A letter to the family: Costa Rica, July 2008.

The Journey: Day 1

American Airlines screwed up my flight, and I ended up spending the night at the Airport Sheraton in Toronto (on the cheap as a “distressed passenger”; not the first time I’ve been labeled as such) flying out to Costa Rica the next morning via Chicago, and then Dallas (the original flight was to have been direct to Houston, and then San Jose). Not much to say about the evening’s experience, except that watching the prostitutes work the bar at the hotel was both interesting and depressing. Don’t order the quesadilla, by the way. It’s not that the cheese is bad, but more that the guacamole is, well, “weak”. After contacting my friend Roberto in CR (who owns the Villas in Playa Samara I was to have arrived at that evening) to tell him of the delay, I retired to the oversized bed and fell asleep with The Weather Channel still on.

The Journey: Day 2

Texas is a really creepy place. The Dallas “Daily Morning News” was a smorgasbord of right-wing analyses of Barack Obama, a protracted piece on an expired Baptist preacher, and two separate stories of infants who died (from the heat) in SUVs when their mothers forgot they were there. Another lengthy article talked about the fact that George Bush, in an act not seen since Eisenhower in 1963, sanctioned the execution of an American soldier (convicted of four murders and eight rapes in the 1980’s). Apparently, you can’t execute a soldier without the expressed and signed approval of the President.

Ads for luxury homes, dental surgery, and weight loss clinics (as well as extensive articles about the Dallas Cowboys) abounded, accompanied by three full pages of obituaries, extolling the virtues of long-dead relatives and recently deceased enlisted sons.

A blistering, stifling 103F, and hardpan taupe countryside, speckled with bright green golf courses and huge tracts of cookie-cutter homes with azure swimming pools kind of rounded out the experience.

Not so much Chicago, which was my first stop, where cold Sam Adams lager and limp Caesar salad punctuated a two-hour layover. (Didn’t see the skyline either on the approach, or the departure; sad). I did find myself all verklempt as I walked past the towering windows of terminal K, remembering the picture of me as a small boy looking through my own legs back at the camera in exactly the same spot, more than 40 years ago.

That unmistakable Midwestern twang was omnipresent, as were the comments of “darlin’” and “hon” from the wait staff at the crummy airport restaurant (Wolfgang Puck needs to be taken out behind the shed and shot) sitting amongst the travelling salespeople, the road-weary families, and some other weirdos like me.

Then, almost suddenly, after a 4-hour, eventless (unless you consider two repeated showings of “Horton Hears a Who” on the ancient VTR above my seat an “event”) flight over the rest of god-forsaken Texas, the shining Gulf of Mexico, dark Guatemala, lake Nicaragua, and Costa Rica’s spine – the impressive Cordillera Central mountain range - our 757 touched down at Juan Santa Maria airport, amidst the startling brilliance of sodium vapor lights crouched between the volcanic mountains of the Central Valley.

After an hour of friendly and just-for-show customs lines, I found myself among the insistent cab drivers in front of the airport, having the first decent cigarette of the past 36 hours. (Smokers are social pariahs; I know that Western society has recently deemed, among other things – including driving cars, eating animals, and not keeping your teeth clean -smoking as taboo, but for God’s - Allah’s ; Buddahs’, Christ’s; whatever’s - sake; let some of us indulge in life’s small pleasures after particularly trying ordeals).

Then, as serendipity jumped out from behind a large bougainvillea bush, I met Estoban Salazar. He, among the many, asked me where I was headed. I said to Samara, but I needed to get to Hotel Il Millennium this evening.
“Oh, si; Samara is beautiful. I have a friend there. Maybe you know him? Roberto Carrere. He is the owner of Villas Kalimba.”

I sat back in the front seat of Estoban’s van, the windows wide open, a third blessed smoke burning slowly in my hand (and “Mandolin Rain” playing on the radio; not sure how to categorize that on an ethereal level, but it’s a good tune) and, for the first time in two days – maybe in two months, maybe in two years – breathed a serious sigh of relief. The careening motorcycles and overloaded trucks were more laughable than scary. Ladies with shopping bags picked their way along the side of the road between the broken asphalt and cavernous concrete runoff ditches. Open air bars and cheap hotels line the streets, and hunker in dark, narrow, lush alleyways, their cast iron security gates not yet bolted, full of the smells of roast chicken, fried fish, and exhaust fumes. Crooked neon signs announce small grocerias, which look more like gutted RVs than stores. And everywhere there is the musical sound of Spanish. And always laughter.

