Category: Historical

04 July 2003
Friday I woke around 7 a.m. and proceeded to slowly wake up and prepare myself for the day. The previous evening I had asked the proprieter of the hotel to arrange a guided hike for me this morning, but I had not heard anything last night so I was not expecting to have anything to do. However, upon leaving my room to head up to breakfast about 8 a.m., she came running out telling me that my guide was here. I hurridly asked for a piece of toast before heading out on the hike.

The hike, through a private reserve, lasted about two and a half hours. During that time, the guide and I discussed many topics, including conversation, the various flora and fauna, and I learned some fascinating tidbits about the rainforest. For instance, I saw a species of tree that sheds its defense against parasitic vines. I also saw some orchids and micro-orchids, bromeliads, tree-ferns, banana and coffee plants, and a variety of berry and seedlings. We also spotted a tucan, and the three-wattled bellbird, which has a unique call that goes “Boonnnggg!” followed by a whistle.

After the hike (and a milkshake at the cheese factory), I wandered around killing time before the Sky Trek zip line canopy tour I had scheduled for that afternoon. This fun-filled activity involved taking eleven ziplines through the jungle canopy, the longest of which was 750 meters, and the highest of which was, well, high. A group of about 10 was assembled, along with two guides that would attach us and detatch us at each end. The first zipline had me freaked, but by the third one I was really in to it, having a blast. The point wasn’t so much to see nature as it was to hurtle at high speeds. Unfortunately, about halfway through the tour, the afternoon rains rolled in, leading all of us to get soaked through, as none of us were smart enough to take along the raincoats. In fact, the rain had started coming down so hard that when combined with the speed of the zipline it actually stung. I could barely keep my eyes open on the last three or four lines.

While drying out in the lodge waiting for the bus, I started talking with Laurie, from Washington State, and Ellen (see the photo! She did NOT look like she’s 22, regardless of what she said!), from Toronto, who were on the tour (and also quite soaked through). They had been working on a Habitat for Humanities project for the previous five weeks and were finishing up some fun touring about before heading home. In order to warm up, I also had my very first cup of coffee, ever. And it was AMAZING. If you try one thing in Costa Rica, make it coffee. You won’t regret it. Not that I plan to start drinking coffee here, but I would definitely have some again when I find myself back in Costa Rica.

After the zip line tour, I was dropped off back at my hotel. I changed in to some dry clothes and walked the half a kilometer down to Teormonti, an Italian restaurant, where I had some good Lasgana for dinner. The dessert, a pineapple pie a la mode, was incredibly sweet, and I could barely take a bite without wincing. I couldn’t help but think that the ice cream must have come from the Cheese Factory, and I happily ate it all. The walk back, after dark, without a flashlight, was not one of my smarter moments. I was less-than-pleased to not be able to see where I was walking at all, as it was pitch black outside. And when the dog started following me, I was even less happy (yes, dogs do run wild in Costa Rica. I was cautioned not to pet any dogs unless I could see that they were clearly owned by someone).

Stumbling through the dark, I arrived back at La Colina and went to bed…

05 July 2003
This was the first day my stomach was upset since leaving. I left about an hour later than I had intended, not that it would have mattered. I had been planning to set out to the Monteverde Cloud Reserve, hopefully to arrive in time to secure a guided hike. As it turns out, I wouldn’t have been able to, as the person at the entrance instructed me you really do need a full day’s advance notice.

Regardless, I paid the entrance fee and headed in to the reserve, guidelessly viewing the various flora and, with less success, fauna of the rainforest. It really is a spectacle, walking along narrow paths through an overwhelming green forest that feels both peaceful and vibrant at the same time. The sounds of the insects and animals abound, and it’s rarely silent, though it can quite down some.

Along the path I met a couple (apparently in their early 60s (Betty and Donald, I think. At least, that’s the names I’ve convinced myself of), though I thought they were perhaps in their late 40s/early 50s when I first met them). We talked for much of the trip, about the rainforest, our experiences in Costa Rica, and our mutual desire to travel. I received many words of wisdom, which I will try to put in to practice. I also encountered a woman in her early 30s (my guess at least), who was doing some birding. Oddly enough, it turns out that all are of us are originally from NJ, and that three out of the four of us are Rutgers grads. Talk about a small world! As coincidence would have it, the young(er) woman, whose name I absolutely can’t recall, was staying at La Colina as well. Actually, in the room next door.

