Costa Rica Day 8 – 1/26/06 (Thursday)

06.01.26 – Woke up around 8:30 to my alarm. Well actually, I’d woken up several times to my alarm but snoozed it each time. I turned on my computer to write in here and, for some strange reason, I connected to the internet. Usually it takes a concerted effort to get even an occasional spot of connectivity. Today it happened w/o me even trying! Erik, my brother, saw me pop online and started chatting to me. It was nice hearing from him. We chatted for 10 or 15 minutes before he needed to get back to work.

I knocked on James’ door a few times to get him rousted. I think he stayed up quite a bit later than I had.

Since I was hosed for writing in here anyway, I chatted w/ Darren Thomas, my coworker about work-related stuff. They were experiencing some problems with some of the code I’d written. I was afraid of that since I’d had almost no time to test the code before going on vacation. Nothing was so bad that it was an emergency, which made me feel better. I still feel a bit embarrassed that my code is having problems though. I just hate turning in code with defects. I know that is impossible, but I still get uncomfortable about it.

Since we needed to get moving, I hurried and took a shower and got dressed after I was finished IM-ing Darren. We packed our stuff and were on our way by 10:30. I was in a bit of trouble as I thought I’d left my bag with extra GPS batteries and my extra camera batteries in the car. Turns out I was wrong, but didn’t know it till we were well on our way. So I had a GPS with ½ discharged batteries, not a fatal problem, but more seriously, my camera batteries were running on empty.

We reached Cartago, the former capital of Costa Rica, around 11:50. One big thing to see is the town church – Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles. Since there was parking available out front, we stopped and spent the next 40 minutes admiring and photographing the church, which was active – not just with tourists but with people praying and such. I felt a bit like an interloper as there were people kneeling on the benches praying and walking on their knees from the back of the church to the front while James and I ran around snapping photos of cool-looking stuff.

This church was basically equivalent to a European church: great stained glass and cool architecture. It was built after 1928 when the previous church was destroyed in an earthquake. As James said, “they take their religion seriously here”. The pews all had boards in front so that you could kneel. I’d never seen anything like that before. Nor had I ever seen anybody approach the front shuffling forward on their knees. It was a bit strange to see men, women and children wearing modern jeans, backpacks and tennis shoes doing this. It seems so traditional that you would expect to see these people wearing something besides jeans and tennis shoes.

One other surprising thing was a statue of a saint who was obviously of African descent. The other saints were all more euro looking. Foolishly, I didn’t take a picture of it. I was not in a picture-taking mood due to my lack of spare batteries. How do you time the consumption of battery power on a trip of unknown length?

Eventually, James had photographs of everything he thought was interesting, so we moved on. The weather had changed from more or less sunny to somewhat overcast and almost misty. Really what was happening was the clouds were moving in at ground level, so you were actually in the clouds. That’s the level of misting. Very light, but if you spent an appreciable amount of time in it, you’d get wet. This was to be a theme for the weather we’d get till we returned to San Jose: mostly overcast with occasional rain or mist.

About 1:30 we hit CATIE, which is a research facility (www.catie.ac.cr). James had hoped that his friend Dr. Michael Snarskis, who went to Columbia my friend Gina R’s dad no less. Dr. Snarskis was back in San Jose at the time, but we did get permission to go on the campus anyway. Normally they charge $5.00 to “tour” the facility, but I guess since James name-dropped, not today. James showed me a famous sacrifice rock where human sacrifices took place. Dr. Snarskis was the one who discovered the rock, which was just sitting in front of another building. The CATIE facility is very nice. It has well-groomed landscaping and relatively clean-looking buildings. James told me about Snarskis and the rock and we read the little informational signs surrounding the rock and then moved on.

We came to a really cool river that was crossed by a very bouncy bridge. James had stopped to photograph this river earlier but he wanted some more photos. There were some wild birds in a tree next to the bridge with an amazing call. The sound is impossible to describe: “bwoop! bwooop!” is the closest I can do in text. I would say it was almost electronic sounding. They also had these really funky nests that hung from the branches of the tree and were teardrop shaped.

The bridge over the river didn’t inspire much confidence. Every time a car or, especially, a truck drove over it would bounce like nobody’s business. And it was really narrow. I was constantly watching the traffic. It wouldn’t take much to clip you with a rear view mirror.

We hung out there for about 10 minutes before driving on. One thing that really strikes me here is that people will throw up a shack almost anywhere. The general land is very rugged, so you’ll find houses — shacks really — perched alongside steep gullies, or on the side of the hill or alongside the road. Wherever you have a slightly flat spot, you can have a house.

We ate lunch at the Turrialtico Restaurant around 2:15. This place is obviously a “tourist trap” since it’s so darn nice. It looks like you can rent a room here as well. It’s perched on top of a small hillock and has some killer views of valley below. The place was eerily quiet. There was just one other party eating there. This is a place that could easily seat 20 or 30 tables. James says that on the weekends, this place is packed. Wednesday afternoon, it was dead!

The food was delicious and I was hungry. The mascot of the place was what I’ve been calling a “dog dog”. “Dog dogs” are ubiquitous around Costa Rica. They are mixed-breed mongrels that don’t really look like any specific breed anymore since they’re the product of countless cross-breeding. She was a cute sad-faced dog who was very friendly and not too pushy.  I’m sure she does well begging during the busy times of the year with the gringos. At one point she did the pet-dog thing of resting her head on my lap and gave me the sad puppy dog eyes hoping for something. I don’t feed pets at the table as a general rule so she was out of luck on my account. For dessert we had milkshakes. They were very good but a bit watery for James’ taste. He likes his milkshakes thick.

After dessert James ran around and photographed some of the scenery and did some macro work on the flowers. I took a few pictures myself and did a GPS shot of the location of the place. James calls it “getting the JDAM coordinates”. The milkshake was making me a bit sleepy so I jumped in the car and closed my eyes for a few minutes while James finished up.

We got back on the road at 3:25 and about an hour later arrived in Siquerres at 4:15. This was our turn-around point; the light was going to be gone in about 2 hours. We got a bit lost and couldn’t find the road back to Turrialba and home.

All during the drive from Cartargo, and most especially, from Turrialba, you could see a gradual change in housing, not to mention the forest canopy. The houses changed from more plain to more brightly colored. They were still mostly just shacks, but it seemed to me they were a bit more nicely taken care of than in other areas. The skin color of the locals gradually darkened as well. The forest changed to thick, dense rainforest and the foliage in general became a bit more tropical in appearance. You also saw a lot more plants-growing-on-plants type of action.

Despite the rain, there were still lots of people walking and biking alongside the road. Most walkers and even the occasional bicyclist used umbrellas to mitigate the rain. I say mitigate because with the winds that were present, I personally doubt the umbrellas did more than keep the rain out of your eyes. Generally, the rain was more of a really heavy,  almost Pacific Northwest-style mist with occasional bouts of outright rain. The rain was very warm, so I’m sure that’s partly the reason people didn’t seem to pay it too much mind.

Eventually, we were on a road that I would later determine to be Hwy 32 and not Hwy 10. We saw one of the rather common open-air food/drink places (“café”) and around 4:20 stopped to get a “coke a smoke” and some directions. Its name was “Bar Rest Amubri”. James and I grabbed a coke and glass of ice and sat down at the bar. There were two young women running the place. Mostly, they appeared to be “hanging out”; the place was empty except for us. They had a television tuned to a Jerry Springer style show, named “Laura”.