I am tired, but this is magical. I am met by Enrico (who, after seeing my guitar, expressed his longing to learn the piano) at Hotel Il Millennium. My $30 room is bright, loud, and smells of green (and no, not mould; the fresh kind). The shower was an epiphany. I’m watching a soccer match, and plugging my ears whenever a jet roars overhead (the airstrip is, like, meters away). If I want, I can wander out into the back and sit on a bench under a banana tree, or gingerly negotiate the sidewalk-less, craggy and damp roadside to find something to eat. Maybe some empanadas and a handful of fresh lychee.

Say what you want about my addictions to everything from substances to good conversation, my silly romantic nature, and my penchant for self-delusion, but I can’t shake the true reality of the calm that this place brings me.
La Pura Vida indeed.

And now, I sleep. Just need to see if Juventas can hold on to their 1-goal lead over AC Milan. It ain’t the Bluejays, but hell, when in Rome, eh?

The Journey: Day 3

Breakfast is coffee (of course; it’s Cost Rica) papaya, pineapple and a touch of dolce de leche on toast, as the sun rises (everyone here gets up around 5:30am). Estoban arrives to take me to the airport, and I stroll into the sheet metal hangar that serves as the waiting area for Sansa Air’s daily single-prop flights to other areas of the country. After an hour sitting on my backpack in the shade (strumming my guitar like some kind of 60’s reject; at least no one complained, or tried give me food or spare change) I approached the check-in desk (well, table, really) and was told that the gravel driveway in Carillo that serves as the airstrip is too wet to land on. They happily refund my money, and tell me to check back tomorrow.
This was not part of the plan. Not that the plan wasn’t sketchy to begin with, but the whole delayed and cancelled and/or unavailable transportation issues were starting to devalue my rail-running, go where the wind sends you style.
So, I called Estoban (he’d given me his card). “Como esta amigo? Yeah? Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

So, Estoban drove me to Samara for the same price as the flight. Four hours through the central valley, up over the main mountains, across the Guanacaste bridge to the Nicoya Peninsula, and down to the plains and then over the coastal mountains, and finally to Playa Samara. We talked a bit, but mostly we smoked and listened to Estoban’s large collection of Mexican pop music at high volume, banging our hands on the roof of the van as we blind-passed trucks and tourists on the narrow, winding road. Trestle bridges over rushing waters, stands of teak 100 feet high, sugar cane, coffee, bananas, chickens, dogs, kids, and everywhere it is so incredibly dense and green.

And then the Pacific, and the 5km crescent of grey volcanic sand that is Samara.

The Journey: Days 3-5

I always have a difficult time explaining to people of the gut-enhancing joy that this part of the world offers me. Perhaps – maybe – it is simply some kind of escapism; a need for something new and different (a kind of hallmark of my life, actually) but then again, I may just need to disassociate for some reason (kinda the same thing when you think about it). At the end of the day, though (man, how I hate that phrase) this place makes me, well, all happy inside. Like Christmas morning, or a late-night movie that you know and love. But with large bugs.

What happens is this: You wake up at 5:30am, as the howler monkeys begin to bitch at the sun and the cicadas begin their long cries for relationships. You wander down to the beach around 6 (after eating some pineapple and drinking a coffee) as the tide is turning back towards the shore. The water is between 26-28C all the time, but you can always tell when the tide turns, because there are noticeable chiller bits in the incoming water.

Depending on the offshore weather, the surf is either huge, or massive. As the beach is shallow, when the tide comes in, the Pacific turns its power to shore, and mounts 15-foot breakers to the very edge of the beach. You can ride them (as many do) but I prefer to wait until they crest and break, and then dive under them, letting the tons of water rush by in a matter of seconds, popping back up on the other side unharmed to wait for the next onslaught. Particularly when the tide is turning in I like to play a game called “come and get me” where I try to see if the ocean can psyche me out and catch me unawares. This usually ends up, at least a few times per visit, in an ass-over teakettle joyride with a spluttering, salt water-up-the-nose, sand-in-the shorts conclusion and me muttering “okay, you got me with that one”.
Roberto has become a fairly decent chef, and cooked dinner three times while I visited (I made him some gorgonzola-stuffed penne with fresh tomato sauce one night, and a beef and fontina braccioli with red cabbage for lunch one day, and a salad to accompany dinner made of mango, chiote, ginger, carrot and red onion ). Oysters grilled with lime and breadcrumbs, marinated artichoke bruschetta, shrimp linguini, barbequed lobster tails with garlic butter, and always breakfasts of blended fruit, pastries, bacon, and scrambled eggs. His apple seed grappa is still poisonous though. Don’t tell him I said that.