After the hiking, I picked up some souvenirs at the Hummingbird Gallery’s gift shop, I accepted an offer to take a taxi back to La Colina, sparing me a further two+ kilometer hike. I also made a quick stop at the Cheese Factory, taking in my last ice cream for the trip.

Back at La Colina, I killed an hour and a half reading while waiting for dinner, which I had decided to eat in that night. As it turned out, the woman I had met hiking was also eating at the Lodge. I had a great conversation with her through dinner and until about 8. She’s had quite a number of travel experiences, including a year and a half period when she gave up on work and decided to wander around the world. Talk about inspiration! I feel like I could do it myself, now, and I’m also starting to feel as though I really want to.

06 July 2003
This morning was the morning I was slated to head back to San Jose. The driver came as scheduled, 7:45 A.M.. Much to my surprise and pleasure, it was the nice guy who had driven me up here on Thursday morning.

The ride itself was uneventful, with the exception of the snotty American college students (I’m guessing on those two points) in the back. They sounded as though they had been on a trip, and were making fun of some of the people they had met. Thankfully I was able to just sit there quietly until we reached San Jose. We did have some trouble locating a hotel, including asking several people in San Jose for directions, but everything worked out in the end. One of the guys on the ride was from Argentina, so I peppered him with a few questions, as I am considering it now as a destination.

I arrived at the hotel around 1, ate a delicious lunch, wandered around the area near the hotel for a time, watched some TV to become more acquainted with the goings-on in the world, relaxed, ate dinner, and went to sleep before 10.

07 July 2003
At ten minutes of 4, I awoke to the sound of my alarm buzzing. Running through the morning steps to preparedness, I was ready and out the door for my taxi ride by 4:45 a.m. I arrived at the airport, groggily passed about an hour and a half after check-in until the flight boarded, and it was on the way back home.

Just two things are noteworthy at this point. The Flight Attendants (FAs) on the San Jose – Houston segment of the trip were among the friendliness and most professional I have seen. They were enthusiastic and talkative, and actually appeared to enjoy their work. One of them even came around shaking hands with all the paxs before we landed.

To counterbalance the positives, the Houston – Newark segment was delayed on the ground in Houston by about an hour, and then delayed in the air for another 45 minutes or so. Go figure. Of course, I was seated with two pharmaceutical sales reps from the Houston area on each side of me, from different pharma companies no less. It made for some interesting conversations.

Comments
So, what would I say about Costa Rica? The people are friendly and the country is beautiful. At least once you leave San Jose, and San Jose’s not that terrible. The air quality isn’t the greatest, that’s all. Once you head out of the city, the diversity of plant and animal life is phenomenal and the natural beauty left me feeling happy, relaxed and quite pleasant. Even the other travelers tend to be happy and quite approachable.

Costa Rica has definitely jumped to the top of my destinations list, and I would actaully love to buy some property there. Perhaps one day I will.

I finally saw an article that makes the argument I make about shifting the rationale for the intervention in Iraq away from the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument.

The trouble is, we have not found any such weapons, which has led some Administration supporters to shift their ground. Whether or not Saddam had nukes, they argue, his rule was so vile that getting rid of it was a service to mankind. That is true. But if the test for deploying American power to remove a regime is not the danger it poses to the U.S. but its wickedness, why stop at Iraq? As Mandelbaum wrote seven years ago, “The world is a big place filled with distressed people.” Why not ease the suffering of those in, say, Burma or Zimbabwe?

Given previous American foreign policy, this rationale becomes difficult at best. The U.S. has always been willing to work with and support “less than savory” characters as it serves the interests of the state. Pinochet, Arafat, Sharon, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, Milosivic, the list goes on and on.

An argument supporting interventions in failing states on moral grounds in some instances while not in other instances is harder to make than that of national interest, as the moral justification of foreign policy must be applied consistently for it to not be purely hypocritical. A policy of intervention for moral reasons that is only applied “when we feel like it” can only lead to bitterness and failure.

