SAN DIEGO — I planned a vacation in Costa Rica. As usual I searched every airline, travel agency, garage sale and the entire catalogue of the Library of Congress for the cheapest airfare. My efforts were rewarded with a very inexpensive airline to transport us to this Central American paradise. It’s a local carrier accepting trades for tickets. They bartered for furniture, live chickens, goats, and S&H Green Stamps. The only things they would not accept were bananas, the biggest export cash crop of the tiny country.
The airline is inexpensive because it doesn’t have to pay landing fees at San Jose Airport, the only airport that can handle jet aircraft in the country. They parachute you into the city. The ticket agent convinced us the distance from the airport to the center of the city where our hotel was located was quite a long commute in heavy traffic. Parachuting was the most practical and fun way to arrive. Incidentally, for those who want to make reservations after reading this tip, the name of the airline is “Whee.”
Our flight took longer than most airlines, again because of the value. The crack sales people at the airline insist they use Zeppelin air ships, “So passengers could enjoy the scenery more during the trip, and didn’t suffer from jet lag when they arrived.”
We rented a car and traveled over most of the West Virginia-sized country in ten days. There is no army in this tiny overcrowded nation, but there are many police road checks, especially on the weekend. They inspect locals for current licenses, guns, and condoms. Our vehicle was always waived through, because a sticker on our license plate identified my wife as having been through menopause.
There are 23 mini-ecosystems in Costa Rica. This creates problems in dressing for the weather. You can go through cool mountain weather, tropical rainforest, desert dryness, and balmy seashore on a Sunday drive through the countryside. I solved the problem each morning by donning thermal underwear, underneath my bathing suit, a raincoat, pith helmet, and galoshes.
The only other sizable city in Costa Rica besides San Jose is Limon, a seaport on the gulf shore of the country. It’s a town of 50,000. It’s an impoverished place. We were booked by our travel agent into a hotel a few miles outside of Limon, on the beach. At first glance, the two-story structure seemed like a decent place. Not too luxurious, which fit our second-class lifestyle, but it had a unique setting. The building cantilevered out over the water. The steel pillars supporting the building perched right in the water on top of a flat rock outcrop. Light foamy waves lapped against the barnacle encrusted concrete footings. A closer look around the premises and I came to the conclusion the proprietor of the hotel was probably the brother- in- law of the building inspector. The rooms were constructed of hollow red clay blocks fired to semi-hardness. The same kiln used to fire pots used in raising flowers. The kind of pots that disintegrate in a garden after a year of watering.
The outdoor restaurant had a panoramic view of the sea. We were offered a choice of tables, “With or without exposed beam ceiling.” Exposed beam is where the stucco plaster had fallen revealing the overhead supports. In spite of this setting, we had a decent dinner while watching large banana-laden freighters in the distance plowing their way north to distant harbors in the United States. The cargo in the ships hold eventually appeared alongside three balls of ice cream in Baskin and Robbins shops throughout America.
In the evening, safe beneath the covers, I remarked to my wife, “If there is a good strong shake here, I think this place will come down.” Prophetic words. A few short years later, there was a devastating earthquake whose epicenter was smack in the middle of this unfortunate area. Many people were killed, and the hotel disappeared from existence. The land rose up, and the shoreline moved several miles out to what had previously been gulf waters.
A couple of days later in our journey we stopped for lunch near the foot of an active volcano. We had lunch at a typical “Burre,” a grass roofed primitive but clean open-air restaurant. We befriended the only other customers, a traveling young English couple in their late twenties. They had camped directly beneath the volcano the previous evening. “We didn’t get much sleep,” they said, “the volcano burped and roared all night long which unsettled us.”
Twenty years earlier this volcano exploded suddenly, killing hundreds of people living nearby. After lunch, I took video pictures of them with the mountain in the background. The volcano obligingly hiccupped and belched a puff of smoke into the sky while I was filming them telling their story.
*
Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego.