Hello friends and Family, and Goodbye Central America.
Costa Rica is an interesting and beautiful place – Pura Vida (Pure Life) as they describe the country and people in it. Covering only 0.03% of the surface of our planet, or in US terms, a little smaller than the state of West Virginia, Costa Rica has approximately 6% of the world's bio-diversity. They got rid of their military and re-wrote the government system in 1948-9, making it one of America's’s earliest democracies, and their development is a success story for it. A good portion of the country is comprised of coastline, and they say that over a million tourist visit every year.
We have certainly met more tourists from the United States in Costa Rica than elsewhere on our trip, but our fellow country men are still travel shy compared to the Canadians and Europeans among others. I think it is a combination of the bad press Central America has had in our lifetimes as well as the aftermath of 9/11 and the current war more so than the car eating pot holes that had us wondering about our personal safety, but who can really tell.
The government policy of active neutrality has twice earned Costa Rica the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, although by walking around on the University campus yesterday it seems to be that this neutrality has not continued. The students are denouncing the government, a government without a military mind you, for its involvement. I cannot seem to find a list for The Coalition of the Willing, so I don’t know what Costa Rica’s official position is, but I do know that if you google search The Coalition of the Willing you get some pretty funny stuff.
I wrote last from the town of Santa Elena, near the Monteverde cloud forest reserve. The tour with the Biologist / DEA agent was great, as much for all the birds we finally identified as for her bust em up DEA stories. We learned that a cloud forest is a rain forest with more clouds and less rain – technical stuff.
This particular cheese factory is a must do in most of your lifetimes (I speak here to the cheese fanatics, which includes most people I know). It was founded by a settlement of Quakers who left the United States in the 1950’s with their Holstein cows to avoid the Korean War. They drove the cows overland and settled in the most remote place they could find, a place with no roads or infrastructure. They then found that their cows produced much more milk than they needed, and that they had no way to transport the fresh milk from the farthest place they could find to a market., so they commenced with making cheese. Many of the people you encounter in Santa Elena are members of these original Quaker families. The cheese factory is a cooperative and almost every family in the region participates by putting their full milk canisters on the road side every day for pick up, and receiving cooperative funds for the quantity of milk they produced. They have almost as many kinds of cheese as Fresh Fields, and the best ice cream I have ever had. It helps that they can pick their Macadamia nuts fresh off of the trees, and break open the cocoa plants in the forest.
The roads to Monteverde are truly the most car eating in the country, and as it turns out, the community would like to keep them that way. They feel like enough tourist make their way up the mountain every year as it is, and that paved roads would encourage hoards. As it was, we spent 4 hours on the trail with our guide and did not encounter another soul. We also took took advantage of the poor road conditions and having a rental car to meet new people. No Mom, not hitchhikers, but friendly locals who needed a lift, and in turn, we learned a lot about the region. Sisters going down the hill to their grandparents, two old men heading back to San Jose after a weekend at their brothers who had us stop the car to show us hot springs, etc.
From Monteverde we headed to the black sand beach of Playa Hermosa where the waves were too intimidating to surf. Check out the photo from our room, it was an amazing place.
From there we continued South along the Pacific coast to Quepos, which is adjacent to the Manuel Antonio National Park. This is one of Costa Rica’s most spectacular parks (which is really saying a lot) with its expensive white sand beaches backed by an evergreen forest that grows right up to the high-tide line. The park hosts a primary tropical rainforest, mangrove swamps, lagoons, beaches, and 12 islands. There are 109 species of mammals and 184 types of birds.
Craig was down with a cold, so I left at 6am to be perhaps the first visitor to the park for the day. In my first 2 hours I did not run into another soul, and became absolutely terrified of rainforest sounds, most of which turned out to be rather cute orange and purple crabs that live under the leaves of the forest. I was absolutely convinced that they were giant orange spiders for quite some time, but luckily had no one to share this sentiment with. I saw loads of monkeys (three different kinds), bats, birds and 5 sloths at the park. I learned useful (to me) sloth facts such as they are not really adapted for walking but can swim, they come down from their trees to poop once a week and tend to do it at the base of their favorite tree to give back nourishment, and they can host up to 800 beetles in their fur. I would say more but am afraid most of you would stop reading if you have not already. If you have a boring job or are a student or your name is Cara, click here to play sloth games...
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/1478/sloth.html
The heat of the tropical rainforest being too much for us, our last adventure took us up to Chirripó, the second highest peak in Central America. We stayed at a nice mountain lodge, hiked, ate more chicken, rice and beans, sat in natural hot springs, speculated about more birds we could not identify. It was simply fabulous!
Our last few days are in San Jose. It is a much more modern and developed city than we have been in since Mexico City. We are gluttonously eating Turkish food for lunch, buying the New York Times, enjoying hot water at a nice hotel, etc. For the first time on the trip we gave money to a scam artist – a nice looking young lad who told us he had just arrived in the country the day before and had been robbed and was left without a way to call his grandparents to have them fax a copy of his passport, etc. We of course bought him a phone card, took him to dinner where we chatted about California where he is clearly from, and then a Canadian guy approached us to ask him how it was going with the Embassy, etc. He had tried to help him days before. We were chatting with the people at our hotel about this and it turns out that there are several north Americans working this same scam here, so Craig is of course just dying for one of the others to approach us.
As for me, I am getting excited about starting school. I have been in contact with other members of the group, many of who have already landed in Buenos Aires and send great reports. The economic situation there is looking up, and the hold on people’s savings will be released in the next 120 days. Elections are coming up at the end of April, and so far no one candidate has been able to muster as much as 20 percent of voter support in any published opinion poll. According to election rules, a candidate must capture at least 46 percent of the vote or outdistance the next closest candidate by at least 10 percentage points to avert a runoff, so it looks like we will experience elections and a run off in my first few months in country.
From the Washington Post –
Some say that the leadership crisis is a product of Argentina's history. Democracy returned only 20 years ago, following a brutal military dictatorship that came to power in a 1976 coup that created a vacuum in the development of democratic institutions.
Human rights groups have said as many as 20,000 people were killed in the "dirty war" of the 1970s, when the Argentine military abducted university students, teachers, intellectuals and labor organizers, all of whom became known as the disappeared. "There is an entire class of our potential leaders gone," said Abramovich. "It is impossible to replace them, and so the consequence is a greatly diminished political body." "We're essentially missing an entire generation of our best and brightest," said Menendez, the barber. "The bill has to come due sooner or later. Who can say how many people were among those . . . who disappeared who could have actually inspired Argentines?"
I will be staying with a family along with the other person from my group from San Diego for the first few weeks until we find apartments. Craig will be down for a brief visit at the end of April, after his travels in Peru and on South, and before heading to the States to arrange for work projects and meet his new niece.
Signing off from the travel journal business with well wishes to each of you,
Erin Kate
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