The pitches feature howler and capuchin monkeys, sloths, crocodiles, tapirs, lizards, toucans and other colorful tropical birds … unparalleled biodiversity, lush rainforests and volcanoes. And the country of Costa Rica and its people seem to know their survival, economic and otherwise, depends on the survival of nature. “Pura vida,” they say regularly, copping the name of a popular Mexican movie from the 1950s as a nationally spirited expression to convey that everything’s cool …
En route to the tropics, is that Connecticut’s Brass Valley I see covered in snow? I’d hardly know it from this high up anyway.
Perfect view of NYC and bridges. Curve of NJ coast, promising, I think, a portal to the Pine Barrens, which I don’t really know, except from the Sopranos. Now I recognize Philly. Can I possibly see the ocean beyond it when I look east? Then we’re on to Delaware, and no more snow cover.
Up high, I see someone else’s contrails. And strange freighter-looking drones, maybe 10, near the mouth of the Savannah River, known for its heavy water. Some of the vehicles look to be taking off. Or are they Chinooks?
Half watching the movie Civil War on Copa, I notice the Everglades look mucky from up here. A bit like the empty lots I just read about. Then on to the phantom look of reefs off the Florida Keys and the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City. We originally planned to vacation in Panama. When Trump said he wanted to retake the canal, we canceled our earlier plan and made Panama City a stop on the way to Costa Rica. Even landing there gave me the creeps.
What are the beautiful whiffs of chocolate on the drive from San Jose’s airport to the Costa Rican capital’s downtown?
We take in Teatro Nacional on the advice of Professor Alan Smith. The tour guide-actress makes not-so-subtle comments about wealth inequity, noting that the theater was built for oligarchs and paid for by peasants. Those poorer Costa Ricans were relegated to the third level, which, the guide quips, actually have the best views. She notes they can raise floor for prez elections and thereby raise the country—an exercise that used to be done by soldiers until the country wisely abolished its army in 1948.
The Mercado Central welcomes us to what will be two weeks of interesting sopas de mariscos. Always with shrimp and squid and a mussel and, if requested, thickened with leche or, ideally, coconut milk.
The “diplomat’s lounge” at the old San Jose airport.
The vast La Sabana park is filled with Ticos playing soccer and basketball in the shadows of the National Soccer Stadium. We walk in the stadium, free of charge, for the start of a Concacef U-17 match between Trinidad and the British Virgin Islands, but the sun is too hot, and we leave before the game gets going.
At the edge of the park is the fascinating Museo de Arte Costarricense. The museum is housed in the old control tower of the old San Jose Airport. Its collection of paintings by mostly Costa Rican artists is small, but the sculpture garden and Golden Room (the old “Diplomats Lounge”) is worth the trip, with its walls carved in painted-stucco depicting Costa Rica’s history, from indigenous times to the development of cocoa and coffee industries and modern civil life.
On the streets nearby, we pass two interesting historical markers: one recalls San Jose in 1884 becoming one of the first cities in the world to be illuminated by electricity (a reminder of the excellent novel This Is Happiness about the arrival of electricity in Ireland) and one commemorating the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
The city’s Jade Museum, which claims the world’s largest collection of pre-Columbian jade artifacts, offers perspectives on the “semi-precious” stone whose story twists far beyond the polished green jewelry I knew. The museum shows and tells the story of jade artwork and jewelry used for ornamentation and, notably, shamanic rituals.
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On the ride to Tortuguero, we pass miles of banana trees with their fruits tied up in blue bags to protect against pests. I recall the moment when I was fascinated as a youthful stock boy at Purity Supreme by the small mouse that had come in with a crate of bananas. I also reflect on Bananas, a book by Peter Chapman about the United Fruit Company, later known as Chiquita,
I also recall the international banker and student loan tycoon I knew who moved to Maine and built a greenhouse suitable to growing bananas. And of the Woody Allen movie “Bananas.” And my brother—a young progressive, if not hippie, in the making—hanging an inflatable banana in our shared bedroom.
