Costa Rica

The Good, The Bad, y el Feo

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Photos

• Watching lava boulders tumble from the clouds shrouding the top of Arenal Volcano, then split open to reveal their red hot center.
• Citrus and banana trees exploding with fruit right outside our door—and a juicer and blender inside. And finding ripe fruit and new blossoms on the same tree.
• Transparent-winged butterflies, and praying mantises eating each other, and all kinds of multicolored birds with amazingly complex songs hanging around the house. Like living in some kind of National Geographic special.
• Our local bar in Ciudad Colon, lovingly nicknamed "the piss joint" for the scent that often emanated from the men's baño in the middle of the room. Where you could always count on hearing a little Air Supply or adult-contemporary Rod Stewart or other bit of randomness, always under the watchful eyes of Axl and Slash from the G'n'R poster above the bar.

• The north end of Drake Bay, in the southwest corner of the country. Absolutely no one around on a palm-tree lined, postcard-perfect beach, away from the generators of the "jungle lodge" crowd a bit further south. And that waterfall trail (thanks for the tip, Fred).
• Manzana de agua—a reddish-colored, pear-shaped fruit that tastes like a flower and grows on massive trees reminiscent of magnolias.
• Cheap rent for really nice places (especially when compared to San Francisco). And great coffee at even the tiniest hole-in-the-wall food stand, for 30-50 cents U.S.
• The original Costa Rica sauce, Salsa Lizano (since 1920). A little sweet, a little savory, like nothing you've ever tasted before. Goes on just about anything.

• The city of San José. Everyone talks about how horrible the city is, and before arriving I thought they were all just exaggerating, that there had to be some good. Well, it's horrible. Traffic, fumes, smog. That's all I think of when I think of San José.
• Internet access. It usually takes a few calls to connect to RACSA, the government-owned telecommuncations monopoly. Then much of the time you're "connected" there's no actual data transferring back and forth. You just sit there, racking up time, which you end up paying RACSA for. Then you pay ICE, the phone company, for the actual call. The issue of privatizing the whole thing has led to full-on rioting in the streets. Internet anything is a mess.
• Cooking and seasoning with manteca (lard).
• Trying to do business. Since I don't speak Spanish well, my experiece was solely with English-speaking companies, usually from North America. Before you try to do business in Costa Rica, ask yourself the following questions: How much time do I want to waste? How little do I want to be paid? How much work do I want to do before I realize I'm not going to be paid anything? You get the idea. See "el Feo" below.
• Quepos—a popular beach town that we just found to be over-touristed. Well, OK, we also got our bag stolen there on the beach, so there's some personal bias against the place.

• Gringos on the grift. Something the guidebooks won't tell you about. There's a significant gringo ex-pat population in Costa Rica that's insane. Mad. And all they seem to do is run around in circles swindling each other in any way possible. Similar to what they call "the haole shuffle" in Hawaii, if that means anything. It's a really ugly thing to witness.
  
  From the hotel owner in Escazú (who lied to us repeatedly and tried to scam us for more money) to the British ex-landlady (who had an automatic Magnum and a propensity to drink too much and who did scam us for more money) we met many a foreigner we'd rather stay the hell away from.
  
  I've heard it said that Costa Rica is "the land of the wanted and the unwanted," meaning the foreigners who move there are either wanted by the law or unwanted by anyone else. So if you go, just be a little wary of the gringos, until you get your bearings.