We Brake for Water Buffalo!

Watch out for the water buffalo!

We’ve been back in Costa Rica just over a week now and it sure is good to be here. This is the first July we’ve spent in country and we can understand why it’s called the “green season.” In the six weeks we were gone, the trees have filled out in lush splendor, flowers are in bloom everywhere -- even more than usual -- and the air is alive with butterflies. On our first walk last week, we passed a large roadside patch of zinnias and the number of butterflies of every description, large and small, black and yellow, brown and orange, red and white, was just astounding! I recorded this video and hope that you can spy all the wings fluttering from blossom to blossom. The musical background is the neighbor’s radio. Talk about abundant flora and fauna!

A local cornfield

Local gardens are bursting with the bounty of fruits and vegetables as well. It seems like the corn stalks increase a foot or two every day and huge squash leaves spread wide across the ground. Banana trees are majestic with their large new leaves and still-green fruit. If this is the rainy season, it’s not too bad. Most days the rains don’t start until mid- to late afternoon and mornings are sunny and nice.

Of course, for our own pantry we hope to get back to buying from the local organic cooperative market, now run by our friend Nathalie on the model of community markets in her native France, offering small or large size baskets stuffed with the week’s best buys. In addition to the veggies and fruits, she sells organic goat cheeses, Swiss cheese, jams, chicken and fish, eggs and dark chocolates. Yum!

Atenas recycling in action

And while we’re on the subject of organic farming and other important environmental issues, I recently wrote a column for The Costa Rica News about a relatively new effort here in Atenas to collect and recycle tons of materials, such as plastics, glass, paper, cardboard, to prevent them from ending up in landfills. Señor Alfonso Quiros V, chief of operations of W. Recicladores, CR, S.A., has recruited dozens of local volunteers to help his small staff in gathering and sorting recyclables the first Wednesday of each month at the Central Park in Atenas. He’s providing the same service twice a month in Grecia, the larger town up the hill from us. Such efforts are so important in protecting the amazing biodiversity and beautiful ecology here in Costa Rica. As Señor Quiros said to me, “It will take some time to educate the public and our youth on how critical this is, but we will continue to work toward that goal.”

Such projects are extremely valuable in helping Ticos understand the long-term value of preserving their magnificent country’s fragile environment. But one of the most promising developments in ecological progress here is the creation of a new political party focused on protecting Costa Rica’s vast biodiversity and ready to move the battle into the political arena. Formed in 2004 by reporter Carlos Arrieta and retired English teacher Rodrigo Arias, the Green Ecological Party has set its sights on winning a seat in the National Assembly representing the Cartago province where they got their start and have their strongest support. The party has put Arrieta forward as a candidate for office twice before, in 2006 and again last year, but failed to win a seat. He and Arias are optimistic that as Ticos’ political awareness of environmental issues grows, voters will demand strong governmental policies to protect Costa Rica’s ecology; party members hope that 2014 will be their year for a win. 

One of the main planks in the Green Ecological Party platform is banning plastics in certain Costa Rican industries in favor of biodegradable materials. They support mandatory environmental education programs in schools as well as the creation of an environmental “police force” to guard against litterers, polluters, illegal loggers and others whose activities degrade the environment.

 

On a lighter note in closing this post, I’ll mention a couple of funny animal incidents we observed lately. The second rider’s unusual mount is a water buffalo! As we were walking down the road, we saw this fellow along with two horseback riders jogging down the sidewalk then crossing the highway to continue along a side road. I’m sure my horse would have been freaked out to share the road with this creature but the Tico horses seemed less concerned with him than with a rough place in the sidewalk.

Roscoe and Layne socializing on the deck

Vicious Bassett Hound

And finally, meet Roscoe, the landlord’s young pit bull who often comes to visit us as we relax on the front deck in the late afternoon. He gives the breed a good reputation with his lovable nature. In fact, he’s so easy-going that a neighbor dog, an elderly Bassett hound that seemed an unlikely attacker, got the best of poor Roscoe on our back patio recently, biting him in the butt. Hard to imagine but the old guy gave the pit bull puppy a sore tail end!

Pura Vida!

Hot Golf, Cool Baseball, Green Dreams

My mom's parched backyard

Only a few days remaining in our stateside travels before a most welcome return to Costa Rica. It’s amazing just how good the “green season” sounds, even with its promise of thunderstorms, after a couple of weeks of West Texas weather: bone dry, boiling hot days of 100+ temperatures and long, slow-roasting evenings in the 90’s. How do people live here, I ask myself over and over. In fact, I’ve asked a few residents and no one seems to have an answer. They get a silly grin on their faces, roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.

