The Blue Monkey Review

Tourism 1

This short posting is just to offer a few ordinary
details about travel here in CR. It has only a little
to do with the people, climate, terrain, economy, or
culture.

Sign outside (painted on the wall) of a restaurant in
San Jose:
It's Tipican
Restaurant of
Costa Rican
Exellent Food
Wellcome

Most common foods: black beans, rice, potatoes. The
"typical" dish that most restaurants offer is a
casado. This is a plate of black beans, rice, a
vegetable and/or salad with a fried meat dish,
chicken, beef, or fish. A popular breakfast food is
gallo pinto, black beans with rice, something I hope
never to have to eat again. The sauces here, at least
the ones I've tried, are fairly common, though
coriander is used an awful lot.

Housing
I've already talked about home construction here.
Traveling around the country, I've seen a lot more
use of concrete for homes. Rebar is, accordingly,
quite common. Some people use it in creative way, as
in the bars used to protect windows from entry. I've
seen church buildings with rebar crosses.
The steel or sheet metal roofs I described earlier are
pervasive. They make a lot of sense, I guess. They
keep the rain out. You don't have to worry about them
collapsing under layers of snow. And if a hurricane
blows them off, they are easy to replace.
But more valuable, I'm sure, will be some sense of the
housing available to me as I've traveled. The most I
have paid for lodging was $35 in San Jose (this was
for a double). The first night they put us into a
room with no window and a fluorescent light with a bad
ballast, so it kept blinking while it was on. Light
off, you were in the black hole of Calcutta. I
foolishly did not ask for another room until the next
night, so am still having trauma flashbacks. The next
night they gave me a room with window, a.c., three
beds, and fully functioning fixtures plus some nice
extra furniture like a desk.

The least I paid was in Monteverde, a room for $10 per
person that had a little more than enough room for the
bed and a private bathroom ($5 rooms with shared
bathroom were available, but sorry, I'm past the days
when I'd have pondered that option). I wasn't too
happy with the room. The hotel was at a corner, and
the traffic in Monteverde arrives one car at a time.

Manuel Antonio
May 28, 2003

May 28th I joined the Ticos and surfers headed for the beach. Rather than another tourist junket, I took public transit, i.e. the bus. This was a full sized Mercedes Benz bus and this driver took it over roads where I would not even consider taking the Saturn. How bad are the roads? See my last posting.

As we dropped from Monteverde toward the coast we could see clouds below us, lying in the valleys like lakes. The ridges below us looked as though they had less vegetation and less agriculture, but as we approached I could see more cattle grazing.
After three hours or thereabout we made it to Puntarenas, on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, where the line ended, and there I waited one and a half hours for the next bus to Quepos. That was another three hour bus ride, not memorable except that a couple of kids threw up and passengers were shouting for "bolsa!" The conductor, who obviously dealt with this kind of thing before, made his way back through the standing passengers to the mess and seemed to take care of it.
At Quepos I had reached the end of my bus travel. I had a reservation at the Mono Azul (Blue Monkey) Hotel. This is run by an American couple and has (so far-this is my third night) mainly American guests. But it is a wonderful place to be even if it were in a less wonderful location. The hotel is by far the nicest I've had in CR, very efficiently run by the family and Tico staff. The owners have developed a program called Kids Saving the Rainforest and offer summer camps and other educational programs on the rainforest. They have an active program of rehabilitating injured animals, most evident from the two (2) sloths who are at home in the dining area. The restaurant here is all open air and the food matches the quality of the hotel. There are two pools, my room has air conditioning, and did I mention I'm a short bus ride from the beach. I'm paying $25 a night, plus a little extra for the a.c.
Stats:
Number of people seen consulting guidebooks other than Lonely Planet: 3
Number of people seen consulting Lonely Planet guidebooks: 407
My goal here has been Manuel Antonio, a national park. It runs along the coast with a little peninsula that juts out into the pacific. The day after my arrival (and after taking care of some laundry chores) I headed to the park. On the bus I learned that here the double yellow lines on winding, hilly roads serve no traffic control function and are purely decorative. The bus drops you at something that looks nothing at all like the entrance to a park. You stand beside a public beach and have to guess that the park is in the direction that the bus was going when you got off. You cross a sandy stretch to an inlet that is covered with water, so to continue you have to decide what shoes and clothing get wet. Finally, after passing the test you arrive at the park entrance and pay a kind of stiff entrance fee to walk in.

What you walk into is jungle. This is the aforementioned peninsula, so you continue through jungle with beaches on either side, though you can only just see the one and the other not at all. Finally, if you were me, you end up at a tiny beach separated from where you want to go by rocks and ocean and if you are prudent (i.e. not me) you turn around and follow the trail to the right place. But I made it.
So began my dilemma. Here I was in a place where the jungle goes all the way to the ocean, with only a strip of beach dividing the two. Sand crabs, hermit crabs, and crab crabs skitter across the path, and lizards are pretty common. If you look up you likely see white faced monkeys, and iguana are common here. I set up my spot and quickly got into the Pacific only to find it gentler and warmer than I expected from a childhood of going to Malibu and Costa Mesa beaches.

The dilemma? Well, how does a world view contain a place this nice? There is nothing that I know of in Martin Luther or John Calvin about tropical paradise (though it is true I don't have my Institutes of the Christian Religion along to check on this). You can kind of fit original sin into a landscape like northern Europe in winter. I comforted myself by thinking that minus malaria meds, this might be pretty inhospitable. But it was an exercise of rational thought of a kind that I haven't been doing too much of since arriving in CR.

It is true that as a tourist I'm not meeting my Ticos. I did have a short talk with the woman who took my laundry. But at Manuel Antonio I had other significant interactions with the local fauna. The monkeys here are quite bold. Given the chance, they will grab anything from unattended beachcomber belongings that looks like food. One tried to get into my bag, and the other tourists helpfully stood around and did nothing. An iguana came within about a meter of me as I ate lunch, but was intimidate when I leapt up a shouted "Yow!" He moved about a foot away, but at least I could eat my lunch in peace. And a raccoon calmly walked over and eviscerated my bag of trash and would not be intimidated or leave until he was certain it contained nothing edible.
I went back to Manuel Antonio today (sunburn notwithstadning), but it was cloudy and began to rain and then, after a couple of hours, to rain hard. Everyone retreated to a shelter except for some Russian tourists who stayed in the water (I guess thunder storms don't stop you from swimming in Odessa).
Supermarket names
In La Fortuna: Super Christian #2
In Quepos: Super Gordo

Reflection on the first day of fall, 2003
Even when we were still at the beach, I told Sara that if she had not come along on the trip I probably wouldn't have put a beach into my itinerary. I remember very clearly thinking, "I have a girlfriend on this trip, so we'd better include a beach." That astonishes even me, now, as I think about how good that time at Manuel Antonio felt. But all that Calvinism, or whatever, still dominates my thinking. When I travel, the goal is to connect with the real people, to find some cultural insights that I wouldn't get from National Geographic, and to experience the place in a manner that is mainly comfortable but not really pleasurable. Sara is good for me in the same way that traveling with my children is good for me, in that it forces me to open myself to new experiences.