Let me explain my recent love affair with a country in which I have about as much knowledge and experience as I do with life on Mars.
In what feels like nearly a lifetime ago, a cruise I was on with my future wife (Lisa) had Puerto Limon as a day-long destination where one would get to experience the lush beauty and ecological paradise that is Costa Rica. From a distance, the shoreline was lined with palms and the landscape was reminiscent of the Hawaiian coast. It was mainly tropical forests, covered by hilly terrain formed by volcanic explosions and rain erosion. But as the port came into sight, Costa Rica began to look more like the Port of Houston than a trading destination for the yellow fruit for which it was named after. Knowing of the monstrous mark-ups charged by cruise lines for booking tours through the ship, we decided to see if there was anything to do in port. In most cruise ports, one can book the same tours offered in the Lido Theater, for a third to a half of what you can get them for booking them directly from the tour operators in port. An added bonus is that if you are lucky, you might even be able to escape the geriatric crowd that you've dined, gambled, sang Karaoke with and probably lost the Most Sexy Passenger Pageant to. Our best thought out plans backfired when we disembarked to a pier that was so long that it required a tram to bring us to the gates of the maritime seaport. Once out the gates, there were no tour guides, no shops geared to tourists and really, very few taxis. Many of the residences were gated and lined with barbed wire. For a moment, I pondered the possibility that we accidentally docked in Guantanamo Bay. Well, being the brave souls that we were, we decided to walk into town. It was probably about 11am and the short walk to civilization left us sweaty and hot. Ideally, we would find a coffee shop with wifi. Instead we found a tiny room with air conditioning and computer terminals you could surf the internet with, but the keyboards were in Spanish as was the language which the kid who ran the joint spoke. On the bright side, the air conditioning was excellent and the small computers were pretty fast. Not really understanding the currency, the price of 1,000 Colones an hour sounded awfully expensive, so the first site I Googled (or was it Alta Vista'd back then) was a currency convertor where the cost worked out to a little over $1 per hour. Heck, Lisa and I could each rent our own terminals, for the entire day for that matter which is pretty much what we did. The ship's internet worked out to a rate that was probably around four or five thousand times that (of which we would never pay), so we were super happy at our find. And who cares if our memories of Costa Rica amounted to high-speed internet at a very low cost. Until we returned home a week later and discovered all of the site passwords we visited at that internet shack were hacked by a Costa Rican at an IP address that lead to Puerto Limon.
A few years later we were on another cruise. This time the Costa Rican port of call was very different. The pier was much shorter, the terrain was flatter and there was even a sandy beach which stretched for quite a distance. Though the sand was more the color of mud and quite honestly, the water did not look terribly clean or inviting. So we decided to take a walk around the port and this time didn't make the mistake of surfing the internet for the day. Instead a local tried to sell us on a personal tour, to which we instead offered to buy him a beer (and eventually lunch) in exchange for answering our many questions about the country where all of the residents lived in homes that more closely resembled jails than the residences we were accustomed to seeing all across Central America. This was also the first time we were introduced to Imperial Beer.
Disregard the scary Third-Reich eagle logo! It's extremely drinkable and won't make you goose-step. As we compared and contrasted living in America with living in Costa Rica, we were blown away by stories of incredibly inexpensive homes with annual property taxes that amounted to what I paid to park my car for a month at my local train station. He also talked of the wonderful healthcare that was easily a fifth of what we pay for here in the states. When we told him we paid $15,000 a year property taxes on our .17 of an acre lot in New Jersey for a house that was approaching a century in age, he nearly fell off his chair. Heck, his income didn't even reach half that amount. But even after hearing about all of these amazingly cheap opportunities this country offered, I was still not enamored by it. Mainly because much of what I had seen of the country was an industrial seaport and a gated and barbed-wire strewn ghetto. Pura Vida? Pura mierda from this Gringo's perspective. I think I'll stick with Mexico for my international vacationing dollars going forward. Now if they could only get control over their trinket solicitors...