A few minutes after we arrived, it began to rain really hard. Tropical rain hard. It was just pouring. It made a neat sound on the metal roof. I went to the car to get my camera to take a movie of the rain. Though James’ car was parked literally 15 feet away, my brief stint in the rain left me pretty wet. My going for my camera was all the excuse James needed to go for his camera as well. So I took a movie of the rain while he ran around and snapped photos of the place: the kids, the serving girls, and who knows what else.

The kids there were, of course, fascinated by his camera and one especially precocious boy really, really wanted his picture taken. The others were much shyer and had to be coaxed by their parents into letting James take their photo. The little boy tried to speak to me but of course I couldn’t understand him; “no entiendo español” is about the extent of my conversational Spanish. My comprehension is a bit better than that thanks to James helping me with a few words here and there.

James told the boy that I was a gringo and that “he doesn’t understand”. The boy looked at me skeptically like he thought we were pulling his leg! He didn’t believe that James couldn’t speak Spanish very well either! It was pretty funny.

Eventually the rain let up a bit and we got our directions (incorrect directions as it turned out) and headed off down the road around 4:45. It seemed longer, but we’d only spent 20 minutes there.

The brief downpour had changed the landscape quite radically. Where once there were little cracks in the earth now raged small streams. Areas of the road were flooded – not deeply, but enough to get you to slow down. Formerly small streams now boiled with water. Everywhere there were small rivulets of water pouring into the ditches. I’m sure that’s why the ditches/gutters are so darn deep. You can get a lot of water in a little time.

We began to get suspicious about our directions almost immediately; we were heading out of town and didn’t recognize any landmarks. I turned on my GPS to get a reading and sure enough, we were heading off in the wrong direction. They were sending us along Hwy 32, which actually would have taken us back to San Jose, but James had specifically asked how to get to Turrialba. That was the route he was familiar with and since we were going to do it mostly in the dark, he wisely didn’t want to try something new.

We turned around and found signs pointing us in the correct direction and were soon actually on our way to Turrialba.

Around 6:20 – 6:30 we hit really terrible fog. It was just ridiculously dense. The roads are marked very poorly, which stressed James out even more. We were on the typical Costa Rican road: winding; narrow; minimal if any markings, almost never any reflectors indicating the sides or center of the road; no shoulders and at best, a steep, deep ditch on either side, at worst, a long, nearly cliff-like drop-off. Add to that the occasional completely unlit pedestrian or bicyclist, oncoming vehicles and all the other vehicular riff-raff, and you’re suddenly not having so much fun.

We soldiered on for 15 or 20 minutes until James decided that he wanted a break. We pulled off to stop at “El Clon” (Pollo A La Leña El Clon). It’s in the area of Juan Viñas, a small town just outside of Turrialba between Turrialba and Paraiso.

El Clon turned out to be a rather nice eatery. This one had a few locals eating food and an open fire roasting chickens on spit. We went in for our usual coke and smoke. Man, I’m going to spend weeks getting off of caffeine from all the Coke I’m drinking! Now that I think of it, I actually had a non-caffeinated sports drink instead of coke. I’m trying not to drink more than 2 or 3 cokes per day.

There were some neat things to take pictures of and I sat down at a table while James ran around and took photos. A few minutes later, what turned out to be the owner of the place came over and gave me a photo album to look at. He tried to explain some of the photos to me, but of course I couldn’t understand a word he was saying and he didn’t speak any English. I would flip through the book and he would chatter in Spanish and I would nod my head like I sort of understood.

The photos he was showing me were of an abandoned railroad line that went through the region. It was, of course, pitch black out, but I gathered that part of the rail line actually went right behind the place. Costa Rica doesn’t appear to have a working rail system any more. At one point they did, but now everything is moved by truck or airplane. Pretty amazing since the largest city, San Jose is a couple of hours drive from the ocean. And the roads are not so great.

James gave the owner an Escazu.biz card and that started a real exchange between him and the owner. James is trying to start a few regional websites that he eventually hopes to turn into at least semi-commercial business promotion websites. The owner’s name is Alvaro Campos. Nickname: “Macho”. James and I noticed that Alvaro’s shirt was pressed and the restaurant was clean. I especially noticed that, for a tico place, the bathroom was very clean. It’s not quite up to modern American chain restaurant standards, but there are a lot of places in America that I’ve seen a worse bathroom in. Alvaro seems like a pretty squared-away guy and James feels that this guy will be a great contact in the region. Some of these types of people know everybody and can really be great contacts for meeting other people.

James and Alvaro had a long conversation. Occasionally James would catch me up to the proceedings. At one point James asked about a picture on the wall of a town that looked like it was flooded. Alvaro grabbed a key and opened up a display case with some books and other artifacts. The book was an older book discussing the history of the region. It turns out the town was wiped out in 1962 (I think) by Irazu; the volcano we visited a few days earlier. Since the display case was open, the guy began showing us the various artifacts he had collected. Some of them were “the real shit”: ancient stone artifacts like axe heads, stone cutting knives, old pottery – still functional in the case of a small ceramic flute/whistle. It was all really cool stuff to look at and handle. And here it was, just sitting in some guy’s case in a restaurant by the side of the road. James tells me that it’s legal for people like Alvaro to possess such artifacts as long as they don’t try to sell it to foreigners who would take it outside of the country.

It was getting late and the fog had cleared up, so around 7:30, we got back on the road for home. Really what happened is that the fog has just been moving to the west, so we soon caught up to the fog again and had a miserable hour or so of driving through dense fog and rain. Things finally cleared up as we neared San Jose. San Jose’s streets were dry as a bone and the weather was actually quite pleasant.

I don’t remember exactly when we got back. I think it was around 8PM. James tried calling Sabrina to see if she wanted to go hang out with us. Regina was already busy with some other activity.

I set about writing up the previous day’s activities while James downloaded and sorted through his photos. Time flew by and before we knew it, it was late! Like after 10:30 late. And we hadn’t eaten dinner yet. James didn’t realize how late it was till we were on the road. Our initial mission was to head out for some sushi but at 10:30 the place was closed. So we ended up at Pane y Vino, a nice Italian place where we had insalata caprese. It’s a salad with sliced tomatoes, sliced mozzarella, basil and oil and balsamic vinegar. It’s really tasty. We also had a really delicious pizza with ham and parmesan shavings on it.

After finishing, we drove up into the boonies of Escazu. Escazu is backed by some rather impressively tall “hills”. They’re really mountains. Even in Washington I’m sure we’d consider them mountains. The roads up are ridiculously bad, though in typical Costa Rican fashion, near the top, the chopped up dirt road suddenly becomes inexplicably nicely paved for a stretch. There are just some fantastic views up there. You can see the whole western part of San Jose stretched out in front of you. It’s especially cool at night with all the glowing lights. I’ll bet you can see at least 25 miles no problem. The air is noticeably cooler up there, so I’m guessing we’d gained at least 1000 feet or more. We were sitting outside in fairly breezy conditions at Pane y Vino, but up here, with the same breeze, we quickly became a bit chilled.

We bumped our way back down the side of the mountain and James pointed out where he sometimes hikes up to. It’s called the “White House”. Formerly some fancy estate of a very rich man’s wife, it’s now a very upscale restaurant and hotel. I’d guess the White House is about ½ way to the top from Escazu. We drove downhill for a considerable distance. I became quite impressed with James’ hiking abilities as it took at least 10 minutes to get near the condo. James tells me when he hikes all the way to the White House, it takes about an hour each way. It seems like it’s further than that to me.

