Sad News San Jose and back on the road

Trying to do a little catch up job, I also put a large blog up yesterday about Stewart's backpack getting stolen and then fishing in Jacó Costa Rica, so if you get a chance to read down you should check it out as well. If you have any advice for ways to better this blog, please just drop a comment down at the bottom. I have been getting a few spam comments with links saying "see here," advertising some computer programs, so please ignore this and don’t click the link because that will just make them keep spamming me. I don't know whether I should be flattered that I’ve gotten enough hits to warrant spamming, or pissed off?

While traveling it seems as though just when you think that you have seen it all, something comes along that blows your mind and changes your opinion of what different countries are like. This is particularly true in Latin America where randomness seems to be the norm, and it happened to me again that night in Jacó.

After a day of fishing, we decided that we would take a stroll around the city to admire some of the night life and see what this supposed party town was all about. I didn't fully understand the way that tourism, money, and irresponsible travelers had perverted the small economy of this town until walking down the street on the way to the bar. In the 200 yard stretch from our hotel to the bar at 9:00 pm in the evening, I was literally offered "weed, cocaine" or "ganja and white" no less than 10 times. Kids on bicycles no older than 13, old men sitting in the alleys, 30 year old street thugs, and plastic prostitutes all wanted to sell you drugs. This continued throughout the night and even in the morning as I went out to buy a cup of coffee; the drug dealers were on every corner in this supposedly safe city. You felt like you were being watched everywhere you went by the sunken eyes of addicts amidst an underworld of depravity. Everyone around just wanted to use you, and they saw you as only one thing: a meal ticket or another potential way to get their fix. The real true disturbing thing about the whole sub-culture is that its entire existence is due to white travelers like myself. And the more tourists that come in search of a good time continue to propagate and support it even today; simple irresponsibility does not do justice to how their actions destroy the people of this town.

The night only got better, for the next bar we went to was called "The Beetle Bar." It was a bar about 50 feet wide and 200 feet deep blaring loud reggaeton over the speakers while colored lights flashed off of mirrors and faux black leather seats with chrome edges in a dimly lit scene. There were maybe 20 other white men like ourselves, 20 local looking Costa Ricans, and no less than 150 girls in short colored plastic mini skirts with small skimpy tops. Every SINGLE one was a prostitute, and each one of them walked past you like a starving animal digging for trash, trying to get their own fix or next piece of food. We decided we had seen enough and high-tailed it back to the hotel for bed.

After a day of surfing and play on the Jacó beach, we got on the 3:00 pm bus headed back to San José. Craig had a flight to catch taking him back to his job in Birmingham, thereby ending our week of Costa Rican adventure. Craig made his 7:00 am flight and it was back to just Stewart and I for the remainder of the trip. While we regrouped for a few days, we had a chance to stay in possibly the nicest hostel in San Jose, located in a quiet neighborhood east of the city with embassies and universities. Called Bekuo, this place had their own wine list, a Japanese styled meditation garden complete with stone sculptures, all the cable TV, billiards, a huge California style kitchen, and furniture straight out of Ikea.

I did some blogging and Stewart went to the Embassy that day to get a new passport, but came back with some bad news. He could have gotten an emergency passport that day, but it only works to leave the country, and would not have been nearly sufficient for the trip to come. The real passport was going to take 10 business days (over 2 weeks at the time) and cost 100 dollars. He opted for the real passport, which meant we were both going to be stuck in Costa Rica for two weeks, with precious little time left after we had waited longer in Panama for Craig to get into Costa Rica. That night he also did some budget crunching and realized that he didn’t have the money to finish the trip all the way back to the US like he had originally planned. On top of this, taking buses all the way back the US from here would have cost more than a plane flight out of San José, and possibly taken 8 days. So... Stewart bought a plane ticket directly out of San José bound for the US in two weeks after he got his passport.

I was left with two options: stay in Costa Rica with Stewart for two weeks while he waited for his passport and then book it north, or split then and head north on my own, making my way through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico solo. I wanted to finish the trip that I had started, and see all of the countries standing between me and the motherland. So Stewart and I said our goodbyes, I gave him 20 pounds of stuff from my backpack I didn’t need, promised to write, and I boarded a bus headed north out of San José towards Los Chiles, a small town on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

I was about 2 parts excited, 2 parts apprehensive and 1 part sad to leave Stewart for the open road of Central America.