The Chapman book notes a connection to “banana republics,” the business-corrupted small countries, not the clothing brand. The term was coined in 1904 by O. Henry.
Chapman’s commentary betrays his conservative fraternity with the United Fruit ethos even as he tells the company’s history of brutalizing workforces and corrupting democracies. Like Trump, United Fruit’s lawyers called the Department of Justice the “Department of Injustice.” On the Sandinistas in next-door Nicaragua, Chapman asserts: “Under Carter, the White House had taken leave of its senses and opened the door to Communism.”
Some big fruit factories pop on the the road to our home-stay in Santa Rosa de Pocosol. The community of small farms built as a government experiment is led by strong, proud women and their families. They show us how to pick and prepare cocoa beans and squeeze sugarcane into sweet juice served in shot glasses, followed by moonshine.
There are very peaceful, friendly stray dogs everywhere.
On the road to Rio Celeste (whose water is minerally blue) the terrain begins to look like Vermont, complete with cows. Dairy farms lend themselves to pretty landscapes, though not as lush as the rainforest. And many of the cows look thin, with their ribs visible.
We stop at an indigenous Maleku community where we share a traditional Maleku meal, hear stories of their culture and the challenges facing the smallest Indian tribe in Costa Rica. The community aims to regenerate forests and plant fruit trees, which encourage animals back to their natural habitats. As part of the tour activities, we paint our own indigenous masks. I’m reminded my artistic self-confidence is a thing of the past.
Our guide Pedro is superlative. He is knowledgeable of nature and the history and culture of Costa Rica. He is kind and thoughtful.
A few of us broke from the group to visit thermal pools at a five-star hotel where we visited hot springs allegedly warned by the lava of the nearby Arenal Volcano. Being a skeptic, I wondered whether the successively warmer pools were the product of some high-tech plumbing. But it sure was relaxing.
Joanne and I both feared the tour would be packed with Trumpy Americans, but the group was great. I especially hit it off with a former BBC documentarian, who went freelance, then called it quits, when the calls stopped as he so pointedly put it. (Though he was a bit taken aback by Joanne’s and my proposal for a large tip to our fine guide Pedro … a difference he chalked up to American’s habit of big tipping, which I connect to our underpaying in the first place)
Wonderful to see the Pacific Ocean from the distance of Monteverde, reminiscent of first spotting the Pacific while traveling with my young children around San Diego 25 years earlier and quoting my schoolbook understanding of Balboa making the sighting centuries earlier. “That’s the Pacific!”
Then a wonderful tour of a coffee plantation guided by a fourth-generation Quaker whose family went to Costa Rica when the country banned its military. I was enthralled by the coffee plantation landscape and feel—a colonial empathy I tried to compensate for with some questions to our pleasant Quaker docent about the well-being (and possible organizing) of the plantation’s mostly Nicaraguan and Panamanian coffee-pickers. Not much uptake on that inquiry.
On the ride to Tortuguero, we pass miles of banana trees with their fruits tied up in blue bags to protect against pests. I recall the moment when I was fascinated as a youthful stock boy at Purity Supreme by the small mouse that had come in with a crate of bananas. I also reflect on Bananas, a book by Peter Chapman about the United Fruit Company, later known as Chiquita,
I also think of the international banker and student loan tycoon I knew who moved to Maine and built a greenhouse suitable to growing bananas. And of the Woody Allen movie “Bananas.” And my brother—a young progressive, if not hippie, in the making—hanging an inflatable banana in our shared bedroom.
The Chapman book notes a connection to “banana republics,” the business-corrupted small countries, not the clothing brand. Turns out O. Henry coined the term in 1904.Chapman’s commentary betrays his conservative fraternity with the United Fruit ethos even as he tells is history of brutalizing workforces and corrupting democracies. Like Trump, United Fruit’s lawyers called the Department of Justice the “Department of Injustice.” On the Sandinistas in next-door Nicaragua, Chapman asserts: “Under Carter, the White House had taken leave of its senses and opened the door to Communism.”