        

But live here they do and incredibly, they even go outside during the day and survive -- grocery shopping, going to work, visiting the library, running errands. They even play golf!

         

Goodwill golf clubs

Which leads me to my topic for the day, my new golf clubs. Layne and I had transported our good clubs and bigheaded drivers from California to Portland last summer, thinking that with all the family golf players in Oregon, we’d probably get the most use out of them there. Climate change has made us re-think that notion since during most of our June visit this year, the weather was rainy and chilly -- not exactly my idea of good golf weather. We had a few nice days and managed to make the most of them with nine holes at King City one day and eighteen at Tri Mountain another. But we also had in mind putting together a set of clubs for use here in Texas so we could play when visiting my mom and perhaps even transporting some down to Costa Rica as well.

         

Since I’m not a terribly serious or skilled golfer, it had occurred to me that I might find an inexpensive set of clubs here in Texas on Craigslist. Indeed, there were some offered but none that fit the bill. I needed women’s clubs and didn’t want to spend much. But I never expected to find the clubs I needed at Goodwill.

         

Mother and I had gone to an enormous thrift store in town, Christians in Action. They had huge racks of clubs, organized only by size -- all 4 irons, 5 irons, etc. jammed together on stacked wooden frames. To figure out which were women’s clubs was a gargantuan project. Although the clubs were bargain-priced at $2.39 each, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of clubs and the undertaking I faced in finding what I wanted from the hundreds there.

         

So-called "fairway" on the 5th hole

So on we went to Goodwill to see what they might have. What a surprise to find only a small number of clubs, easy to sort through, standing in a large open box. I quickly noticed “First Lady” on an iron and realized it was a woman’s club. It looked in pretty good shape so I continued looking through the selection and found the entire set was there, from the driver to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 irons and a wedge -- all of the same brand, all in darned good condition. The price? Wait for it… 99 cents each! And if that wasn’t bonanza enough, I also found a nice bag, in better condition than my own, for $2.98. I got the whole set for about $12.

         

That’s the good news. The bad news was the condition of the municipal course I played on. Fairway? What fairway? Oh, you mean that dried out corridor with scraggly grass here and there and hard dirt everywhere else? Given the desperate drought conditions hereabouts, however, one could expect nothing else. So I’ve played twice now, early in the morning to avoid the heat, making the best of the course conditions and finding myself quite satisfied with my new irons. The driver leaves much to be desired but that may just be “operator error.”

         

It seems the secret to survival in this weather is to find something fun to do inside an air-conditioned building. To that end, Mother and I jumped in her air-conditioned car and drove a few blocks over to the air-conditioned Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho where a fascinating exhibit is on display depicting the history of women in baseball. Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball dispels the myth of women’s baseball as only a brief phenomenon of the 1940’s when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was in its heyday, later celebrated in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks, Madonna and Geena Davis. Through photos, original posters, framed postcards, game programs and magazine articles, the exhibit reveals the birth of women’s ball in the mid-1800’s through the onset of the sport at women’s colleges, such as Vassar in 1866 and Smith College in 1879, and on to the present day crop of outstanding athletes swinging bats and hurling balls. Organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance, which takes their exhibitions into just 100 small and medium-sized communities each year, the exhibit in San Angelo is the only stop for the show in Texas. If Linedrives and Lipstick comes to your area, don’t miss it. It was well worth going out in the heat.

         

Now it’s on to Costa Rica and the luscious tropical weather I love. Pura Vida, here we come! 

Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Wild Monkeys Roam!

September 4, 2010

It’s Saturday and we’ve been invited to our new landlord’s birthday party up by the swimming pool in the shelter of the rancho. We’re all settled in with bags unpacked, groceries bought and our complex address memorized for use in calling taxis. Try this on for size: Barrio Los Angeles, Calle Capre Verde, tres cientos metros norte, mano izquierda. It translates something like: Los Angeles neighborhood, Capre Verde Street, 300 meters north, on the left. For us it translates into a resort-like home with a friendly neighbor upstairs and helpful and generous owners up the hill.

         Moving day on Wednesday was an adventure from beginning to end. Our friends from Pure Life Development, Gerardo and Nelson, picked us up and somehow stuffed all our bags into the back of their SUV. Upon our arrival, landlady Odie met us and provided the important information: our new phone number, garbage days, the cleaning lady’s name, schedule and cost ($10) and her own phone numbers. Odie is a highly educated woman who speaks fluent English and runs a Spanish language school in Atenas called Spanish Immersion. Her husband Eduardo is a charming Tico who is working on his English as we are working on our Spanish. We’re told he loves to sing and dance so we look forward to his birthday fiesta later today.