I’ve been watching stories on Hong Kong somewhat more closely these days, since I’ll be traveling there for Labor Day weekend. The most important news these days is on what has been labeled a “draconian” security law that elicited a large protest of approximately 500,000 people. When you think about it, 500,000 people is quite a large protest. But when you consider that Hong Kong has a total population of 6.7 million, that’s about 7.5% of the population that actually came out to protest. That’s an amazing percentage of citizenry that was motivated enough to actually go out and publically express their feelings.

Could you imagine waking up from a coma after 19 years? I’d honestly bet I’d think everyone was playing a joke. Still, he should write a book and get a movie deal. It’s the American thing to do, after all!

All elections need to be more like the California recall. You never know who might run, but this candidate seems like a lot more fun!

Well, here’s my trip review as promised.

02 July 2003
Wednesday night I arrived at the international airport in San Jose. After clearing Immigration and Customs, I’m at least expecting something of a lobby area, where there are phones, money exchangers, and a place to arrange some form of transportation. To my surprise, though, after walking through a hallway, I’m unceremoniously dumped out on the street, where there’s a huge crowd of people waving flags and signs, some of which are those with people’s names on them, some of which aren’t. Confused, I stumble out of the crowd, and a guy points me in the direction of the Departures level, where I can find a booth to change my money. Another guy, trying to get me to use his taxi, followed me and waited for me, seemingly refusing to accept that I didn’t need or want a ride.

After changing the money, I went back downstairs to find the Interbus shuttle that I had scheduled to give me a ride from the airport to my hotel. With the help of, well, someone in a reddish orange shirt, we found the Interbus guy and I was saved. While waiting on the side for him to find his two other passenger sets, a group that I couldn’t see arrived in the waiting area, much to the crowd’s delight. I heard cheering, shouting, and drums, and there was plenty of flag waving as well. I would later find out that the football (soccer, for us Americans) team was returning home from abroad and that this was the welcome party.

The shuttle finally came to take me to the hotel, and I grabbed by bag to quickly follow the guy who had grabbed my other bag as he chased down the shuttle. Somewhere between the time I was standing waiting for the bus, and my arrival at the hotel, I lost my jacket, which I would later regret even more. On the plus side, the hotel, Grano de Oro, was beautiful, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a place to stay in San Jose. It was a small (35 room) hotel made from a converted house, with a nice (and delicious!) terraced patio restaurant inside, and a friendly, English-speaking staff. I was more than happy to settle in and catch some shut-eye.

03 July 2003
Thursday morning I had scheduled Interbus to drive me up to Monteverde. The reservation had warned me that I would be picked up a 7:45 AM, so I woke early and quickly ate a bagel at the restaurant so I would be prepared for their arrival. Unfortunately, 7:45 turned out to be more like 9, so I ended up sitting and waiting in the hotel lobby for over an hour.

The ride up was an experience in and of itself. I spent quite a bit of the trip talking with three other passengers, one named Guy, from New Jersey, and two others. The younger of the other two, probably a year or two younger than I, was down for in Costa Rica for a few weeks, spending time with a friend of his. He had joined up with the other two (Guy and the older… ummm… guy?) to accompany them on a birding trip to Monteverde. They were going to be up there until the older guy’s wife was finished with the church trip she had volunteered for.

The older guy had some interesting stories, too. It turns out that he actually grew up in Liberia, where his parents were a missionary before returning to the States when there was a coup, I believe back in the early 80s. Then he actually returned to Liberia for a number of years as well, where he raised his own family, before returning about 10 years ago to settle in Colorado. He was talking about riding their motorcycle with the whole family (himself, wife and three kids) over dirt and pot-holed roads, seeing oodles of nature, and generally growing up in a different culture.

In the meantime, we had headed off the main highway, which for those here in New Jersey would be like the equivalent of a county road in Hunterdon County, on to the dirt road that leads up to Monteverde. Our bus driver, a really friendly fellow that unfortunately spoke little English, would periodically wave and honk, particularly at the women we saw along the route. One of the other paxs remarked on this toward the end of the ride, saying that he thought this especially curious because he had thought that the woman sitting in the front seat next to him was his wife.

