To the Nicoya Peninsula, Sunday 2 July
The frontier posts on the Pan-American Highway are big and busy. Leaving Nicaragua is slow rather than difficult. Costa Rica is good-natured, although definitely slow. I carry photocopies of everything from the size of my belly button to the circumference of my ears. I meet a young Argentinian driving a white Dodge semi-sports car home. The Argentinian is less experienced. He knows neither the registration number of the Dodge engine nor where to find it. I enter customs behind him. He overtakes me on the highway some three-quarters of an hour later. Perhaps we will meet again, possibly in Panama.
I see no hovels as I speed down the Pan-American Highway. I note less refuse on the verge than in other Central American countries. The land is more cared for, big trees are left standing to protect the soil. And, yes, there is a feel more of organisation than of chaos. I turn south at Liberia towards the international airport. Miles of US-type hoardings advertise car hire and real estate. What is unreal estate?
A hardtop road leads to Samana – according to my four-year-old guidebook, a quaint little village on a safe beach. The village has become a resort and is crowded with Sunday coach trippers. More signs for real estate, for condominiums. The signs are in English. I take the coastal road down the Nicoya Peninsula. The road is dirt but good dirt. This is hill country, green and beautiful. White Brahmin cows graze paddocks. White walls and white entrance gates wall off the coast. Apparently condos in Costa Rica are vast gated communities as opposed to apartment blocks.
The dirt road twists between steep hills. Sunday afternoon and each village is in mid-football match. Beer is drunk in vast quantities. I stop for water and the barman insists on buying me cola. The cola has a strong taste of rum. A man chants rapidly into a mike round the back of the bar. His accent is strong. I catch a few numbers. Psalms? Verses from the Bible? And threats that this is the audience’s last chance, absolutely the last chance! That much I understand. Then more numbers.
I presume an evangelist preacher is denouncing the twin evils of football and inebriation.
I ride round the corner into a cattle auction.
The sun is setting. I have been riding for twelve hours and have reached that point of fatigue where making decisions becomes almost impossible. I spot a boutique hotel (so advertised) at an intersection. Boutique hotels make my wallet flinch.
I take the other road. It leads downhill. A second road bears a sign to a beach. I hear a bike behind me. I brake and turn to ask the driver’s advice on where I can find a comfortable and affordable bed. In that one moment of inattention the Honda slips. I lie beneath the Honda. The leather gaiter saves my leg from frying. One mirror is smashed.
Two men on the following bike lift the Honda free. A shard of mirror has sliced my right hand.
The bike riders insist I return to the boutique hotel for first-aid. One rides my bike; I sit pillion behind the other. The wound is washed. Blood spurts. A Costa Rican family in a Land Rover are newly arrived guests. The husband, an investment banker, drives me to the village of San Francisco Coyote. The owner of a local restaurant telephones the doctor. I wait in the restaurant and watch Al Pacino on TV in a gangster movie. Doctor and wife arrive. The wife wears a mini-miniskirt. Owners, staff and clientele of the restaurant watch while I am injected, scrubbed and sewn. I bleed more copiously than the actors in the movie. The audience is mine.
The doctor scrubs my wounds with the energy of a cleaning woman scrubbing a dirty bath.
I don’t like to watch.
Where else to look?
Look up and I confront an audience as eager for gore as aficionados at a bullfight.
Look down and I confront the delightful thighs of the doctor’s wife. The doctor may be enraged.
Such are the dilemmas of the walking wounded.
I have eleven stitches in my hand. I have lost blood. I need a comfortable bed. And I must grab the opportunity to talk with a Costa Rican in the upper echelons of the country’s professional classes. The bikers have brought my bike to the village and parked it behind the general store. A villager gives me a lift in his pickup to the boutique hotel. The banker family are the only guests. Orchids abound. Quiet is an understatement. Imagine a non-denominational chapel in an upmarket funeral parlour.
The manageress is from the Philippines. Her accent is familiar to me from past travels in Asia, as is the gentleness in her voice and the soft uh-huh of agreement with which she answers my arguments. I negotiate the room rate down from 120 dollars to eighty. Breakfast is included. So is an acre of stone floor, an emperor-sized bed and a bathroom for sybarites.