         Wednesday afternoon Odie kindly offered to drive us in to San Jose to PriceSmart, a Costco-type membership store, where we could purchase a few things we needed to set up house-keeping. At the last minute, our Texan neighbor Linda decided to join us and in a light rain, we all set off, chattering as we got acquainted. Shopping went well until Odie ran up to us, with alarm on her face, saying she had just discovered that somehow in all the bustle of our arrival there, she had not only locked her keys in the car but had left the car motor running! After a few phone calls and an hour or so wait, we were on our way back home, laughing at the small calamity. That evening, Linda fueled a celebration in our new home with a bottle of Spanish champagne and lively conversation.

         On Thursday, Layne and I set out to test the theory that we were within walking distance of town. It turned out to be a half-hour hike each way but we made it to the large grocery, Coopeatenas, and picked up a few things before heading back down the gentle slope to Los Angeles. Not too bad. The biggest challenge is our own street, Calle Capre Verde, a muddy, rocky lane with trenches cut across it by rain runoff. On our trip to PriceSmart, we learned from Odie that neighbors had chipped in to do the necessary gutter work along the sides of the road in preparation for the city to come in and lay down caliche topping to improve the street. But in a scenario all too typical of Central America, after the pipe work was done, they were informed by the authorities that the city had no money, so the road remains unimproved.

         There are other challenges to life here. One rather delicate issue is that of the septic systems and the disposal of toilet tissue. In hotels we’ve stayed at including the recent Vista Atenas B&B, many restaurants and even our current modern abode, visitors are asked to refrain from flushing toilet tissue. We have been told that the septic systems can’t handle the paper. Instead, we must dispose of tissue in a trashcan, a habit that takes some getting used to. We find it hard to understand such a limitation in septics, but nonetheless, when in Costa Rica, we do as the Costa Ricans do.

         Still the pleasures far outweigh the difficulties, in our opinion. On Thursday evening sitting on our front porch, Layne noticed a large odd-looking bird moving in the tall grasses below. With its long pointed beak, blue-grey feathers and stubby tail, to us the creature resembled a wild chicken. A Google search suggested we were not far off. The fellow is a Great Tinamou or Tinamus Major, also called a Mountain Hen. According to Wikipedia, it lives in tropical and subtropical jungles, rain forests and cloud forests, making its nest at the base of a tree where it lays beautiful blue-green eggs. According to Linda, these are the creatures that make a noisy ruckus in the jungle just downhill from our apartment.

         But Friday night’s nature presentation exceeded our imagination as to what this new home might offer. Not only were there fireflies flitting about (how long since you’ve seen a firefly?), but out in the big trees just yards from our porch we watched a half a dozen or more capuchin monkeys frolicking in the branches, stopping here and there to nibble on some tidbit and leaping across huge swaths of air from tree to tree. Often hidden by large leaves and limbs and moving fast, they were difficult to capture photographically. Still, even at twelve-time zoom with my hands shaking from eager excitement, my new Panasonic did a good job of snapping a usable shot. What a thrill to watch those creatures in their own environment and to know we can look forward to many more evenings of such wildlife entertainment.

         It’s now Sunday and I’m only just returning to this post after a wonderful afternoon yesterday at Eduardo’s festive birthday party. We had a fine time meeting new Tico amigos, learning new Spanish words and dancing to Eduardo’s hot DJ music. Too bad he was unable to dance because of minor knee surgery on Friday, but it didn’t stop him from entertaining us with his vibrant karaoke songs. What a great voice he has! The group included Jennifer, Odie’s business partner in Spanish Immersion, and her husband Rob, and several of Odie and Eduardo’s long-time amigos, Anna, Roseanna, Memo and his wife Annie. Proving himself to be a karaoke pro, Layne even chimed in on the Elvis Presley song, “It’s Now or Never” in English, joined by Memo on the mike.

         To finish off the evening, we “crashed” Linda’s family get-together upstairs, meeting her simpatico son Dillon and daughter-in-law Anna who live here in Atenas with their two young children, as well as her visiting sister and cousin. What an excellent end to a fine day of Costa Rican Pura Vida.

         Now the thunder is booming around us and heavy afternoon rains have begun, but not before I had time for a lovely swim in our pool under sunny and warm noontime skies. As the steady downpour rustles the trees and lightening flashes across the valley, we understand why the “green season” here is so very green. 

(Just a reminder: You can click on photos to enlarge them.) 

Falling Rain, Falling Mangos

May 2, 2010

(Click on photos to enlarge)

         Happy Birthday to both of my grandsons - Kai Josef is 12 today and Orion is 9! I look forward to seeing them both this summer. In fact, the prospect of some extended visits with family members is one of the redeeming features of leaving Costa Rica in only a week.