We stopped off at a gas station to pick up some smokes and ignore the bums. For some reason, this particular gas station allows beggars to hang out. Most places would immediately chase these guys away. The bums are relatively polite and harmless but it’s a strange juxtaposition for what amounts to the nice part of town in San Jose.

We got back near midnight. James was wiped out. I suddenly realized that he was doing all the driving – we had been driving a hell of a lot lately. He had told me not to bother bringing my license, but I certainly began to feel guilty for making him drive so much. I put my license back in my wallet so that I can relieve James if need be.

James was feeling very tired so he headed off to bed without his usual Photoshop session. He was going to have to be up early tomorrow to get his car inspected so he can purchase the “tabs” for his car.

I stayed up a bit later working on finishing the previous days’ posting and headed off for bed around 1AM.

Costa Rica Day 7 – 1/25/06 (Wednesday)

06.01.25 –I woke up, once again, close to 9 this morning. I guess even if I go to bed at 1AM, 9AM is 8 hours of sleep, so it’s not so bad. My ridiculously full bladder is what forced me out of bed. After taking care of business, I grabbed the laptop and headed outside to sit on the porch and finish writing about yesterday’s activities. I also took a GPS shot to mark where we are. James was still fast asleep.

James eventually woke up. I think around 10:10 or so. He has a serious case of sleep hair. The right side of his head is sticking up. I took a photo.

It’s now 10:42. Not sure what I’m going to do next. Probably take some photos of the cabin and relax a bit outdoors. It’s probably 80 degrees and sunny with a nice breeze to keep things cool. It is very pleasant. The “caretaker” was up early this morning fixing the fence. It was one of those background sounds I listened to while still in bed regaining consciousness. Now I hear him raking leaves. His wife is inside playing the radio really loud – the only real sound of civilization.

Facing ESE. On the left, that blue dot along the fence-line is the caretaker mending the fence. 

Composite view of cabin facing WNW (basically opposite direction of photo above).

A larger panorama of the place.

James wandered around taking a few more photos and then we packed up some of our gear. We (and by “we” I mean James! J ) hadn’t decided whether or not to stay another night.

One of James’ photos of the place.

While James was outside taking photos, I noticed the toiled was running so I went to fix it. When I pulled the cover off the tank, I was surprised to see 3 small frogs in the tank!! I have no idea how they avoid getting flushed down the drain. I got the toilet to stop running and then snapped a few photos. I’d never seen anything like that before!

As we were getting ready, I realized I had lost my sunglasses. It took 20 minutes to find them. After I found my sun glasses – I’d managed to throw them on the top bunk bed that I was sleeping on behind some other stuff so I was just about convinced I’d left them at El Pizzarron the previous evening – we hopped in the car and went exploring further south along the Nicoya peninsula. The road was incredibly rough. There were so many potholes. The forest service roads in Washington were in better shape that this road. And this is the main road in the region.

Along the way, we found an interesting dirt side road and drove down it for quite a ways. The terrain out here is completely different from San Jose. Flat and much drier, it really gives you the feel of Africa. This is mainly due to the strange trees of course, but nevertheless, it’s some spectacular scenery. There are some really cool trees down here. James has a bit of a tree fetish so we stopped several times to snap some pictures of assorted cool-looking trees.

James somehow knows about barbed-wire so he told me all about barbed wire and the basic construction as well as the effects – its development put a lot of cowboys out of a job and let to horrible casualties in WWI since it caused people to be channelized and easy fodder for machine guns.

Lots of barbed wire.

We got to a point where we would have had to have forded a small creek if we wanted to continue, so we turned around and headed back. James stopped and took pictures of a Lamborghini tractor. It seems to be an actual tractor made by Lamborghini! Who knew?
Lamborghini tractor.

Back on the main road, we headed back towards Nicoya. Along the way, James managed to hit a really deep pothole. Apparently when you abuse Land Rovers, the flashers automatically turn on. I thought we should stop and at least look and see if there was any damage but James wasn’t interested. The car sounded and felt just fine, so why bother?

Around 1PM, we stopped at Rio Grande Restaurante, which is a largish open-air place. They serve authentic Costa Rican cuisine. I got a chicken and rice dish that was quite good. James could tell I was a little stressed about eating at a place like this so he volunteered that he’d eaten at dozens of places like this and never gotten sick. That was small consolation! There’s always a first time. But the food was quite tasty. For once, the place was reasonably busy.

We got back on the road about 1:30 but not before he took some photos of a next-door pottery vendor’s wares. There was a cool Costa Rican-style pottery thingy (not sure what its function is, if any, other than to look cool).

James taking photos of the pottery.

One of the fruits of his labor.

Still on the way to Nicoya and El Pizzarron, James saw several cool trees but was frustrated by the presence of power lines in front or behind them. There is no such thing as buried power lines here in CR as far as I can tell, so things are just crazy with a spaghetti-work of power lines and connections to houses.

Finally arriving at El Pizzarron, we hung out with Carlos for quite bit.
Chillin’ with a coke at El Pizzaron.

Taking the GPS coordinates of El Pizzaron.

James and I were a bit disappointed that Adriana wasn’t there. Carlos is a really interesting guy, as I think I’ve mentioned before. He’s a refugee from Cuba, having left there when he was 7 years old. At one point he related a funny story of the Caribbean side of CR to us.

It was 20 years ago, and at that time there was only one gas station on the coast and it was located in Limon. Unfortunately he was in Puerto Viejo and very low on gas. He went into a local “soda” (small restaurant) asking for gas and a dude wearing the international symbol for “stoner” — knit hat in green, red and yellow — told him “Don’t worry man. You don’t need gas! Have some ganja man!” James said that pretty well sums up the Caribbean side of the CR.

“We” still hadn’t decided yet whether to stay another night; Carlos was more than happy to have us stay there another night; and we discussed what to do on the way back. I was kinda voting for staying but I could tell James wanted to get moving. As it turned out, we probably had a bit more of an adventure going home than if we’d stayed.

We were packed up and on the road back to Nicoya by 4:45. That gave us only a little more than an hour of sunlight, but James wasn’t too worried about that. We stopped by El Pizzarron for the last time to drop off the keys and have some more of that delicious tres leches cake that Carlos’ wife makes.

Our first goal was Liberia to the north of Nicoya. The only thing I didn’t like about Nicoya was the heat and the humidity. It was a bit much for me as San Jose is probably 15 degrees colder and about 30% less humid. For me it was quite a bit. I know I could get used to it, but I was feeling a bit dehydrated by the time we left.

We stopped at a small town called Belen to take photographs. James is working on getting another regional web-site http://www.guanacaste.biz/ going. The Guanacaste region contains Nicoya and Liberia as well as many other small towns. There are also a ton of resorts to the west that would also be in the Guanacaste region.

James took pictures of the local Cruz Roja (Red Cross) facility. They had a sweet Toyota Landcruiser Ambulance there that James just was gaga over.

Cruz Roja vehicle in Belen.

We also took pictures of a pool hall, people waiting at the bus stop and some meeting going on in a local church. Some of the photos came out really cool.

Pool hall next to Cruz Roja facility.

I’m constantly amazed at how brazen James is when he has his camera and is taking photographs. He just walks into a situation, plops the camera down on the tripod and begins snapping photographs. I thought it was pretty brave of him to do that at the church meeting.

One of the photos James took of the church meeting.

In a way, you’re really imposing yourself when you do that and I remarked as much to James. He admitted he never thought about it that way before. I hope I don’t give him a complex about that. I don’t think I did.

