Costa Rica Page 2

Monday, June 19th 2006: Today the day was mainly consumed by travel in the geri-wagon from the Eco-Lodge in Arenal area to Monteverde area. Monteverde is basically in the same region, due south and just a touch west of Arenal. It's also in the hills, and is famous for its cloud forests which I was looking forward to being cool and beautiful. I got my seat above the wheel of the wagon out of eyeshot of Marcos who proceeded to blather nonstop into the microphone until we got to Santa Elena. I got on my headphones, turned my Finns up and blocked him out as best I could. I finished up my Coffin novel and by noon we made our second stop (first being a 20 min bathroom stop 2 hrs into the ride). The second stop was at a local sugar mill run by one woman and her husband and one employee. They mechanically crush the sugar cane and then boil it in these huge vats until the viscosity is like syrup (which is the product) and it is packaged into little pouches for resale. I guess this is some of the first large marketed prepared syrup. It's 100% natural, down to the herbal-only cleaners they use to clean the vats. After we toured the vats, we were invited into the family's home kitchen where she had fresh baked bread and pineapple empenadas she sold to us for snacks. They were delicious.

We got into Santa Elena about a half an hour later- dodging hordes of intact feral dogs swarming the roads. I really think the dog population has got to be a big problem since there are just mongrels everywhere. I want to organize teams of vets going down here en masse and just spaying and neutering everything in sight. David said something about Costa Rica not being a third world country, really, and while I agree it's not Honduras or rural mexico, he's obviously never been here. Oh, yes, there is no doubt it's a third world country. Homes are tiny and usually tin-roofed but noticeably clean, well-groomed and tidy. There are not heaps of garbage all over the roadsides you see elsewhere with "scenery" of filthy homes with filth and debris in the yards and filthy people. It's noticeably tidy and clean, without gads of homeless trash and people try to be clean and groomed, with clean yards and small but not filthy homes. Women are noticeably obese here, I assume it's as bad here as it is in the US. People are definitely not morbidly obese like they are in the US, but still bigger than me and dressed in skin tight clothing with bare midriffs hanging out and ripples of fat hanging out of all the tight bands of clothing. Yuk. There is a cultural expectation here as it is in other patriarchal cultures: men knock women up, women pump out as many babies as possible to prove man's virility, and women get soggy and heavy. I think my suggestion to cosmetize the already beautiful country would be to send in an armada of vets to fix the feral pet population and to convince the women that bare midriffs and spray-painted-on-clothing isn't really doing anything for anybody.

Santa Elena used to be a tiny little town but actually moved its location to be even closer to Monteverde so they could trade with the Quakers who originated the settlement at Monteverde in 1951 when they left the USA in the quest for nonviolent existence. 12 couples left the US with nothing, moved here and started with nothing. Reading how-to books they set up an electric plant, a cheese factory (still working today) and a colony of peaceful pacifists. Today both Santa Elena and Monteverde are a lot like Fortuna with outdoor adventure sports places every 3 feet and hordes of 20-something tourists, bars and downscale eateries. We stopped in Santa Elena for lunch, and John, Charlene and I went out on our own to the Blue Morpho restaurant which Marcos said was the best place in town. I kind of wanted to eat at The Tree House- which literally has this gigantic, sprawling tree growing in the middle of the restaurant and you have to climb over branches to get to your table and stuff. How cool is that? But those 2 have their own ideas, so I just went with the flow. I are the traditional casado, vegetarian, which I've seemed to ingest for every meal I've had in any kind of restaurant her in CR. It was casado. Just at the Blue Morpho in Santa Elena.

Casado. Mine was minus the meat. There was no hot sauce on the table, unfortunately, either. 2460 Coronas later (less than $4 US) I paid for my meal and we loaded back onto the bus and drove to a local dairy farm for a really stupid experience. The guy spoke no english, so he read this bizarre script off a piece of paper, then Marcos translated (why read the thing? Just hand it to Marcos to translate it directly we wondered?) and then we watched the two girls squeeze the whey out of the curds and put it into a press to make the cheese. Then you could milk the cow, which the girls also did, and they fed the calves for us with milk from bottles and watched the pig drink up they whey. If interest, however, were a few birds John spotted in the bushes: The following magnificently beautiful hummingbirds:

green violet-eared, purple throated mountain gem, and the slate-throated redstart. They also had a nice porch and really pretty flowers growing in the front yard of the house area at the farm. It was still nothing we could not have seen in the US. It was just silly.

We got back onto the bus feeling like that was a waste of an hour, we drove into Monteverde to the El Establo Mountain Resort- wow, you drive up and it's this sprawling new-looking wood hotel growing out of the top of a large hill with 6 brand new buildings just gone (and going) up housing our rooms. I opened the door to my room which was enormous- huge enough for a king sized bed, two twin sized beds, an enormous picture window that opened up onto the meandering path down the face of the hill, overlooking the pristine pool below, and out onto the misty mountains in the distance beyond, complete with a rainbow shining just for me. Wow. In the faint distance was Lake Arenal. Beautiful.

Yes, it was beautiful. I skipped a group presentation which was given by one of the Quaker women about their life and their move here, and elected instead to head up the mountain side to see buildings 4, 5 and 6 and the pond which was supposed to be in front of building 6. Buildings 5 & 6 are really magnificent on huge, sprawling lawns with immature plants growing in and construction crews inside and out. While I was walking up the very steep mountainside, I came upon a small paved trail through the forest which eventually ended on dirt and crews pouring more concrete for it, as well as working on the road, the pond and the grounds. This was seriously lung-burning exercise. There was a collection of exotic birds that El Establo has in a paddock along the pathway- with peacocks, pheasant and some so beautiful I've never seen before. It made me wonder where they birds were from, since we visited the animal rescue place who had a large bird collection as well, and rescued birds such as these from large hotels such as this...

Back down the hill, I spent $2 an hour on internet access at the hotel to use a keyboard that had half the keys worn off, and an "enter" button that stuck pretty badly. I spent 45 minutes composing an email to David which was characteristically long and descriptive only to hit the "send" button and get an error that my session had expired. So I spent my remaining 8 minutes composing a short email in anger. I huffed down the hill a bit further to the dining room and ran across this massive marine toad making such a croaking noise he was impossible to miss: he was HUGE, the size of two fists together and just sitting there on the lawn.

I met J&C after the Quaker presentation, which they found very interesting, for a late dinner on our own. I had planned on heading down the short hill into town in search of something, but Charlene, to my dismay, wanted to eat at the hotel after some indecision. This was disappointing since we were going to be eating 3 squares here for the next 2 days, I really wanted to get out. At risk of going alone, I caved and we ate at the hotel. I ate a club sandwich which was so monstrously huge I gave John half of it, boxing the other half and bringing it to my room (there's a fridge in the room) and eating the fries. On the way back to my room,

After dinner, I went to my room to find, most pleasantly, that many US shows are on tv and are in English with Spanish subtitles. I fell asleep to a rerun of Friends and the Ghost Whisperer. Unfortunately, El Establo is extremely loud for some reason- you can hear everything going on in the hallways which are pretty cavernous and reverberate every little noise and door closing, so it was a pretty sleepless night. The bathrooms, while huge and beautifully tiled, are open to the cavernous hallways at the top, so the ambient room noise is huge and from the very loud hallway. This might not have been so very bad any other week, but we seemed to be staying at the same time a buss load of teenage american kids were also staying (probably a high school spanish trip or something?) so it was laughing and giggling and in and out and noise and doors slamming and opening all freaking night.

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