         The other positive aspect of our pending departure is the onslaught of the rainy season here. And what a dramatic change it has been! Not only is there predictable rain every afternoon and into the evening, but we’ve also learned something about our lovely mountain locale: There is a lot of fog up here and considerably more rain than down in the town of Atenas, some 500-600 feet below us.

         Last night we had occasion to go into Atenas for dinner with our duplex neighbors, Caroline and Cy, to try out a new restaurant, Antano’s, which had been touted as having good Mexican food. We drove out in a substantial shower but as we dropped down the hill, the rain began to slack off and had completely stopped by the time we reached downtown about five miles away. Perhaps it was that micro-climate of minimal rain even during the rainy season that prompted National Geographic to christen Atenas as having “the best climate in the world,” a motto emblazoned on every Atenas bus, an obvious public relations boon for the local community. In our experience here during the dry season, however, Layne and I found downtown Atenas to be too hot and occasionally too humid for our taste, lacking the refreshing ocean breezes that we enjoy at our chalet. Until these daily rains started, we felt that we had found the best spot here in Alto del Monte on the side of the mountain overlooking the Pacific. Now we wonder, particularly since most of these tropical storms include dramatic lightening bolts and massive booming thunder. But experiencing the rains reinforces our plan to become “snowbirds,” or perhaps more aptly “rainbirds,” as we expect to head north to the States when the euphemistically named “green season” arrives here in Costa Rica.

         This inevitable reversal of weather conditions is one reason Costa Ricans refer to the rainy season as invierno or winter, and verano, the dry season, as summer. Winter here spans the months of May through October while summer starts in November and runs through April. And indeed, local temperatures have dropped considerably since the rains began. Most mornings start out sunny and beautiful as always with clouds just visible on the ocean horizon but by early afternoon the fog rolls in off the Pacific like a grey wind, a palpable mist that quickly envelops the landscape and chills the air. It is so reliable here in Alto del Monte that a road sign just down the hill warns: Area de Neblina, i.e., area of fog. Now we know!

         Driving past that road sign last night we continued on through the fog and drizzle to El Mirador de Cafetal, the restaurant-cum-discotheque recently opened by our friend Ligia Cortes. A recent Latin dance class had added a few new steps to Layne’s and my repertoire and we enjoyed practicing our moves to the hot salsa music. The crowd at El Mirador is sociable and fun, including our vivacious waitress Rosie, who at one point dragged me to the dance floor to serve as partner for her sexy moves.

         But the sunny mornings still offer us a chance for our almost-daily walks down the side road into our local Tico community, a chain of houses along the ridgeline with kids playing soccer, riding bikes or climbing trees, dogs barking, clothes hanging on fences to dry and the local goat grazing by the roadside. Today as we came around the first big curve, we noticed that work had been done to prevent a mudslide, which could wash out part of the road. Although there is a large culvert that crosses underneath the road there, still the torrential rainfalls had already cut away part of the dirt slope dangerously close to the asphalt. Earlier efforts at retaining walls were evident, black plastic sheeting and big truck tires, but both had failed to contain the steady erosion. Now a concrete ridge had been installed at the edge of the road leading down to the new concrete drainage gutter. The gutter looks rather small to us but we hope that it does the trick. As we headed back up the hill to our house, we heard someone calling to us and turned to find a Tico hurrying to offer us a big bag of bananas from his yard. What a friendly community we live in!

         But with only a week remaining in Costa Rica, we are rushing to get some important tasks accomplished on our residency. Last Wednesday, our attorney Monika picked us up from the bus stop in La Garita and drove us to her office in Grecia to get some papers we need to open a bank account. We need the bank account so that we can pay for the Caja medical insurance online; we need the Caja membership in order to proceed with residency. Step one leads to step two leads to step three, et cetera, which we hope will eventually lead to legal status. When we walked out of Monika’s office, we found a friend from Atenas sitting in the reception area waiting to see Monika as well. Small world! After his brief meeting, Marc, Layne and I wandered around the central park of Grecia, gazing up at the unusual Gothic-style metal Catholic Church, then settled on a park bench to chat and nibble a cookie. Just as we were relaxing there, thinking we could hardly be in a safer place, a huge mango fell from the tree above us, flying by only inches from our heads, and splattered at Marc’s feet, splashing his pants and prompting us to move to a bench nearby without a mango tree above it. Which just goes to show, even tropical fruit can be dangerous!

         Only a few more days of our Costa Rican paradise before we return to the hustle and bustle of the States but at least we’ll get to see those two precious grandsons!