In what feels like nearly a lifetime ago, a cruise I was on with my future wife (Lisa) had Puerto Limon as a day-long destination where one would get to experience the lush beauty and ecological paradise that is Costa Rica. From a distance, the shoreline was lined with palms and the landscape was reminiscent of the Hawaiian coast. It was mainly tropical forests, covered by hilly terrain formed by volcanic explosions and rain erosion. But as the port came into sight, Costa Rica began to look more like the Port of Houston than a trading destination for the yellow fruit for which it was named after. Knowing of the monstrous mark-ups charged by cruise lines for booking tours through the ship, we decided to see if there was anything to do in port. In most cruise ports, one can book the same tours offered in the Lido Theater, for a third to a half of what you can get them for booking them directly from the tour operators in port. An added bonus is that if you are lucky, you might even be able to escape the geriatric crowd that you've dined, gambled, sang Karaoke with and probably lost the Most Sexy Passenger Pageant to. Our best thought out plans backfired when we disembarked to a pier that was so long that it required a tram to bring us to the gates of the maritime seaport. Once out the gates, there were no tour guides, no shops geared to tourists and really, very few taxis. Many of the residences were gated and lined with barbed wire. For a moment, I pondered the possibility that we accidentally docked in Guantanamo Bay. Well, being the brave souls that we were, we decided to walk into town. It was probably about 11am and the short walk to civilization left us sweaty and hot. Ideally, we would find a coffee shop with wifi. Instead we found a tiny room with air conditioning and computer terminals you could surf the internet with, but the keyboards were in Spanish as was the language which the kid who ran the joint spoke. On the bright side, the air conditioning was excellent and the small computers were pretty fast. Not really understanding the currency, the price of 1,000 Colones an hour sounded awfully expensive, so the first site I Googled (or was it Alta Vista'd back then) was a currency convertor where the cost worked out to a little over $1 per hour. Heck, Lisa and I could each rent our own terminals, for the entire day for that matter which is pretty much what we did. The ship's internet worked out to a rate that was probably around four or five thousand times that (of which we would never pay), so we were super happy at our find. And who cares if our memories of Costa Rica amounted to high-speed internet at a very low cost. Until we returned home a week later and discovered all of the site passwords we visited at that internet shack were hacked by a Costa Rican at an IP address that lead to Puerto Limon.
A few years later we were on another cruise. This time the Costa Rican port of call was very different. The pier was much shorter, the terrain was flatter and there was even a sandy beach which stretched for quite a distance. Though the sand was more the color of mud and quite honestly, the water did not look terribly clean or inviting. So we decided to take a walk around the port and this time didn't make the mistake of surfing the internet for the day. Instead a local tried to sell us on a personal tour, to which we instead offered to buy him a beer (and eventually lunch) in exchange for answering our many questions about the country where all of the residents lived in homes that more closely resembled jails than the residences we were accustomed to seeing all across Central America. This was also the first time we were introduced to Imperial Beer.
Disregard the scary Third-Reich eagle logo! It's extremely drinkable and won't make you goose-step. As we compared and contrasted living in America with living in Costa Rica, we were blown away by stories of incredibly inexpensive homes with annual property taxes that amounted to what I paid to park my car for a month at my local train station. He also talked of the wonderful healthcare that was easily a fifth of what we pay for here in the states. When we told him we paid $15,000 a year property taxes on our .17 of an acre lot in New Jersey for a house that was approaching a century in age, he nearly fell off his chair. Heck, his income didn't even reach half that amount. But even after hearing about all of these amazingly cheap opportunities this country offered, I was still not enamored by it. Mainly because much of what I had seen of the country was an industrial seaport and a gated and barbed-wire strewn ghetto. Pura Vida? Pura mierda from this Gringo's perspective. I think I'll stick with Mexico for my international vacationing dollars going forward. Now if they could only get control over their trinket solicitors...
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