Traveling solo is an entirely different animal than traveling with another person, family, partner, or tour group; not wholly better or worse, just very, very, different. The traveler is forced to interact and engage the local population and other travelers; when they go to eat, sit on a bus, hang out at a Hostel, walk on the street, or take a boat, their solitude makes them a natural target for the conversational hooks of others. The isolation also works to make most travelers more outgoing simply to have basic conversations, to tell someone about the places they have been and things they have seen. The judgment of foreign culture becomes an entirely different process, because all of a sudden you don't have someone to bounce your ideas off, or another presence to enforce the social norms of home. It is the traveler and the traveler alone who will decide how to perceive the new and strange. It is a more impulsive friendly type of traveling, because of a total lack of discussion about where the next stop will be. I have spent hundreds of hours discussing new potential places with Stewart and other people I have traveled with, weighing pros and cons, but now I can simply pick up and go when the wind blows too strong on my back. Then there is the obvious potential for loneliness and fondness for home, without that other traveler to hold up the reminder of familiar and comforting culture. In that sense it is a purer and more enriching type of traveling, no easy retreat to the known and familiar.

Staying in hostels makes the trip easier, despite the sometimes horrid conditions, because of the other young travelers from mostly western nations who you meet. With them you can have a good civilized English conversation, or go out to eat at a restaurant without having to bring a book. All of the travelers have different stories, but most are decently educated, interested in broadening their horizons, seeing the world, and having a good time. There are also more of these than you think in every corner of the Latin American world.

I headed out on a 5:30 am "express" bus to the hot humid border town of Los Chiles Costa Rica. I say "express" because that is what was advertised, but I have found that no bus is express unless all of the seats, and aisles, are jam packed full of people so that the driver can make as much money as possible. For 6 hours while headed north, the bus would stop every 2-5 minutes to pick someone up or drop them off. The trip could easily be made in 4 hours in a car, but would have cost a good deal more than the 3 dollars I paid for the bus. We got into Los Chiles just before noon and I found a nice comfortable place with air conditioning where I could veg out for the day and wait to catch a small boat up the Rio Frio to Nicaragua the next day.

Los Chiles was a remarkable little town out on the vast tropical plains that are northern Costa Rica, a border town with character which was a first for me. The giant nicely paved and marked road that had taken us all the way from San José to here ended about 6 miles north of the town at the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Despite the beautiful condition of the massive highway built all the way to the border, the Tico government refused to let anyone cross to Nicaragua by land here. Go figure? I mean this road is like only 10 years old, equipped with mile markers, roadside telephones, giant concrete gutters, and reflective lane markers. It is the Rolex of roads for Costa Rica. The last 6 miles sit completely unused, servicing the border guards and 20 so family farms, out in the middle of the hot sun like the vestige of a once great power (I ran to the border for some exercise is how I know that no one uses it).

Los Chiles is home to another testament from the past as well, for just east of the town is a 5,000 foot concrete runway (Google Earth it, it’s longer than the whole town itself!). Some might ask, now why would a town of 3,000 need a 5,000 foot concrete runway? The answer is that they don’t! This is a secrete runway built by the CIA in the 1970's to provide air support for the Contras fighting a civil war in Nicaragua that they ultimately lost. For the art majors out there, google "Iran-Contra affair."

This was my first night out of San José and alone in a dusty, hot border town with not another gringo in site. It was good. It was real good. Los Chiles reminded me of how I love small towns when I'm traveling down here. There are usually only 2 or 3 basic cheap options to choose from for a hotel, maybe 7 different places to eat, and 1 or 2 bars that are open at night. It really takes a lot of the guess work out of trying to decide where to stay or eat, and you can be content that everything is pretty much the same. It is also hard to get lost, because there might be 8 blocks combined in the whole town. The people stare at you because they haven't seen a gringo in a while, which is fine and helps to remind you that you are somewhere authentic by Costa Rican standards.