I did walk down one night to one of my favorite restaurants in the whole world: el Legarto. It’s at the end of the beach, and its centerpiece is a palm wood fired barbeque the size of a small car. If you order the “Plato Mixto” you get a huge platter of chicken, strip loin, pork tenderloin, potato, and tomato, all blissfully seared over the open flames, all washed down with cold Imperial lager. Heaven for about ten bucks, and all in bare feet, watching the sun sink fast into the rolling Pacific.

The Journey: Day 6

The (one; guarded by a dude with a rather impressive shotgun)bank machine in Samara didn’t much like my Scotiabank card (odd, since Scotiabank has a pretty large Caribbean and Central American presence) and since Jen never allowed me to have a Visa or Mastercard (the best I could manage before I left, given my sad credit, was an American Express Card, which simply doesn’t carry any weight in Central America) I was forced to board a bus to Nicoya, about 35 miles Northeast (to put that into perspective, we’re talking about an hour and a half trip on a good day) to find an ATM that would dispense me the cash to check out and get me back to Canada (As I said before; I hadn’t figured the “home” part of the journey out yet – I just knew I’ll be in Miami by 4pm on the 5th , and Toronto by 11, crossing my fingers that the customs people will be, once again, sympathetic to my repeated attempts to obtain my Canadian PR card).

Honestly, today, I am at the point of buying a blanket and living in a ditch.

Anyway, after catching the 11:15 (natch; it showed up around 11:45) to Nicoya (anyone who has travelled by public transit in Central America will feel for me here; pretty hair-raising stuff) I managed to find the Banco de Costa Rica (I’m at a roadside bus stop as I write) and withdraw 200,000 Colones (about $400 US) before the thing crapped out on me. That’ll cover smokes, dinner tonight, my room in San Jose on the 4th, some minor cab fare to and from places and an honor-deposit to Roberto at Villas Kalimba, so I can bail tomorrow and promise him an Internet transfer of funds once I am in a more connected location.

Interesting place, Nicoya. It has none of the classic tourist chic; methinks it may be one of the only functioning towns in Guanacaste that doesn’t rely totally on U.S. dollars from tourism for existence. And as I sit under a sheet-metal overhang waiting for the bus, watching the afternoon thunderstorms roll in, I begin, again, to fall in love with this lazy, beautiful place.

And now, I need to go speak some broken Spanish to someone who knows when the bus is going to get here. Hell, maybe I’ll just flag down a cab. They’re almost New York-style omnipresent, if a little less, uh, reliable? New? Functioning in a proper manner? Air conditioned? Take your pick. One thing though, I’d take any of the cabbies in CR and put ‘em up against the toughest and most hardened of their New York counterparts.

Probably cost me five bucks, and I won’t have to sit next to any livestock.

The Journey: Day 7

Up and out by 8:30, madly shoving my sandy, damp and smelly clothes into the backpack and hiking them to the bus shelter (I managed a shower and a shave, for all the good it would do me) to wait for the bus to San Jose (Sansa, once again, failed to land at Carillo due to several intense downpours and spectacular oversea lightening the two evenings before) I sat in the mud with a couple from Denver, who used to live in CR during the seventies. Then the bus clattered and smoked its way to the side of the road.

Side Notes:

#1:

When you travel alone, you tend to find yourself talking to complete strangers. If you know how to listen, and what questions to ask, people will encapsulate their entire lives into an hour’s worth of wine and dinner, a three-hour flight, or even a fifteen-minute wait in a line. Especially when the social constrictions of familiarity are so completely removed. I have always enjoyed anonymity. It’s awfully liberating.

