Costa Rica – 1- Getting to know a place

View from our friends’ home just outside of San Isidro, Heredia, in Costa Rica’s Central Valley

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The 19th century Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz once said, “Poor Mexico, So Far From God, So Close to the United States.” Diaz’ quote illustrates the tangled history between the United States and Mexico.

Same goes for the rest of Central America, including Costa Rica

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Nancy and I are vacationing currently in Costa Rica.

We are staying with dear old friends just outside of San Isidro, Heredia Province in the country’s Central Valley northeast of the capitol San Jose. Now here five days, my impression is that the neighborhood is a middle to middle-upper class neighborhood. There is a wildlife preserve nearby, the Toucan Rescue Ranch, which we visited yesterday and saw a variety of “rescued” animals – toucans, sloths, ocelots and many more. Our accommodations with our friends are comfortable. I sit in their backyard watching a dramatic parade of tropical birds, none of which I have ever seen or heard of.

The Southern Lapwing, Blue-Gray Tanager, Black-headed Saltator, Great-tailed Grackle, Common tody-Flycatcher, Lesson’s Mot-Mot, Rufous-collared Hummingbird, Melodious Blackbird, Tropical Kingbird, Boat-billed Flycatcher, Social Flycatcher, Great Kiskadee, Rufous-collared Sparrow, Clay-coloured Trush are the ones so far identified; all of these except the Southern Lapwing, seen in a cow field, were seen in our hosts’ backyard in San Isidro.

I presume we’ll see many more as we visit rain forests over the next week.

I’ll write more about birds, wild-life, impressions of “eco-tourism” as I learn more about these subjects. But for starters I want to emphasize that we came here on vacation for a number of reasons:

1. Nancy and I hadn’t taken “a real vacation”  – whatever that means for 13 years. No big deal, just thought it was time. There was a time when we traveled the world and were experienced travelers at that but those days are long gone. So much has changed, starting with how to get plane tickets.

2. There is also the fact that by the end of the year I turn 80, Nancy turns 73 soon and traveling, always a bit grueling even at the best of times, is even more so now.

We decided on Costa Rica because, from what we could tell it is somewhat more prosperous than its neighbors, safer. We’d heard some about its nature as our daughter Molly had visited a few years back and loved it. Add to that two old friends, Daniel Walker and Carol Friesen live here and have been doing so for 17 years and offered us a place to stay. And finally, we thought that as a chronic jet-lag sufferer I might do better in Costa Rica, only one time zone away from Colorado than other places.

And so here we be.

One other point. We really don’t know Central or South America at all. Time to experience it first hand a bit.

Anyhow, here we are. A trial run for perhaps other trips in the future. We’ll see.

I want to emphasize one more point.

Although I have a good working knowledge of a few of the world’s regions outside the USA, I admit that when it comes to Latin America, other than some general understanding of its position in the Global South, this is a part of the world, if I am honest, that frankly I am quite ignorant of most of Latin America. I speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese nor not a one indigenous language. I’ve been to Mexico a half dozen times and to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten’s once. But there is too much blood in the soil in the Caribbean islands to my tastes – and too much offshore wealth in its banks to interest me much, other than Puerto Rico and perhaps one day Haiti.

So I come here something of a “blank slate”.

Needless to say after six days my understanding has grown little and that the first impressions are exactly that, first impressions.

Lovely place, more prosperous than its neighbors, a result of which it is a magnet for nearby peoples, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Colombians, Venezuelans whose countries have experienced war, the destabilizing impact of its “big neighbor to the north”. As in the world in which we live, as the Supremes accurately put it “there is nowhere to run to nowhere to hide” one has to bear in mind that the under the surface of its calm exterior, all the problems of Central America are not far from the surface of Costa Rica either.

Soooo, let’s see what happens as I scratch the surface. First stop in next entry, what I am learning about Costa Rica’s role in the international drug trade.

A demain…