I don’t eat dinner. The banker and his wife join me in the lounge once their children are in bed. They have worked in London, which they loved (or they are polite), and in Miami, which they hated for the domination of the new-rich Cubans whom they found ostentatious and vulgar. The banker visits Cuba regularly on business – bearable, he says, for three or four days. He can pretend he is a tourist and ignore the reality that Cubans suffer: poverty, lack of freedom.
The rash of condominiums on the peninsula is another hate. Prices will double once the coast road is tarred (paid for by the Costa Rican taxpayer). Already Costa Ricans, even of their financial bracket, are priced out of the market in their own country. They have been forced to reassess their view of themselves. Costa Ricans had considered themselves different from other Latin Americans, more advanced, more cultured, more organised, more on a par with the United States with whom they were natural allies.
Only a few years ago they would have identified with the US team in the World Cup, and yet now the banker’s friends celebrated when the US was eliminated.
The Iraq war has changed their perceptions of the United States (I quote the banker). Access to satellite TV has forced open their eyes. They watch bombs and shells fall. They watch American soldiers abusing Arabs. The US did the same in Panama, killed hundreds in the desire to grab one man. The lives of Arabs and Latin Americans are of no importance.
What I write will be offensive and hurtful to my daughter and to my American friends. Should I act as censor or write what I am told?
Or am I goaded by guilt at having remained silent at the Dallas breakfast?
Thunder smashes me awake. Disoriented, I lie shivering with cold. Lightning shows a picture window, terrace, trees bent under a silver downpour. The cold is air-conditioning. I stagger to the windows and out to the room’s private terrace. I arrived after nightfall and am unprepared for my surroundings. The hotel is on a ridge. Lightning displays black waters of a river below the terrace. An animal shrieks. Thunder shakes the terrace. Trees quake beneath a squall. Fresh sheets of lightning appear to dazzle, and I see, through the rain, surf break across the mouth of the river. This is a Conrad vision. I creep back to bed and curl into a foetal ball beneath the goose-down duvet.
San Francisco Coyote, Monday 3 July
The curtains are open to the terrace. I wake at dawn. My watch broke in yesterday’s fall. No matter, this is too beautiful a time and place for bed. I tiptoe out to the pool terrace and see the river clearly for the first time, waters brown in spate. Two curls of chocolate sand mark the corners of its mouth. Palm trees hide the beach. I sit alone by the pool and watch surf break, three white lines. A howler monkey hollers back in the trees. Birds chatter noisily. The tide shifts a flock of pelicans off the sand. Clumsy on the ground, they are wonderfully graceful as they glide upriver into the trees. I watch a pale-yellow butterfly. Workers arrive to mend storm damage, to collect broken branches. They work in silence. The Filipina manager presents me with a steaming mug of black coffee. I have been up an hour. It is six o’clock.
The hotel and the doctor have absorbed my cash. I don’t carry credit cards. I require a bank and an ATM.
The hotel is on a vast ranch owned by an American billionaire. He has owned the ranch for thirty years. He flies in from his home in Hawaii on his private jet each month for a few days. The hotel is a recent hobby (its losses are tax-deductible).
The river is high after the storm. The farm manager drives me by pickup to the river ford. I cross the footbridge and walk two kilometres to the village of San Francisco Coyote. I find a mechanic to overhaul the bike. He directs me to a parts shop, where I find replacement mirrors – genuine Honda parts in a community served by two general stores and a kiosk selling cheap jeans and T-shirts.
The nearest bank is in the town of Jicaral, thirty-three kilometres down a dirt road. The bus journey takes two hours.
The doctor instructed me to rest my hand for three days – no riding the bike. I am settled into a cabin behind one of the two general stores in the village of San Francisco Coyote. I have a bathroom and a fan. The shower works. The bed is comfortable.
Two Costa Rican businessmen and their families occupy the remaining three cabins for the night. The men are brothers. They are accustomed to greater luxury. They complain that they were double-booked into a rental home in one of the condominiums for the first night of the school vacation.
A Dutchman with a development on a hillside beyond the boutique hotel has ridden my bags over from the hotel on his quad-bike. Bush telegraph alerted him to my accident and he drops by the general store to check who I am and whether I am OK.
I eat an early dinner after the near three-hour ride back from visiting the bank in Jicaral town in a retired US school bus. I order steak and am faced with two thick chunks of meat each the size of my shoe soles: salad, fries, fried bananas, two beers. Four dollars is not excessive. The restaurant belongs to the storekeeper.
