Costa Rica

We went to Costa Rica a few weeks ago.

It was the first time that I'd ever been out of the country. Or at least out enough to need a passport to leave and come back.

Going to Costa Rica was an afterthought. Staying for a whole week was a fall back option.

It was amazing.

Neither of us has much Spanish, so we asked the managers of the hotel where we stayed for a bilingual driver to take us to Volcano Poas and the Butterfly Waterfall. These are both pretty standard tourist stops for the Central Highlands. We expected to get a driver who could understand us, would take us to the sights, wait for us and take us back.

Who we got was Wilson Rojas, who had decided that he was our guide to his country and took us places we would never have thought to have gone by ourselves.

Costa Rica is an astonishing country. Ticans are truly nice people with time for the most ignorant of Northern tourists. The landscape is wildly varied and beautiful, We had the best time and plan to go back again, when we can afford it.

But

Costa Rica is a poor country. In the Central Highlands, where we stayed, people live in shacks made of wood scraps and metal sheets right up against the side of the road. Some of the shacks on the road up to Sarchi (where ornamental ox carts are made) are probably less than 225 sq. ft. We saw clothes drying on the roofs of house that had nowhere to put a clothes line. People walk everywhere and, according to Wilson, there's pretty good bus service. There aren't many cars, compared to the Bay Area for example, and most of the ones I saw on the road are older models, Korean or Japanese.

In Costa Rica, we were the rich. We woke up every day to beautiful views at the edge of a canyon overlooking the Rio Grande. We walked through carefully tended gardens, around koi ponds to have breakfast in a gazebo suspended high over the river below. Men in white shirts and black pants brought us fresh juice and hot breakfasts, if we wanted something other than granola and fresh fruit. These same men brought us dinner at night.

It raised a discomfort that I still feel more than a month later. I kept saying, "Thank you" or "Muchas gracias" after every service and received a quiet "Mucho gusto" from each waiter. But that acknowledgment, doesn't mask the fact that he's waiting on me, that he can pretty much only make a living by waiting on me and people like me, and that he's probably fortunate to work where the owners seem conscientious about their workers.

It's easy to ignore the fact Costa Rica is hostage to our policies. All over the highlands I saw graffiti about the TLC. When I asked Wilson about this, he explained that this was about the free trade zone (NAFTA to us) and that it was a good thing for the country. And most of the graffiti I saw near Alajuela was pro TLC. After a few days of riding around together, he admitted that he'd voted against it. The further north we went, the more anti-TLC graffiti we saw, especially in San Ramon, which seemed a more industrial town.

And it's easy to miss the fact that Costa Rica has its own internal problems. We had stopped at a coffee plantation somewhere south of Fraijanes. I can't remember the name of the plantation, but it sells 80% of it's produce to Starbucks. We walked down and looked at the plants and Wilson pointed out the cabins where the pickers lived. These pickers are migrant workers from Nicaragua. He said that Ticans don't want to pick coffee, that it's hard, poorly paid work, that it's dangerous on the steep hills, with the snakes in the groves. It's a depressingly familiar argument. When we had walked back to the van to head back to the hotel, Wilson asked the boy whose picture is at the top of this post if we could take his picture. He was carrying a basket when we came up to him, but put it down after Wilson told him that we wanted to take a picture of him because he was, "muy guapo."

He is of course. But he looks way older than then ten years old that I estimate he was. He makes maybe 1,483 colones (three dollars) a day for his family by picking coffee beans. And from what we heard, they depend on the help too. This isn't an after school job. The Nicaraguans are the poorest in a poor country. They're many of the people who are walking the narrow, twisting roads.

We saw a woman who had been hit by a car as she was walking home from work. People crouched around her, looking panicked as they waited for the ambulance to show up. (It came soon after and the woman was ok. No one knew anything about the driver.) They were, according to Wilson, probably Nicaraguan, probably coffee pickers.

So even though most of my memories of Costa Rica are of beautiful birds, days with four or five different types of weather in them, cloud forests, ceviche in a no-tourist-in-sight restaurant, passiflora, pejibaye, and waterfalls dropping into the deepest green forests, I am more than a little haunted by a serious, slightly worried smile.