The hotel I stayed at in Monteverde was called the La Colina Lodge, owned, or at least operated, by a pleasant German woman whose name I couldn’t spell right, so I won’t try. She was more than happy to make any arrangements I required, which included the night tour that I took that evening. First, though, I settled in to my room and headed down the road to find some eats, which led me first to the Monteverde Cheese Factory, which has absolutely delicious ice cream (I came back here every day I was in Monteverde). I also stopped in Stella’s bakery for a sandwich before heading back to La Colina for the night tour. (Frommers has all the restaurants I ate at in the Monteverde area outside my hotel listed on-line).

The night tour, at Hidden Valley, took me through several trails over a two hour period with a flashlight and a guide. During this time, we saw a few agouti, rodent-like mammals, some sleeping brown jays, a leaf-cutter ant colony, a tarantula, a walking stick, and a variety of flora as well. After the night tour, I was taken back to my room, where by 9 PM or so, it was time to sleep.

I finished that crazy Consipiracy Theory book during my trip, and did you know that apparently what’s really happened is that on the 10th planet from the Sun, there’s a secret race that’s far more highly evolved than us who actually created the human species to serve as their slave race that couldn’t reproduce ourselves. We were used for mining minerals, since their only planet was lacking, but then as a result of a dispute between two of our masters we were given sexual reproduction. And from there, things just kept going. The facts are all there, apparently, to support this case. Evolution? Nope. Creationism? Not according to this author. A master alien race? The facts are in! And I’m supposed to take him seriously…?

In a turn to a more serious topic, I picked up a copy of Underground, by Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite Japanese authors. He interviewed a number of survivors from the Tokyo Gas attack and compiled them in to a fascinating book. Two passages in particular stand out, which I’ll quote here.

From Mitsuteru Izutsu:
The fact is, the very day of the gas attack I worked straight through at the office until 5:30. I didn’t feel weel enough to eat lunch, of course; had no appetite. I came out in a cold sweat, had chills, and everyone said I looked pale. If I’d actually collapsed I’d have packed it in and gone home, but since I wasn’t falling over or anything … Everyone was saying it’s probably hay fever. I’d just retunred from South America, so it could be some kind of allergic reaction, they said. But my eyes wouldn’t focus, my head ached.

I simply can’t imagine being exposed to Sarin gas, feeling as he did, and then putting in a full day of work…

And, from Toshiaki Toyodo:
I didn’t think I was going to die. I’ll bet even Takahaski [one of the two station attendants who initially cleaned up the Sarin gas] didn’t think he was going to die. After all, an ambulance was coming to take us to the hospital. I was more worried about my work, what I needed to do.

At this point, the speaker was foaming at the mouth, could barely breathe, was shaking uncontrollably, and couldn’t stand.

This all points to an aspect of the Japanese psyche I find incredible. The devotion that all these speakers feel to their work, such that, despite having been exposed to the Sarin, they were still more concerned with their work that they wouldn’t leave or that, even as they’re feeling extremely ill, it was foremost in their thoughts. I’m not all that sure that, had that happened here and I was in their place, I would feel the same set of concerns… This I actually find a fascinating example of the Japanese psyche.

I have to admit, while in Costa Rica I was wholly cut off from the news in the world. Coming back, though, and catching up with the news, a tidbit I heard from someone while traveling certainly appears to hold true. She informed me that a friend of hers had said that with the news media, for a story about non-American deaths to be picked up and “publized”, it takes 1,000 non-American deaths to be equated to 1 American.

So, in Iraq, any time a U.S. soldier was injured or killed, it becomes front-page material. During this time, though, how many Iraqis have been killed? Why isn’t that news-worthy too?

Is this just the beginning? Not that the White House appears worried at this point, since public opinion doesn’t apparently care whether they lied or not. I get the sense that many people are using this as a kind of surrogate revenge. After all, I’ve seen polls stating that a majority of Americans believe Saddam was personally responsible for the World Trade Center bombings.

Tonight I’ll (hopefully) post my Costa Rica writeup.

I am home from Costa Rica, where I had an amazing trip! More details will be posted soon!