Los Chiles is a town of wide dusty dirt roads, and a town square that is actually a giant dry crunchy soccer field. Different groups of men and children were sitting underneath the various trees that lined the sides of the soccer field, not in a hurry to do much besides sit there and try to avoid the heat in the middle of the day while catching up on idle conversation. The kids would scream "HELLO" while riding by on their bikes and then quickly hurry away giggling to their friends. You could tell that everyone in town knew everybody else, and it had been that way for a hundred years. The town had one church, which doubled as the town's only school and faced the giant soccer field in the center. One to two story buildings in various states of repair/construction surround the soccer field, selling clothes, pots, pans, and just about anything they could get their hands on. There was a sign advertising Internet, but upon inquiring I found out that it wasn’t working: They said: “Come to think of it, we haven’t had internet for over 2 months now.” I said “Oh that’s swell, how’s business?” They said, “Well, now that you mention it, it has been a little slow.” Go figure? Nothing moved fast in Los Chiles...

The next day I woke up, went for a run, and hit up the customs office literally right across from the hotel where I was staying. If you think that a 6’ gringo is a site to be seen in a remote border town in the northern portion of Costa Rica, you are right, and I got many merit worthy stares to compliment this fact. Now imagine a 6’ 3” gringo wearing only his bathing suit and a pair of tennis shoes, blinding passersbys with his paleness, covered in sweat, and running down the street in the middle of town. Now THAT is a site to see, and every single other townsperson agreed. I no longer have any shame in Central America. I have decided that I am going to run every day until I get back to the US to give my constantly changing environment some regularity.

After getting my passport stamped in Costa Rica, I asked the border official what time the boat left for San Carlos, Nicaragua, my first stop in the next country. He replied, “When it’s full.” Great. After much prying, I finally convinced the boat company to give me a time, and they said not before Noon. Now I at least had 4 hours where I knew that the only boat for the day wouldn’t leave me!

I headed down to the boat docks about noon and boarded a 5 foot wide, 40 foot long fiberglass excuse for a boat that was going to take me 1 ½ hours up the Río Frio to Nicaragua and the small mosquito infested port town of San Carlos where I would sit for another day and wait for the bi-weekly ferry to the volcano island of Ometepe in the giant fresh water lake Nicaragua.

It turns out that boat drivers are a lot like bus drivers, and the more people they can fit on their boat, the better. This is disconcerting for obvious reasons, but I still got on the boat amidst the sacks of fruit, TVs, chickens, clothes, and dogs that people were taking to San Carlos to hock. The boat drafted maybe a foot before we loaded on, and after the 60 or so people, countless giant bags of god knows what, and livestock were on, we were drafting at least 4 feet, or 6 inches from top of the sides where I was sitting. I looked up, I had a life vest, I hoped to god I wouldn’t have to use it and loose all my electronics. The river and Lake Nicaragua were also home to the worlds only fresh water shark, a type of bull shark that migrates seasonally from the Caribbean up the same tiny river we were on and into Lake Nicaragua. This was also another good reason not to fall in the water!

Somehow the 300 pound man that was steering us down the river with a 60 horsepower motor skillfully glided the boat away from the dock and out onto the dark muddy river without getting any water in the boat. I could tell that he had done this before. Slowly we puttered down the narrow 50 yard wide river while exotic birds and monkeys played in the giant trees leaning over the banks. I was very much in the heart of the Nicaraguan jungle, and loving every minute despite the threat of capsizing. About halfway up river, the driver instructed us to all put on our life vests, which initially got me worried, until I realized that we were simply passing the guard shack at the Nicaraguan border, and there was a law in Nicaragua that you had to have life vests.

I knew that we had changed countries immediately upon staring at the guards standing on the 30 foot tall banks over the side of the river. Their guard shack was on stilts, and completely covered in camouflaged paint with camouflage plastic cloth pulled out from all sides, like they were hiding from planes. What? Were they at war? All 20 guards were decked out in complete camouflaged fatigues and each had a sub machine gun slung around their shoulder with their hand on the trigger, and the barrel pointed a little close for comfort towards the boat. The boat captain handed him our passenger manifest and sure as rain we were back on the river, able to take off our life vests (I didn’t).

One hour later the river slowly widened until the banks retreated behind us, and we entered Lake Nicaragua! Spread out like an ocean in all directions, the sun was just beginning to set and I could have sworn we were anywhere but on a giant lake in the middle of Central America. The waves picked up, and the last few treacherous kilometers to San Carlos were not easy ones.

They are fixing to turn the internet off where I am working (Nicaragua suffers from frequent and long power outages and right now I am on a generator), so I’ve got to go, but if I get some time this evening I will tell you about San Carlos, a small town on the southeastern tip of Lake Nicaragua.

Travel Safe!

Merrill