Some big fruit factories pop on the the road to our home-stay in Santa Rosa de Pocosol. The community of small farms built as a government experiment is led by strong, proud women and their families. They show us how to pick and prepare cocoa beans and squeeze sugarcane into sweet juice served in shot glasses, followed by moonshine.
There are very peaceful, friendly stray dogs everywhere.
On the road to Rio Celeste (whose water is minerally blue) the terrain begins to look like Vermont, complete with cows. Dairy farms, I always thought, create pretty landscapes, though not as natural as the rainforest. And many of the cows look thin, with their ribs visible.
We stop by an indigenous Maleku community where we share a traditional Maleku meal, hear stories of their culture and the challenges facing the smallest Indian tribe in Costa Rica. The community aims to regenerate forests and plant fruit trees, which encourage animals back to their natural habitats. As part of the tour activities, we paint our own indigenous masks. Reminded my artistic self-confidence is a thing of the past.
Our guide Pedro is superlative. He is knowledgeable of nature and the history and culture of Costa Rica. He is kind and thoughtful.
A few of us broke from the group to visit thermal pools at a five-star hotel we visited near were allegedly heated by the lava of the nearby Arenal Volcano. Being a skeptic, I wondered whether the successively warmer pools were the product of some high-tech plumbing. But it sure was relaxing.
Joanne and I both feared the tour would be packed with Trumpy Americans, but the group was great. I especially hit it off with a former BBC documentarian, who went freelance, then called it quits, when the calls stopped as he so pointedly put it. (Though he was a bit taken aback by Joanne’s and my proposal for a large tip to our fine guide Pedro … a difference he chalks up to American’s habit of big tipping and I connect with underpaying in the first place).
Wonderful to see the Pacific Ocean from the distance of Monteverde, reminiscent of first spotting the Pacific while traveling with my young children around San Diego 25 years earlier and quoting my schoolbook understanding of Balboa making the sighting centuries earlier. “That’s the Pacific!”
Then a wonderful tour of a coffee plantation guided by a fourth-generation Quaker whose family went to Costa Rica when the country banned its military. I was enthralled by the coffee plantation landscape and feel—a colonial empathy I tried to compensate for with some questions to our pleasant Quaker docent about the well-being (and possible organizing) of mostly Nicaraguan and Panamanian coffee-pickers. Not much uptake on that inquiry.
Manuel Antonio brings us to the beautiful Pacific and a mod hotel made of tractor trailer containers—the kind floated as a solution to homelessness. They look and feel good. But on the first night in an interesting outdoor hotel pool, monkeys come looking for food, and one attacks Joanne, scratching her leg and setting off worries in me of monkey-scratch fever, if not rabies. Pedro is willing to accompany us to the clinic in town, but we anxiously gamble on toughing it out. The implications of rabies are disturbingly final, but the scratch heals quickly. No frothing or particular irritability that I could detect.
I’m reminded that when I drink in a seaside town in Latin America, I feel like Bogie, especially when it’s raining.
Joanne and I take a local shuttle bus to Quepos. It’s a working seaside town, where an old harbor is being supplanted by a new one that looks like modern affluent shopping centers in the US. In that city’s more interesting downtown maze, we find a wonderful farmer’s market … and, most importantly, dim sum. Cha siu bao in Costa Rica!
Riding the public bus from the coast to San Jose through vast palm plantations for producing palm oil, there is constant Latin music piped in. Better than the looping Bee Gees music in our recent hotel.
We experience big delays coming home as our plane began takeoff then returned to the terminal. The good news, volunteered the Copa crew, is that the experience shows the airline’s commitment to safety. Then it happened a second time. Taxiing out on the runway to takeoff position, then heading back to the terminal again. One fiasco after another and the return flight is delayed a day. Passengers become irate. Two San Jose cops try to calm the situation and protect the overwhelmed airline staff. Copa finds it in its heart to give us vouchers for a limited menu at Denny’s. Pura vida.
Among interesting notes from guide Pedro, when someone asked how old some of the trees in the rainforest were, he noted that because tropical trees grow thoughout the year, they lack telltale annual rings.