We spent probably 40 minutes there and got back on the road to Liberia around 7PM. The sky was clear and pitch black. It was an amazing view overhead. About 5 minutes outside of Belen, we came across a fruit stand. It was there that I realized James doesn’t really like to eat fruit. They had stacks of what I’m sure would be delicious watermelons but he was not the least bit interested in fruit. Rather, he saw a cool photo opportunity! That’s fine in my book as he’s a great photographer. I helped him as much as I could and as much as possible, stared up into the sky admiring the view.

We spent probably 10 minutes there before moving on. It was then that I began to realize a few new things about ticos. First, they don’t really care at all about tail-lights. I saw numerous vehicles, large and small, that had no or almost no tail-lights. I was especially astounded by the large number of motorcycles with inoperable tail-lights. In one case, there was a motorcycle with no operating lights at all. The passenger held a flashlight and would turn it on and off periodically to signal to cars that they were there!

Bicycles and pedestrians are also a common sight along the side of the road. Of course, when it is absolutely pitch black, you don’t really see them until you’re on top of them. I can’t believe that more people don’t get killed along the side of the road. But it seems that it mostly works.

We arrived in Liberia around 7:50. We headed for the town square where the big church and town square was. On the way past the square, I spotted a couple of girls that I thought looked interesting and told James we should go and take their picture. However, first things first: we had to take pictures of actual photographically interesting things like the church lit up at night and people talking on phones at the phone booth center. There are about a dozen public phones set up in the square for people to use. Since it was early on a weeknight, things were quite busy, so the phones were heavily used. Other people milled about or sat on the benches sprinkled throughout the park.

Photo of phone booths.

Neat photo of house across the street.

We eventually worked our way over towards where I’d seen the girls sitting. They were still there. It seems to be a common thing for people to just hang out. James setup his camera and started snapping their picture. Of course, they immediately became interested in what he was doing – I was basically an assistant holding some of his lenses and just sort of watching his back – not that things were particularly dangerous.

The two German women are on the left 2nd bench in.

It turns out these two girls – young women – were German! Great! And me not having studied German in years. Katja was brunette and the cuter of the two with a real nice smile. Rosalie was blond and not as cute. She does look better than in her pictures. For some reason she is not very photogenic.

Rosalie and Katja.

James and I struck up a bizarre conversation with them. I think they wanted to practice their English because, although James speaks Spanish reasonably well, they didn’t seem to want to speak to him in Spanish. I tried to do what I could in German, but my German is really, really bad right now. They couldn’t speak English very well since they’d been speaking and hearing Spanish for 10 months. Turns out they are exchange students who are 10 months into a year-long stay in Costa Rica.

We hacked out a conversation with them. We were getting hungry so James asked them if they knew of a decent place to go for some food. They knew of one, but couldn’t manage to tell us where it was so they walked with us to the restaurant. At that point, things got a little weird for a while. While standing outside the restaurant, they started to ask us if we had a place to stay for the night. Earlier we’d told them that we were just passing through on our way back to San Jose. So we speculate that perhaps with our Spanish-German-English mish-mash of a conversation, they didn’t realize that we actually had a car.

We were both wondering if they were trying to pick us up! James was getting a bit worried about being so far away from his car which was loaded with some camera gear and a lot of other stuff that would look theft worthy so he wanted to get back to his car to move it closer to the restaurant. While he walked back to his car, I talked with them some more and then invited them to sit down with us at the restaurant. The declined, saying that they were waiting for a friend to pick them up, so I said bye and they headed back to the park. I think they initially thought we were just off of a bus and were just concerned for us, because as soon as they realized that James had a car, they were like “our job is done, time to get back to park”.

James came by in the car and I jumped in. He didn’t seem to be in a mood to eat at a sit-down place – it *was* getting late – by this time we’d spent over an hour in Liberia and we were at least 3-1/2 hours from San Jose, so our ETA at that point was around midnight.

Liberia is close to some high-end gringo resorts, so there was a local fast food mini-mall which we stopped at. We ate our Burger King burgers and were back on the road to San Jose around 8:55.

The drive back was long but largely uneventful. We stopped a few times along the way so that James could have a smoke. It was also an opportunity to admire the night skies. It was just spectacular. I can’t rave enough about how cool the night skies looked. I told James that he/we should try to organize a trip to the coast with some of his friends for a real, American-style campout. Nobody camps in Costa Rica, so that would be something very different for them. It would be a great chance to see the night skies.

James keeps thinking that getting up high would be the thing to do, which I’m not as enthusiastic about. It gets colder when you go up. On the coast, it was probably at least 75 even late at night, which is an extremely comfortable temperature. My thought was we could lay some tarps or blankets on the sand and just camp out there overnight. We could bring some stoves or start a fire with driftwood or some such.

Up high it’s going to be clearer, but colder and we’d be much closer to San Jose, so the light pollution would be greater.

We finally got home about 1AM. I jumped on the computer to enter my solution to the problem 14 (correct!) and immediately started another one. Anthony had jumped a long way ahead. I don’t know if I’m going to have a chance to catch up with him at this point.

I got stuck a bit on Problem 17 but finally fixed all of my problems (some spelling issues and some logic issues). By that time it was close to 3AM! We were supposed to get up early the next morning to head as far towards the coast as we could, so the earlier we got moving the farther we’d get.

I quickly got things ready for bed and forgot all about recharging my GPS batteries or my camera battery, something that would cause me a lot of pain the next day (actually earlier today since I’m writing this at 10:30 01.26.06).

Costa Rica Day 6 – 1/24/06 (Tuesday)

06.01.24 – Woke up around 9 this morning. I was a bit surprised that I woke up so early. I was a bit worried last night as my stomach was not feeling so good. I need to not drink every night I think!

The weather in Escazu starts out pretty much the same every day I’ve been here. In the morning, you get clear skies with maybe a few clouds. Then later in the day more clouds come out. Things seem to clear up again at night so you usually have a cloudless, cool night. Now this is just during December and January I hear. Other times of the year, the weather pattern is different.

View facing north from bedroom window

I spent much of the morning messing around with mathschallenge stuff. I almost got to the point where I was going to pass Anthony when I got stuck on a problem. I was just 2 points behind him when I had to take a shower to get moving. That was around 1! We packed up to head to Nicoya.

The drive was long and the scenery was, as seems to be usual, very spectacular. One thing I meant to mention earlier was the tire on James Land Rover. It’s not lost any air pressure since we had it pumped up on Sunday! That is most strange.

Anyway, we put-putted (you rarely go faster than about 40 or 50 mph here) our way while chatting about everything imaginable. The W and NW of Costa Rica is considerably different than areas around San Jose or further east towards the Carribean. The land becomes much drier. You get almost an African feel with the trees. To me, it also felt a lot like western Montana with the mountains in the background and flatter, drier plains. Except the trees are very different from what you see in the States. James had the idea to produce a book about Costa Rican trees along highways which I think is an interesting idea. There were sure some very cool and interesting trees on the way.

We came to a section of the road (Hwy 18) that was, according to James, by far the best section of road in the country. From my experience it was. Your average Costa Rican section of road is rather poor: rough with potholes and many patched potholes thrown in for good measure. Generally the shoulders are narrow if the exist at all and there are often 18-24 inch-deep ditches on the side. So if you have a breakdown, you end up ON the road since there is no way to move the car to the side. I’m sure this creates quite spectacular backups at times.

The section we were on, while still being rather narrow and often with steep shoulders, was in very good shape. Smooth and straight as an arrow, it is as good as most highways in the States.