A terrace at the front of the store shades a bar and four teak tables and benches. I sit after dinner with the storekeeper and a twenty-something university graduate. The storekeeper talks philosophy. What is the route to happiness? Do I believe in a god, an afterlife? Would I prefer coffee or another beer?
‘Black coffee would be just fine,’ I say.
I also say that I would prefer a night in his cabins than a week preparing for death in the funeral parlour atmosphere of the boutique hotel.
I talk with the two brothers of the holidaying family over breakfast. The elder brother complains of foreigners owning all the best land in Costa Rica. Neither brother cares much for foreigners. Foreigners corrupt Costa Rican society. They breed prostitution and spread their drug culture. The elder brother is a fan of the Somoza years.
‘There was no crime,’ he tells me (not mentioning that the Somozas and their cronies stole the entire country and murdered anyone who argued). ‘The roads were properly maintained,’ he states. ‘Under Somoza, we had thousands of road workers. There was work for everyone.’
He is also a fan of Castro. ‘There’s no crime in Cuba.’
Unless depriving a people of their freedom is a crime.
Clearly his father was of the privileged class in the years of the dictatorship.
I am here to report, not to argue. I nod politely.
Village life is fun (for me). I watch the comings and goings from a bench outside the store. The under-forties are on wheels, two or four, and mostly motorised. The elders are on horseback. A reasonable horse costs eighty dollars. Add saddle and bridle and you are mobile for 150 dollars. Fuel grows on the roadside.
Most have heard of my accident. I field a stream of enquiries as to how I am and whether it is true that I intend riding to Argentina. A trio from a turtle-protection group drop by to chat. One is from Mexico. They collect eggs and take them to a hatchery. They launch the baby turtles into the sea. Shrimp boats work a mile offshore. Shrimping is the preserve of the Taiwanese. The shrimp nets sweep up the baby turtles along with the shrimps and about everything else.
A public telephone is attached to a post at the intersection outside the general store. The female half of a pair of young blond foreign lovers talks at length. The male half hovers. She retreats to the tree that shades the post – seeking a privacy of which he is nervous.
Two tin placards are nailed to the fence posts. The notice on the left advertises LA NACIÓN SE VENDE AQUI – The Nation (a newspaper) for sale here. The second placard advertises Coca-Cola. The coincidence of the juxtaposition amuses me.
A plump young woman in tight short shorts and a stretched pink top that almost covers the bits she wants covered is a pinball addict. She rides up every half-hour or so on a pushbike to play the left-hand machine of the two in the bar area of the store.
The Dutchman arrives on his quad bike. The storekeeper’s wife invites us to lunch in the kitchen – delicious vegetables of which I recognise baby okra and green beans.
The Dutchman drives me over to see his property. The land stretches up a hillside. The top section is reserved for wildlife. The lower slope is divided into one-hectare lots. Most of those he and his partners wish to sell are already sold. The rate around here is eight dollars a square metre and you can have a good three-bed, two-bath house built for 50 000 dollars.
The houses are set well back among trees on the Dutchman’s land and are invisible from the road. The Dutchman has lived here for the past fifteen years and tends the houses and oversees new construction. We drive down to his neighbourhood restaurant a hundred metres up the road from Coyote beach. The beach is four kilometres long and is divided by the river. At low tide, you can wade across the mouth of the river. There are no buildings on the beach.
We each eat a fried snapper caught that day and drink a few beers. Six to be exact.
The benches outside the store are a fine place for chat. My companion this evening is an economics student in his final semester. He is a fan of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. He and his sister are students at the country’s premier state university. Away from home, they rent an apartment for 200 dollars a month. Their parents are comfortable financially. Poorer kids share a room or a cupboard. Even this sacrifice is well beyond most budgets.
The student is responsible for his younger sister – difficult on occasion. He and his friends take little interest in politics. National politics are too corrupt. Two ex-presidents are in jail. He is angered by the sale of Costa Rica’s coasts to foreigners. As for foreign affairs, Costa Rica is little more than a US colony. The US does what it likes in Central America. Look what it did in Panama. And what it is doing in Iraq. The US invasions of Iraq and of Panama are the same, except in scale.