#2

Everybody should take a bus in Central America at least once. It reduces everyone to the basics of survival, has more thrills than a Coney Island ride, and is unpredictable as hell. At one point, just outside of Puntaneras, there was construction (a loose term in CR; it really means five guys in orange vests with shovels who don’t seem to really have much of a purpose) on a rickety (natch) bridge over a rather vast gully full of slow-moving, brown water and what looked like a high-school reunion of crocodiles. The entire passenger list disembarked the bus, baggage and all, to walk with the driver (well, that’s what it looked like, anyway; I just followed people and prayed) across precarious planks that took the temporary place of the bridge’s road bed. Once across (maybe 200 meters in total) we all got on another bus (similar in age and disrepair) and were off again, bumping down the pothole-ridden, 15 foot-wide goat path they call highway 4, leaving the orange-vested construction people to do whatever it was they were doing (piles of dirt and an aging tractor is all I remember; kinda blocked some of it out).


The Journey: Day 8

(Forgot a bit from yesterday; the bus from Samara, which, after 5 and a half hours, finally coughed to a stop at the depot, left me once again with little knowledge of where the hell I was. Bus depots in cities are always in the wrong part of town, however, so I flagged a taxi and managed to gesticulate my way back to the Hotel, with the help – again – of Estoban, who I called as an emergency translator from the cabbie’s cell phone).

I took a walk this morning down the strip outside Il Millennium, after a coffee, some toast and a guava yogurt. It had rained from the time I arrived and continued through the night as a steady but comforting roar, and the whole world was damp. You know when you go to a big greenhouse in February? That’s what it smells like – all loamy and green, but here is mixed with wet concrete, truck exhaust, sweat and flowers.

Estoban was, yet again, going to share his van, his Mexican pop tunes, his sunny attitude, and my money on the way to the San Jose airport.

In Costa Rica, you have to get to the airport at least three hours in advance. This is due to a few things, including stacked flights all at once, a tropical malaise when it comes to paperwork, and the fact that they close the place, without notice, regularly. Might be a union thing, but I doubt it. I think people just decide to go home.

Miami is hot, sticky, and crowded (with the exception of ice-cold bars full of nachos and Budweiser) and absolutely rife with wide-eyed, aimless travelers. The flight directly over the Florida Keys up highway 95 (right over the Sunshine Skyway to Key West) and then across the swamplands was incredibly entertaining though.
Not so enjoyable was the gaggle of pimply, hormone-soaked and same t-shirt clad teens on some kind of religious trek, who surrounded my relatively comfortable window seat at the back of an A300. Ah well. Oh, and if I have to watch CBS’s snippet-filled, corporate-lackeyed, smarmy, utterly retarded and grossly patriotic programming on American Airlines just one more time, I swear I’ll have to use the air sickness bag. Thank God for my laptop, and two saved back issues of the New Yorker.

The flight to Toronto was also marred by yet another crowd of adolescents, this time a uniformed group of Columbian soccer players, who – and I don’t know how this is possible – giggled and yelled at each other, throwing snack-o wrappers and standing in the aisles for the entire three-hour flight. I watched “Kung Fu Panda” on high volume as it was the lesser of two rather monumental evils. The saving grace was a series of wide and varied banks the 737 pulled, flying up through southern New York at 30,000 feet, to avoid towering thunderstorms, which lit up like disco balls as we sailed between, over, and through them.

So here I sit (after another easy talk-through at customs) in the Econo-Lodge on Airport Road in Toronto (called them randomly from a list of relatively cheap places) at almost two in the morning, smelling like bad American beer, stale Cheet-os and nylon seat covers, looking like a gaunt but well-tanned version of Grizzly Adams, picking gum off the shoulder of my shirt (don’t know where I picked that up today; just noticed it on approach to Pearson Airport) and writing the last few stanzas of this lengthy and completely self-indulgent travelogue.
There may be more, as I still have to figure out what tomorrow is going to bring. As I said, I’m heading to the Maritimes to burden some of you with my messy existence for a bit, get some work done to fill the bank account back up, and consider the next move.

But I can tell you about that in person. I make a mean gorgonzola-stuffed penne, so it seems. Trade you for a bed and some conversation?

Postlude:

Oh, and I think I have a Bot Fly larvae in my butt. One of you is going to have to look, because my shoulders hurt from carrying around the backpack and I can’t contort myself in the mirror properly to check it out.

Kit: August 6th, 2008