying to him about some
things he had said. But we both agreed that there was no point worrying
about being foolish unless one was actually risking something, like
giving him a lot of money or leaving him alone with all our valuables,
and as Gari wasn't going to do that, where was the risk? And slowly Gari
felt the lies were breaking down as Remi opened up to him. After one long
and intense conversation, Gari asked him plainly, "What is your future?"
Remi started crying, and said, "Nothing."

Gari decided that the best way he could help Remi was to show him
something of a different life, one that wasn't centred on drugs and solely
on making it through the here and now. He offered to take him with us to
the beach, to pay for his accommodation and food, to basically give him a
holiday from San Jose. They agreed to meet that night back at our hotel,
and the three of us would go for a meal. Gari ran the idea of Remi
joining us for our trip to Quepos past me, and I agreed it was a great
idea, and was very pleased Gari had found some way to do the kind of
helping he had been wanting to do. At 8pm we sat down in the hotel
reception to wait for Remi. He never showed up.

The next day I headed to Quepos — Gari decided to wait in San Jose an
extra day and hoped to meet Remi and find out what had happened. He
spotted Remi later that night, sitting in the Parque in a new clean
shirt. He met Remi's eyes, and Remi shook his head as if to say, "Don't
approach." It seemed like Remi was waiting for someone, and Gari walked
away, feeling that he had done all he could, and he joined me in Quepos
the next day. We still don't know really why Remi made the decision he
did, but if you are heading to San Jose, look out for a teenager in the
Parque Centrale called Remi, please help him out but don't give him money...

No sounds but the waves and the jungle

Manuel Antonio park, next to the town of Quepos on Costa Rica's Pacific
coast, was indeed very beautiful: jungle paths connecting hilltop
lookouts with white beaches. We saw monkeys swinging, turtles retreating,
tiny crabs pretending to be sea shells, lizards limberly waddling, trees
with rows of black spines, huge ants marching, and lots of American
holiday makers gabbing inanely. Now, these are certainly not things you
would see back in England (well, except for the American holiday makers).
But when something has been built up as much as Costa Rica's natural
wonders are, there is inevitably a level of disappointment. I didn't want
to stumble on to some odd coloured rabbit/squirrel thing, I wanted
peacocks and piranhas, I wanted to see a scarlet lion the size of a cow
playing chess with an invisible winged panther. There seemed to the both
of us a high level of pretentiousness in these parks: it may be an
ecologist's treasure trove, but realistically, would I and almost every other visitor really be able to spot and distinguish between the 200
species of bird in the park? At one point we paused, someone else's guide
had spotted something high up a tree. It was a sloth, doing what sloths
do (nothing). I told the guy walking behind me this and he shot back, "is
it a two toed or a three toed?" I wanted to slap him.

The problem was my attitude, of course, not the park itself. It is
surprisingly easy to tramp through, muttering, "where's my goddamn
invisible winged panther?" and miss that one is in a beautiful and
calming natural haven. Without really discussing it, Gari and I sat down
at one point off the main path and just closed our eyes. Slowly thoughts
and distractions worked their way out of my mind. I sat still, my
muscles releasing tension I hadn't realised it was possible to release,
and all I could hear were the waves sloshing against the cliffs far below
us, the winding weaving through the trees, birds calling to each other.
After a long time, I opened my eyes, and saw the jungle for the first
time. I saw how moisture clung glistening to the leaves of one tree and
to no others, how the white husks of one plant must be the discarded
wombs of its now dropped fruit. I opened my lungs to how incredibly clear
and green the air was, and measured my breathing against the soft, slow, back and forth of the sea.

We walked on silently, and paddled, rested and talked on one of the
park's beaches for a while, then walked up towards the final look out
point. The view was everything it could have been billed as. The sea
stretched on until it joined the blue of the sky, and beyond the rocky
peninsula nearish to us, a thick line of golden beach followed the
endless shore to the horizen. Seeing that curving unimaginably long
beach, seemingly deserted, green mountains behind it, bluest sea in front
of it, hawks lofting on the wind close over our speechless heads - it was
a moment that doesn't fade as others do. I felt that if paradise has a
coast, this is what it looks like.

Looking for small town Costa Rica

Gari flew back to the UK after our trip to the beach, but I had a few
days before my flight out was due. I felt my experience of the country
had been a little unfair, I had seen only tourist towns and the capital
city. I wanted to find some small town Costa Ricans, where the life was
good and the people were friendly. Up to this point, it had been an
intermittent principle of our time in Costa Rica that anyone who was
friendly and talkative turned out to be Nicaraguan. On one of our bus
journeys, we had passed through a small town, Naranjo. It looked
pleasant, small and with very pretty surrounding hills. I decided at that
moment that this was where I would spend my last few days in Central America.

On my arrival in Naranjo, it did indeed seem like a kind of paradise.
Perfect sunny weather, a pretty town, with good looking, well educated
people. I sat on Sunday evening and watched people slowly fill up the
lovely white town church. Young and old people dressed up in their best,
and I listened peacefully to the echos of the service from the central
square outside.

But although the hills surrounding the town were beautiful, after 24
hours I was very bored. People didn't seem very friendly or talkative,
possibly because I don't look that foreign in Costa Rica, or possibly
because I did look foreign and they were sick of tourists. At lunchtime,
I sat down in a cafeteria selling El Savadorean snacks. The four women
were lively and chatty, and we watched some ludicrous soap opera
together, laughing at how silly it was. Finally, I thought to myself, I
have found that small town, non-tourist spoilt Costa Rica! Hurray!

That thought was punctured as the manager of the shop jokingly told me to be
careful with one of the four women there, she was Nicaraguan and might
kidnap me (or marry me, I wasn't sure what her Spanish meant). I laughed,
and asked the manager where she was from, "El Salvador!" she smiled. The
other two women were, in fact, Nicaraguan as well. "So, none of you are Costa Ricans?" I asked, and they all laughed. Hmmm. 'Small town Costa Rica' continued to elude me.

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Central America Insiders page.

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