On to San José, Wednesday 5 July
Guidebooks warn of the usual dangers to be encountered in San José, capital of Costa Rica: robbery, rape, pillage. San Francisco Coyote was a pleasure. I leave with regret. We had heavy rain in the night. The dirt road across the Nicoya Peninsula is slippery. I wear leather work gloves bought at the hardware store in Jicaral and I pay great attention to the road. The final few kilometres along the coast to the ferry are cratered hardtop. I stop at a café on the hill down to the ferry terminal. I rest my butt on a comfortable chair and prepare for a peaceful breakfast and a cup of good coffee. All hell breaks loose. Hells Angels! Or a wild bunch of late-thirties reliving their adolescence. They come armed with trail bikes. They work the throttles, brrrrm, brrrrm …
They are connected through college or work or accident. Most are from the States, although one is a Brit, one from Peru and one a Nicaraguan with whom I talk on the ninety-minute ferry crossing.
The Nicaraguan’s field is telecommunications. He was based for twelve years in the US and travelled widely for his employers – Africa, Latin America, Europe. Marriage and two small children persuaded him to give up the travelling. Back home in Nicaragua he has his own business in telecommunications. He is a pro and doing well. He is nervous of the coming elections. Political memory has a ten-year lifespan. The electorate have forgotten the misery they suffered under the Sandinistas. They will forget or forgive the thievery and corruption of Ortega. Many will vote for the anti-American Ortega as a snub to the despised Bush. Others will believe the socialist dream. Nicaragua will suffer a new period of chaos and economic ruin.
He talks bitterly of Europeans falling for the romantic image of the Sandinistas, of deliberately ignoring the truth.
In reporting his beliefs, I will earn the ire of many broadly to the left of the political divide. My reports of those critical of the US will have earned the ire of those on the right. All in all, I am doing well …
I ride up over mountains to San José through coffee plantations and past suburban mansions with trim lawns and big gates. The gates of the wealthy are less guarded than in other Central American countries.
I am nervous of riding in capital cities and seek a hotel on the outskirts. I have been warned by ex-pats in Nicaragua that San José is unsafe. I stop at the roadside to enquire of locals. They tell me ‘Nonsense!’ and advise that hotels in the city centre are cheaper and there is more choice.
I consult my guidebook and decide that, for once, I should experience a backpackers’ hangout. The city is easy to navigate. The hostel is on Avenida 6. I request directions only twice. A tiny room with a fan and a window to a corridor sets me back twenty-two dollars. This is an English-speaking haven – even the few French are attempting English. I sit in the caféteria with a young English woman, arrived this evening from the UK. She is a conservationist and will work for six weeks on the Caribbean coast as a volunteer before flying to Peru to join a tour of the Inca Trail and so on down across the salt lakes of Bolivia, Chile and the Argentine, to where?
Where would any sensible English woman head?
Tierra del Fuego!
We check our emails and head to our respective beds.
A birthday party is under way at the small swimming pool in the central patio. Most of the celebrants are Brits. Latins, and we would hear music, a few good voices. With these Brits, simply being noisy appears a high priority.
To the Caribbean, Thursday 6 July
I rise at dawn and discover girls curled in armchairs and on benches. I write that they are girls because they seem too young to be described as women and I worry that ‘lasses’ is too old-fashioned a word even for this old fogey
The noise has gone out of them, the group spirit has evaporated. Isolated one from another, they appear very young and pale and vulnerable and waif-like. A boy and a girl are in the pool fishing for pieces of a smashed wine glass. The boy has found a mug broken in two. A wet packet of cigarettes lies on a table. Two of the cigarettes have rolled onto the wet tiles.
I overhear the girl say, ‘It was probably my fucking fault.’
The word seems particularly ugly at this hour, almost desperate, and I wish that comforting her was possible.
They leave the pool while I surrender my key and retrieve my deposit. I pass the pool on my way to pack the Honda in the rear courtyard. The kids have left the two cigarettes on the tiles. I pick them up. They melt in my palm while I seek a bin.
I wear two shirts and my windcheater for the ride up over the mountains this morning. Slopes are swathed in netting. Something called helecho grows beneath the netting – a new word.
I stop for breakfast at a proper roadhouse with a spectacular view. I have time to drink one mug of coffee before the Christians arrive. They refer to themselves as a family and travel in three Toyota Coasters. They belong to a church in Detroit and have been on a mission trip here in Costa Rica and now are enjoying well-earned R&R. Most are in their late teens. They are accompanied by an interpreter and I learn that helecho is a fern – exports to garden centres.
