costa rica 2020

Some final thoughts and some suggestions for those who are thinking of visiting Costa Rica during the North American winter. Politics and Economics CR is a political oasis in Central America. I am a typical ignorant American: I know little about the history of politics in other countries (the same could probably be said about my knowledge of American politics!), so it is fascinating to me that Costa Rica has been able to be a stable representative democracy in the midst of the bloody civil warfare within my lifetime in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, even Mexico even though a lot of it is the product of US foreign policy. And I know even less about South America where Annie and Lara have been the past six months (Ecuador, Peru, and Columbia). I said to the girls that I would love to learn enough Spanish to be able to talk to the locals about their level of awareness concerning domestic politics and their standing in the international community. Are they more knowledgeable than Am...

Today was a travel day. We left Quepos for a 4-hour drive to San Juan. The girls researched a kayak trip in the mangrove swamp but it started at 7:30, so I decided to pass. Ultimately, they did too. Instead, they walked down to the beach for one last swim. I went part of the way down to the beach but the trail was rough and steep and my knees were barking at me from the day before so I turned around and got lost on the way back up to the house. I thought it would be a fitting end if I died in the jungle. The girls took their snorkeling equipment and they said the water was much clearer. We packed up and hit the road. Most of the roads were well-paved and alternately high-speed/limited-access toll roads or two-lane roads like we had been seeing before. The girls kindly researched a plant-based restaurant on our route so we stopped there for lunch. It was a lovely little outdoor place with lodging on the property. This is what a plant-based hamburguesa looks like. Ann...

We spent the day at Manuel Antonio, a national park. We drove toward the park entrance and a couple of guys were flagging cars toward an area off the beach to park. We were escorted to a spot by a guy jogging in front of the car and when the car was parked, he requested 8000 colones (about $4). He was wearing a vest that made him look like a park employee but obviously, he was not - this was just private enterprise because we were still a 5-minute walk to the entrance of the park. The road leading up to the park entrance was lined with stalls and day hawkers, all of whom spoke pretty good English. The park was an example of infrastructure investment: we walked on concrete walkways with steel tube railings or boardwalks with a rope along the sides. Like the city streets, there's a pretty deep gutter, ostensibly for heavy rains. In the city, the gutter is about a foot deep so you could hurt yourself if you're not paying attention. For this excursion, we decided not t...

(Note: we are currently in an airbnb where the wifi can not support multiple people online, many of whom are streaming or uploading/downloading pictures so I will have to add pictures later.) We had a leisurely morning. It was about 75 degrees at 8:00am. Here's what it looks like out the back of the property. Not bad. And here's the front. It is a modest home, clearly not built to be a rental, unlike the properties we stayed at in the mountains. First, it was much larger. There were not only two bedrooms but two bathrooms. The floors were worn, tiles were cracked with some permanent stains. The shower had wiring that makes you understand why there is such a thing as code enforcement. The showerhead that you're looking at has a heating element in it and it generates either a hot dribble or a warm slow flow. Since the air temperature was warm, we didn't really need hot showers but we were hoping not to get electrocuted. I told the girls that I would sin...

We packed up so we could meet the check-out time but left our luggage at the airbnb so that we would have a car that was an invitationLara booked a tour (caminata guiada = guided walk) for us today in the Reserva Bosque Nuboso Santa Elena, the Santa Elena cloud forest (http://reservasantaelena.org/). It is a nature preserve owned by the government and managed by the board of the Santa Elena Technical High School. Here's a copy of a hand-out I found at the reception desk. I always like to have a copy of the trail map even though we were with a guide. Our guide was Ruth. She was knowledgeable, chatty and clearly enjoyed her job. She was a product of the Santa Elena high school and she told me more about her post-graduate training but I didn't quite understand what it was. But when I asked her if she was finished, she said something like: "thank god, yes, I am 25!"  Here she is at our first stop. She is calling a Quetzel. It was up in the canopy but I ...

We bought groceries at a supermarcedo the night before so we could eat breakfast in the airbnb. The girls had eggs. I had pre-packaged nut butter that I bought at Wegmans on pan negro. Before we left, we said hello/goodbye to all the livestock. These were guard-geese. We had geese in Taipei and they are not only loud, but quite aggressive toward strangers. We got in the car and drove about 3-4 hours. We didn't actually go that far in part because we were just circumnavigating a lake (Arenal) and also because much of the drive was on dirt roads. The road surfaces were so bad, that Annie was often downshifting to first. Here's the lake we were going around. I was intrigued by the red sand. I walked down to check it out and it more like hard-packed soil. Here's what it looked like up close. The black stuff was also some kind of dirt. Here are the girls just as weather was blowing in. I would describe Costa Rica as having micro-climates. ...