Look at that nice road!

Of course, this section was apparently built by the Taiwanese! Apparently, they do various Central American countries favors like this in exchange for them voting to support Taiwan in the UN against China. Smart cookies, these Taiwanese. In some ways, I’d be embarrassed, as a country, to accept the money. Even worse, it IS the nicest road in Costa Rica. So you know it’s not the soil or anything else as James tells me is the common refrain when one asks about the roads. It’s just plain bad engineering on the part of the Costa Ricans.

To be sure, they face challenges in road construction. The land is often very steep and the seasonal torrential downpours much create a lot of erosion. And I’m often amazed at how deep the ravines go when crossing even in nominally flat terrain. It’s nothing to have something that is 50 feet or more deep on a bridge that is only a hundred or two hundred feet across. Some of this can’t be avoided, but I get the feeling that a lot of problems could be avoided through a little more foresight.

At one point along Hwy 18, we stopped at a little roadside restaurant to buy some cokes. I needed to take a piss. The bathroom was pretty damn scary, though I got much amusement out of the air freshener that somebody hung up in the bathroom.

The orinal

Note the air-freshener at the top of the photo!

The sun was setting, so there were some really spectacular views of the setting sun. James jumped at the chance to take some pictures. The sun was behind the clouds and cast the most amazing shadows in the sky while simultaneously peeking through the clouds. I think I got some decent pics of this too. After spending about 20 minutes photographing the setting sun and smoking a cigarette, we drove on.

Sunset photo by James

Sunset photo by me

It was dark when we reached the pizzeria (El Pizzaron) in Nicoya. The owner, Carlos is a really, really nice guy. It was a amusing to hear him talk though. He had a basically perfect accent but tended to use “man” a lot in exclamations. James showed him his photos and he was often exclaiming “Oh man! Those are great!” and things like that. Carlos told me he used to be into photography long ago so he was really excited about James’ work and his camera and tripod.

I had a Canadian-Bacon & Pineapple pizza which was really tasty. The pineapple was especially good – it was local and fresh-picked. It was super sweet, but not in the artificial “let’s add sugar” way. Yummy!!

They had a young, but cute girl working there. How’s that for useless trivia. But being single, I tend to notice these things. Of course, she’s way, way too young not to mention not very strong in English. Just as well. I wouldn’t have anything in common with her anyway…

Adriana

Nicoya was busy at 6PM when we drove through it on our way to El Pizzaron. The streets were full of cars, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians. The stores looked busy and many people milled about. I remarked how busy it was for being so late and James had to remind me that it was only 6:30. It gets dark early here – later than in Seattle right now. But the weather is so warm and the people obviously dress like it’s warm, so that, for me, unconsciously it seems much later. In temperatures like we have here, it would be mid summer so things would get truly dark no earlier than about 9 – 9:30 (if not 10PM). So I always have a slight amount of cognitive dissonance when the sun first sets.

Nicoya seems to be a relatively nice town. It’s moderately large, but still a 1 street town. I could see as we drove through it that off of “main street” there was nothing but houses. It does have a college and a hospital so it’s not too sleepy. The pizza place is right across the street from the college. I may try to bug James to go there to borrow a wireless connection today (I’m finishing this Wed morning 9:30 or so).

After dinner and hanging out to chat for a while, we followed Carlos to the ranch. It was pitch black when we arrived. Just the lights of the ‘cabins’ and street light for parking.

Carlos’ cabin at night

You immediately notice the stars here. The sky is almost completely black. I haven’t seen skies and stars like this in a long, long time. There isn’t any place I think in Washington State that has such dark skies. It made that, a) I’d kept up on my knowledge of the constellations, and b) that I had a decent pair of binoculars to look at the night sky with.

Carlos showed us around the cabin. He’s even got hi-speed internet here – though it costs him per minute to use it. He was very careful to show us how to connect AND disconnect from the internet. That got me to thinking about semi-socialist countries like CR. On the drive over, James had told me about many goofy laws that the CR’ns have; such as a mandatory Christmas bonus equal to your monthly salary, getting 4 weeks of vacation after a year (or two years? – can’t remember precisely) and some labor laws making it difficult to fire people. Those sound good in principle, but they rarely have the effect that people intend.

Anyway, I began to wonder why in the heck, with all the other expensive and somewhat unproductive or counterproductive laws, doesn’t CR subsidize hi-speed internet? It seems like a no-brainer. One of the problems this country has is that it is still very provincial. The general population has a very poor understanding of the larger world and how Costa Rica fits into the big picture. This causes them to hold unproductive ideas about things.

Humans sometimes are a bit too adaptable. They can get used to bad situations as easily as good situations. Not that Nicoya is horrible, but I think there is a lot of wasted human potential down here. The few people I’ve met have all seemed to be friendly and generally industrious, but they are held back by a mediocre government and I think the lack of a true understanding that things could be better. The most squared-away CR’ns are the ones who have been to the US or Europe for an extended period of time.

I speculate that this happens due to several factors. A) people that can afford to send their kids to the states or who go there to work later in life have money to begin with and thus have a better education. Being proficient in English is a huge leg up here. B) (and here I’m really speculating) I think that these people see and absorb the daily habits and attitudes of people in the US/Europe. For the most part, people aren’t *that* much smarter in the Europe/U.S. Sure, they may be more educated, but there’s a whole host of largely unconscious habits and expectations about how things should be. For example, most people I know wouldn’t even dream of trying to bribe a cop. There’s just no point to it. Down here, that kind of thing is “routine” (I don’t want to make it sound like it happens *all* the time, but it’s far more common).

What you end up with is a semi-corrupt and ineffective police force. One thing that always surprised me was that guards are everywhere. I mean everywhere. If you’re even moderately rich, you’ll have a guard outside your house 24/7. If you have less money, you’ll have a maid who will live in the place and watch the house even when you’re gone. Grocery stores have at least a few guards posted out front. The one we stopped at in Escazu as we started our trip had 3 or 4 guards and at least one had a shotgun! Many parking lots have several guards to watch over the cars. Heck even old Gabriel is a set of eyes and ears to keep others from pestering customer’s cars.

All that adds up to a huge waste of resources and manpower that could be better used elsewhere. I’ve been referring to it as the “full employment program”. You’ve got a lot of people who are really marginally employed. Sitting around for 8 hours or more per day watching the world go by day after day has GOT to be terribly boring to boot.

All this is a cultural thing of course. People have low expectations of the police force, so they adapt, improvise and overcome. But it acts as a hidden tax on everything.

Nicoya’s got that small town feel, which is nice. The houses don’t have bars on the windows, people don’t reflexively lock their bikes when they park them in front of the grocery store (try doing that even in Seattle HA!). The stores still have roll-down shutters, but they don’t have the ubiquitous security guard(s) posted out front. It’s much nicer in that regard.

Alright, enough of my tirade. Back to the “journal”. So Carlos showed us around the place. It’s small but nice. Needs a bit of sweeping since insects are so ubiquitous and they crawl inside and leave stuff behind – poop, skins, themselves. James tells me this is typical CR construction. The front door leads to the main “living room” with an open kitchen towards the rear. To the left are two bedrooms. One was an office, the other is where I slept. Across the living room to the right is the master bedroom and master bathroom. A second bathroom was next to my room, but, through a quirk of construction, it was filled with bugs since it’s somewhat open to the outside. I wondered where the washing machine and dryer were and we didn’t discover them till a bit later when we walked around the back of the house. They are sitting on what might be considered the back porch, though I didn’t see any way of getting to them without going outside and walking around the house.