An adult woman and two teens join me at a window table. I recount discovering the English martyrs, familiars of my childhood, memorialised on the chapel wall in Oaxaca. The teen daughter asks what I write. I reply that I write about people acting under pressure. I suggest that church education prepares us to resist pressure (I am doing well).
I mention a simile I care for: that we are born on the platform of a child’s slide; once we put our foot on the slide, how far we slip is a matter of chance (I am still doing well); there is no fundamental difference between Eichmann and the person who merely makes anti-Semitic remarks (not so good – not good at all).
I am unfamiliar with the religious sects of the United States. I forget that many hold curious and, to Europeans, unpleasant views on those they refer to as ‘those Jewish people’.
The lady excuses herself. She has matters to attend to. Her children follow. To my left, a volcano wears a cap and shawl.
The highway twists down through the mountains towards the Caribbean. Roadwork backs up the traffic for a couple of kilometres. I creep past the queue. A worker holding a red flag asks where I am going. I tell him. He waves me through and tells me, ‘Good luck, old man, and take care.’
So many people have wished me luck, people imprisoned by lives of constant struggle; people who have never sampled liberty of choice in what they do: La lucha, la lucha. Along comes a fat old man on a small bike and they dream for a moment. If the old man can, then maybe, maybe some day, just maybe …
And I, as I ride on, am immensely grateful and proud – proud that I am, if only for a moment, part of a dream. Failure would be to betray all those well-wishers.
I reach the littoral. Central America is coffee, sugar and bananas. This is banana country, warm and humid. A straight road with broad grass verges trimmed and planted with bougainvillea divides endless rows of banana trees. A pale-blue plastic sack protects each bunch of bananas. An image arises of movie cold stores where Mafia hoodlums hang corpses among the beef carcasses.
I stop for coffee and a bottle of cold water at a roadside stall and pack away the two shirts and windcheater. The next turn on the left leads to the offices of the second-biggest independent banana plantation. Dole (US) is the biggest independent. So much I learn after an hour’s wait to meet with the plantation manager. He manages 4000 hectares. Count the packing sheds, maintenance workshops, drivers and office staff, and the plantation employs over 300 people.
The offices are neat and freshly painted, clipped hedges border the drive. Obsessive, I notice a loose light fitting.
A further forty kilometres brings me to Puerto Limón. I treat myself to a fine room on the second floor at the Hotel Miami: air-con, hot water, cable TV. The internet café round the corner has air-con; connecting the laptop is easy and I download a week’s photographs from my camera. Work done, I walk the streets.
I am trespassing on the grave of the United Fruit Company. Puerto Limón was once a Company town. At the Hotel Miami, a photograph (circa 1902) of United Fruit’s weatherboard headquarters shares wall space with two photographs of banana boats of the same period loading alongside United Fruit’s wharf.
In those days, Limón had the same by-laws as Morales in Guatemala. Native locals were obliged to step off the pavement when encountering a white Company official.
Limón’s waterfront is a relic of regal glory. I stroll at night along the pavement below the seawall. Loving couples share the wall with family groups. I pass a clump of oldies trying to recall their recollections. Five kids kicking a ball give me a ‘Hi!’ and a grin. Five elderly men are recording a local radio programme at a table in the town’s smartest hotel. I sit at the bar, drink a beer, chat with the manageress. A designer enters to show the manageress the logo for this year’s October carnival – a mundane young gnome. I dine at a Chinese restaurant on wonton soup.
Limón, Friday 7 July
Today is a day of rest. I sleep late and rise to a view from my window of the Caribbean – not the Caribbean Sea, but a Caribbean population. In riding south through Central America, I haven’t been aware of race. People were Honduran or Nicaraguan or Costa Rican. Although some were a little darker or a little paler of skin, there was no discernible division. Now I dress and cross the street for breakfast at a Latino-owned comedor. The two women who take my dirty laundry under a steel grill are palely Caucasian. I have run out of business cards; the printers are Afro-Caribbean women. An Afro-Caribbean bootblack polishes my shoes. I note that truck drivers are mostly Latino. Latinos run small stores, small businesses and restaurants. Owners of the few big stores and businesses are Chinese, Lebanese or Syrian. Street sweepers are black, as are the drivers of the swankiest cars.