Inside the cabin. The clutter is all our crap. It was tidy when we got there.

After Carlos left, we unpacked and settled in. When we were finished, we headed outside to hang out. We began by sitting on the porch, but after a while we dragged the chairs around back to sit under the stars. Unfortunately, the street light that illuminated the parking area never went out so our view was sub-optimal. Not knowing the layout of things, we didn’t feel comfortable wandering too far from the house. Being pitch black outside didn’t help matters either.

So we made do. We spent at least an hour out back chatting about things: girls, his sister, my brother and I can’t remember what else. Eventually we got bored with watching the stars roll slowly overhead. Well actually, I mostly got uncomfortable slouching in the chair so I could look upwards at the sky. James took a few pictures of the place at night before we retired back to the porch where we spent some more time chatting.

Cool photo at night

Around 1 AM James got tired and headed in. I fired up the laptop and got at least some of the day’s activities recorded. But first, I think I solved Problem 14!! I had one thought about solving the problem on the way between San Jose and Nicoya. Yes, I AM that much of a geek. When thinking about it, I began to wonder if I wasn’t getting an overflow issue and since it was so easy to try I did it and came up with a different number! I’m hoping it’s the right one this time. I converted the ints to longs and that seemed to solve my problem.

I wrote in here for a while and then headed to bed.

Costa Rica Day 5 – 1/23/06 (Monday)

06.01.23 – I got up around 9:30. No wireless! In fact one of the sites I was using is now security enabled! So I’m totally screwed for internet access right now. It’s 10 AM right now and I need to go wake James up!

We left for the volcano Irazu at the crack of noon. Along the way we stopped at many different places.

First Stop: Breakfast “Café de Artistas”. It’s one of the places is Escazu where ex-pats go. The menus were all in English. I had some scrambled eggs and tasty “gallo pinto” (gai-zho peento in tico-talk) a rice-and-bean dish. This is more or less a ‘typical’ breakfast dish in Costa Rica according to James. I guess you can get a version of this at McDonalds.

I finally go to meet Don Gabriel – the parking/security guard for the café. “Don” is an honorific like, perhaps, “Master” as opposed to “Mister”, which is common. James likes to call Gabriel by that as it is a bit ironic or excessive without being mocking. After breakfast, James had me sit beside him and took our photo together. Gabriel seemed like a nice old dude. He’s small. I’d guess he’s not much more than 5 feet tall.

Me with the famous Don Gabriel

Second stop: the mall “Multi Plaza Del Este”. In one of the many strange contradictions in Costa Rica, the mall is a very up-scale nice mall literally 500 yards from which is a horrible slum area. The poverty delta is quite striking. We toured the mall – of course we visited the Apple store – and finally visited a Carrion store. I was hoping to find a pillow case as James got a pillow for me but no pillow case!! So I’ve been using it in its original plastic bag. That’s getting a bit old as the plastic is getting to the point where it sticks to my face at night. So tonight it’s a pillow case or nothing! After taking a quick tour of the mall, which is a really nice mall – I was tempted to take some pictures of it but in the end, it’s like many other malls, we continued on our way towards Irazu.

Third stop: a small place along the way for some water (me) and coke (James). James ordered our water and coke w/ ice in cups. I watched him chip out ice from a tray and dump it into the cups with his bare hands. That immediately got me worrying about e coli or some such. We’ll know in a few days if that dude washed his hands. After hanging out there for a few minutes, we moved on.

I don’t know how these places survive. They never seem to be very busy. We were 2 of perhaps 4 people who patronized the place in the 15 minutes we were there.

The climb up to the volcano is quite impressive. All around you find just some impressive scenery. Escazu is around 3900 feet. The top of Irazu is 11000. So it’s a considerable climb up the side of the volcano! I can’t say enough about the scenery. Just very impressive. I took a few photos but really it’s hard to appreciate the incredible vistas you get. You end up higher than surrounding clouds. I’m sure at times you’re above the weather that can be more than a mile below you.

The area is fully occupied all the way to the top. Farms and small villages dot the route to the summit, so you’re hardly ever ‘alone’. The most amazing thing is to see people chugging up the roads with bicycles. Oh, that reminds me. The roads to the summit were uncharacteristically nice. James tells me it’s due to tourism. They don’t want to scare away the tourists.

We stopped off at a restaurant at probably 8000 feet. James finally succumbed to the photographic opportunities presented to him and we spent about 15 minutes snapping photos before taking a quick peek inside the restaurant. He had to show me a t-shirt from Offut Air Force base that somebody had dropped off. The walls of the restaurant were covered in business cards thumb-tacked to the wall. This place was almost empty. There was a couple of ticos eating and there was a gringo couple eating there who were heading down from the summit with whom we spoke for a few minutes before heading outside to take photographs.

Looking uphill towards Irazu

Photo of tree taken on the way up

We reached the summit just before 3:00PM. Of course, they closed at 3:30, so we had to hurry. Like our other stops, this place was almost deserted. There was one gringo with a tica girlfriend who wanted us to take their picture. They had some cheap disposable camera which James used and then told them he’d take their picture with his camera.

In part he’s being nice, in part he likes to take photographs and it’s all practice, and in part he uses it to generate some awareness of http://www.escazu.biz/ since he tells them to go to the site and get his email from there to get the photographs.

We were at almost 11000 feet (GPS verified!). You don’t really notice that till you start to walk and then you’d think to yourself about how out of breath you were getting just from walking. The main crater is quite impressive. 1000 feet deep and 3000 feet in diameter.

The main crater

“Bomb Damage Assessment” – James loved to take photos of me playing with my camera or GPS

James ran around taking pictures of everything while I took a few photos as well.

James looking for photo ops

On top of Irazu

The bathroom was closed by the time we got back to the car, so I had to use the green room. We stood around and listened to the quiet air while James had a smoke. It was really peaceful and quiet up there. Eventually however, the park people came back and honked at us so we jumped in the car and left.On the way down, James and I stopped at several places to take photos.

Clouds hitting the ground.

Nice scenery on the way back down.

There were some spectacular scenes. He talked to me about lighting and what he was looking for in scenery. He tends to go for pure outdoor shots. He knows more than he thinks he does, but I did think that he missed out on some really cool-looking older buildings along the way. Some of these old shacks really had character. I’m not really the photographer to do much with them, so I didn’t even try.

 
This gives you an idea of the slope on Irazu

James wanted to check out a different way to Guayabo (a place w/ a pre-Columbian city). Apparently, there are 2 ways to get there. Along the way, we hit the most incredible fog. It was extremely thick. At times visibility was less than 100 feet.

Not even the densest point of fog

Not even the densest point of fogQuite a shock from when we were on top of the volcano in bright sunny skies. Eventually, we got concerned enough about the fading light (by now it was 4:30) that we decided to turn back and go home along a known good route.

Traffic in San Jose was medium bad. Nothing like the traffic jams of Seattle, but bad enough. I think we got back home around 6:00 or so. James downloaded and edited his photos while I took a nap.

When I woke up, I found I had a brief spot of internet connectivity which I took advantage of. I downloaded several problems from the mathschallenge site and got to work solving them. I should have been writing this, but … what can I say? Instead, I’m writing this at 1:47AM!!

Around 8 we headed out for “The Pub”. It’s an ex-pat bar. We arrived to find it reasonably crowded with people. There were 3 drunk, rather white trash Canadian chicks who really wanted James to take their picture! James asked how long they were here for, and one of them said they were down on vacation – for the past 2 years! Then, what I believe to be the BF of one of them decided that he wanted James to photograph his ass so he pulled down his pants part way to give James a shot of his plumber’s crack (which he took). That really made James’ evening! After we finished eating and I drank my two Guinness (yay Guinness) we headed out to find some other places to land. Along the way we toured a few of James’ favorite picture taking places. It was dark, so no photos. And he swore me to secrecy (not really).

We couldn’t find any place really worthwhile, so we ended up at Henry’s. At Henry’s instead of the quiet evening James was anticipating, we ran into James’ niece’s (Kelia), former teachers. It was a birthday party and the birthday girl was drunk. Several of them knew James so we were quickly included in the group. Most of them spoke English quite well so I didn’t have to be a 5th wheel for once. Birthday girl was really drunk and kept pestering James to take her photo

James remarked that our experience with these girls made James miss the refined company of Regina and Sabrina all the more. Those two girls are pretty squared away. They’re attractive and intelligent and good conversationalists. What’s not to like?!? I agree, but on the other hand, we weren’t seeing them in the best light. If it’s your birthday, you can get drunk and be a bit goofy, no?

We finally headed home around 12:30.

It’s now 2 AM and I’m tired and heading to bed!

Costa Rica Day 4 – 1/22/06 (Sunday)

2006.01.22 – I’d gone to bed “early”; about 1AM for once. I even slept in a bit but got up around 9:30. Not having anything pressing to do (I suspect James stayed up later working on his projects – he’d taken a couple of hundred photos last night at his sister’s party and at Henry’s) so he’s still in bed as I write! 

James got up around 12:30. He apparently was kept up till late by a party that was going on in the complex. I had been doing mathschallenge.net stuff all morning, so I was far from bored. It was kinda nice to just chill out and do some coding for fun. It’s rather addictive. I guess it has to do with the whole ranking system. I think I’m up to 2% genius. People always try harder when they are being ranked. 

Anyway, we eventually got moving for the day – showered and shaved and all that. For lunch (breakfast?) we stopped at Pollos Malé, a tasty BBQ chicken place. We both had pollos a la leña, a ½ chicken, beans and a Pepsi. The beans are sort of like refried beans but they are noticeably sweeter than in the States and they are more finely ground. They were almost like a mash, with few if any distinct beans. I noted that the Pepsi didn’t taste much different from what I remember in the States. 

We noticed just before we were done that the driver’s side rear tire was flat! As we approached, the ubiquitous parking lot guard/attendant chattered to James in Spanish and ran off. Apparently he knew some guy who could fix the tire. Unfortunately for him (no tip!) he didn’t find his friend. Just about that time, the owner of the place (Marco Male) showed up and he gave us a ride to a car wash nearby where James knew they had some tire puncture fixer stuff. We got the tire filled enough to drive to a local gas station where we got it pumped up all the way then headed for PriceSmart (owned by Costco – you can even get Kirkland brand stuff there!) to get the tire patched. 

Things were moving slowly so we took off, but circled back since we couldn’t very well drive a long way w/ a tire that was potentially going to go flat. The spare tire is unusable since James doesn’t have the key to unlock it! We parked back at PriceSmart and sat for about 20 minutes debating what to do before saying screw it and heading for the hills. The interesting thing about San Jose is that the hills are where all the poor people live. And they have some just killer views. But you can see the poverty level rise in concert w/ the altitude. 

Along the way, we stopped at a sports court and James and I got out to take some photographs of local skateboard kids. I held the lenses while James snapped dozens of pictures. At one point, a group of them came up to me (I was sitting to the side w/ 2 lenses in hand for quick-changes) and started talking to me in Spanish. I had to tell them “no entiendo espanol”. I could hear the word go out asking if anybody knew how to speak English. 

Skateboard kids

This was actually taken a few days after I left CR, but it’s illustrative

Unfortunately, none of them did, so I just had to smile wanly as they went back to skateboarding. I was a bit disappointed because it would have been fun to even hack out any level of conversation with them, but I know about 5 words of Spanish right now. 

Moving on, we ended up cresting at probably more than 1000 ft above San Jose to spectacular views. By this time, it was getting on towards sunset (4:49PM) and we picked a spot and took a bunch of scenery photos. There are some killer views up there.
.

Photo of sunset.

Same spot, just turned to the right somewhat.

Me 

Another of me with the sunset

Given the surrounding poverty, it’s almost surprising to see a very few places where the owners are obviously rich. For the most part, this high up you see glorified shacks. 

Sunlight fading, we took the long drive back down to Escazu to do some shopping before heading back to home base. Much like the public market and the mall, all grocery stores are basically the same. Only the people and the languages on the boxes are different. The main notable feature is that the ketchup section is larger than back home. Apparently Costa Ricans really like their ketchup! 

Back home James is right now (6:40) sorting through and editing some of his photos. He got a few good ones from what I’ve seen so far. Perhaps even one that is worthy of Escazu.biz! 

I’ve been working on mathschallenge stuff since the previous paragraph. It is now 8:40 and we’re finally heading out for some dinner w/ Regina – the daughter of Mercedes and a friend of James’. 

12:40 – James and I just got back from having dinner with Regina and Sabrina who are daughters of Mercedes. Regina is a very cute 5’2” woman who works at Intel. Her older sister is much taller; probably around 5’10” and is also quite attractive. Sabrina just broke up with her boyfriend, which impressed me in a way since she came out to hang out with us. Both of them seem really nice and quite intelligent. It was easy to chat for several hours with them. We had some dinner and a few beers and just chatted the night away. Regina spotted some Mexican musical star but couldn’t think of they guy’s name or the group he was in for a while much to everybody’s amusement. We all tried to get her to go over and talk to him but she decided against that. 

Me, Sabrina (facing) and Regina

Sabrina

Regina

We stayed up late. James working on the photos he took of Regina and Sabrina while I worked on solving 3 more mathschallenge problems. Once I got my “E09” big integer class done, several problems were trivially easy to solve. I also watched James edit his photos. 

I headed off to bed around 1AM. 

Costa Rica Day 3 – 1/21/06 (Saturday)

06.01.21 – Went to the market in the morning. One thing you begin to realize is that after you’ve been to a number of markets, they are all really the same. You’ve got little stalls w/ people selling all manner of foods and crafts and you’ve got (hopefully) crowds of people milling about shopping and buying stuff. The only things that really change are the types of produce and the languages used. Even the crafts can be the same for the most part. Nevertheless, it’s still fun to see one from time to time.

At the market

James brought his camera – ever on the prowl for a photographical moment. I had a 10AM appointment with Mercedes, who does Cranio-Sacral massage/therapy so we only spent about 20 minutes milling about before James dropped me off at Mercedes’ house. She is a nice-looking older woman — originally from Argentina I’m told – and speaks fairly decent English. The CS massage was interesting. Only the 2nd massage I’d ever had. Her touch is significantly gentler than the shiatsu massage I had 3 weeks prior. I pointed out my back issues, but when she poked and prodded, she could generate no pain. I guess some of my back issues are all in my head. She worked all sorts of spots. 2+ hours passed surprisingly quickly. I guess I was a bit tranced out at times. Afterwards we headed out for lunch and then to the mall. The mall in Escazu is much like any other mall in the world. My favorite store there was Carrion, which is a department store. I just liked the name. We stopped by the Apple store of course and then headed to a computer/electronics store to get some Cat5 cables. They had to manufacture them, so we left and wandered the mall. I did notice that the crowds were somewhat older and there were a lot more families than you would see in a mall here.

After picking up the cables, we headed back home where I figured out that, oops! I needed to have a cable/dsl router and not just a hub! Duh! I was a bit embarrassed about that. Fortunately, I paid the lion’s share of the cost. As it turns out, there’s an unsecured wireless network w/in range so I can hop onto the internet anyway. The speed is dreadfully slow, but who am I to complain?

While we were waiting for something to happen, I started working on the stuff at mathschallenge.net, which is a computer/math problem solving web-site. They post problems that you can solve w/ the computer. One of the things they tell you is that all of the problems can be solved using about 1 minute of CPU time. That helps you to think creatively about solving the problems instead of just using brute force methods.

Anyway, I solved a couple of problems already! So I’m officially 1% genius. There are guys who have solved all 106 problems. Very impressive. I’ve got a long way to go. Now I’m kinda addicted. I keep thinking about solving more problems. At least it’s good practice.

After we both took some cat naps, we headed out to his sister Laura’s place. She was having a small party there. We hung out there for a short while and took off. He wanted to take me to a few other places to meet some people he knew but restaurant was closed so no go.

Ending up back at his place, we hung out for a while and BS’d and surfed the web. I worked on mathschallenge stuff and wrote in here.

A few hours later we headed out to Henry’s. It’s run by a Columbian dude named Henry. I guess the family is Jewish and the whole family left after Henry was attacked by robbers (they owned several restaurants down in Columbia) and left in a wheelchair. CR is much, much safer than Columbia. Even so, it’s strange here in Escazu that nearly all the cars have car alarms. The streets are generally quite narrow so very frequently as you’re driving along you’ll here the “chirp, chirp” of car alarms warning you to stay back.

There are patches in Escazu where you could think that you’re in Southern California. The streets are nice, the buildings well-cared for, the cars nice, etc. But these only last for a block or two. James lives in a really nice condo complex – certainly worthy of any place in the States. However, literally outside the gates (guarded 24/7 by a couple of security guards), you’re plunked into the 3rd world: rough streets, run-down buildings that are almost shacks, etc. There is prosperity here, but only in small patches.

James was telling me that some people believe that a lot of the construction that’s taking place in Escazu is drug money being laundered. I thought that at least they are doing something productive with their money. Building a condo or shopping complex lasts a lot longer and benefits a lot more people than buying a Ferrari (not sure why you’d want to own one down here as the roads suck!!) or hookers or some such.

Anyway, Henry’s was quite busy with people. James would leave me alone to run around photographing people, which wouldn’t have been so bad except we were outside and he took the catbird seat. So half the time, I was sitting by myself in a walkway outside the main room facing the wrong direction to people watch!! The only guy I could see w/o turning around was the security guard who checked people’s IDs.

Costa Rica Day 2 – 1/20/06 (Friday)

06.01.20 – Woke up several times during the night. Overall, the couch pads were comfortable but sometimes when I would shift position, they’d separate and I’d have to wake up enough to put them together. Even though I’d gotten 2 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours or so I still woke up after just 6 hours of sleep! I was bumming about that! I laid on the bed and kinda drifted in and out of sleep for a while before James got me going.

After showering and getting ready, I James led me to believe that we “just going out for some breakfast”. However, we ended up instead heading to the mountains. 1/2 there, he decided to turn around and we headed towards the Pacific instead! Stopping at a small stand for some Coke, we looked out on a nice vista.

James at the rest stop.

Along the way to the rain-forest and waterfalls. Not at the rest stop.

From there we headed back to where we were!!! I was a bit annoyed at that since we had been driving for several hours and had reached neither the mountains NOR the ocean!! After retracing our steps up the mountain, we finally made it up and over the ridge to some cool waterfalls.

Me and the waterfall

We hung out there to take some pictures and chill. I had to take a piss, and James told me to go stand by the side of the road and pee. He said that all the guys down there don’t have any shyness about taking a leak on the side of the road w/ people everywhere driving by. I was self-conscious but needed to go so I did it. I hurried up and didn’t completely empty my bladder, fearing a tourist bus would happen by at the inopportune moment.We headed further down the road for another 20 minutes or so before turning around to head back to San Jose. There are so many sights to describe that it’s hard to know where to begin.- forgot camera cable – only had 7 photos left on camera! 

Here’s some notes I made while thinking about my experiences so far:

- lots of incredible scenery – very very steep hills – incredible vistas and scarily steep drop-offs that are concealed by vegetation. Roads were narrow. A large truck and a tour bus just had BARELY enough room to pass each other. They had to stop first to give themselves enough time to figure out where to go tough. It was tight. Like about 1 or 2” to spare.

- overturned dump-truck on the way back

- even rich places have a bit of a run-down feel to them

- poor places are pretty primitive

- Inka Grill. Peruvian food. Good food but they have a lot of food that includes shrimp, so we had to be careful about that. Table behind James had a couple who were NOT happy. They were very tense. I think they were breaking up. The woman was quite attractive, which is why I even paid attention.

- stole internet to get online to check mail. Nothing was going on that needed my attention. Also downloaded a driver for my camera since I forgot to do that OR bring a cable along w/ me. Fortunately, it’s a mini USB interface and James’ camera uses a mini USB interface so I was good to go. The MS picture download software SUCKS ASS!! It renamed my files and it re-did the date of photograph! Just fucking stupid!! So partway, I started to download the files manually. Of course, I told the MS package to delete the pictures after it downloaded them, so the two operations began to clash. I got most of the photos w/ the original name at least. The most important ones are the New ones. I think I have all of the older photos already. But it’s just annoying that MS software did that. I’m so pissed. Of course, the *other* CF card is completely empty, so I just had bad luck choosing the wrong card.

Around 10PM, I took a short nap because I was feeling tired. Then we went out and hit up a couple of bars. 1st was Mas Tkila. It was quite crowded and they had a live band playing. We hung out there for a beer’s worth of time. Then we went cruising around, I saw the house that James used to own and we noticed 3 guys in a pickup truck sitting at the end of the street near his old house. James thought that was very suspicious so we parked there for a couple of minutes while we waited to see what they were up to. They seemed to become rather agitate by our being parked there. James had his cell phone out and I was starting to feel a bit tense because we’d be outnumbered if they decided to come over to the car. Eventually they started their pickup up and pulled forward just as a homeowner came out to talk with them. We took off since it looked like things were somewhat amicable w/ the homeowner.

The next place we hit was a new bar called Utopia in Santa Ana (pronounced “santana”). We checked out a couple of other places that were in the same complex. Once was an Irish bar and I could see a Guinness sign in there so I told James we must go back there at some point to have a Guinness.

Utopia was pricey to get into — $5 each and we ended up staying there for about 15 minutes. It’s definitely the happening spot. It was crowded with the “beautiful people”. There were quite a number of good looking women in there. James unfortunately was bothered by the artificial smoke. One thing I noticed is that all the guys were either clean shaven, bearded or goateed. There were no mustaches to be found. Thinking back to Mas Tkila I don’t think I saw any mustachioed people there either.

Afterwards, we drove up some roads along a route that James used to take when he went for walks from his house for exercise and then headed back here.

One other thing that struck me tonight was the lack of traffic in the mid late evening. Around 11PM in Seattle, you’d see cars everywhere, but it was really rather quiet. There were the happening bars, but these places are separated by a number of miles and even then you didn’t see a tremendous number of cars on the road. I get the impression the people don’t bar hop as much as, say, in Seattle.