Today was my final full day in Costa Rica. Today is May Day, and Danny, a tour guide,
went to downtown San Jose to be in a parade with other workers, including his
fellow tour guides. I slept in, as did
Sophi, who didn’t have to work today.
So about 10:15 we headed to the hotel where expediciones
tropicales was to pick me up. We chatted
about the fact that yesterday when Danny dropped me off, he’d met her old
friend. But we thought she wouldn’t be
working today, so Sophi dropped me off and I went inside. The friend was, of course, at the desk. I called and texted Sophi “can you please
come back to the hotel?!?” I didn’t tell
her why.
She showed up in a few minutes and I waved her inside. She laid eyes on her friend (her former best
friend with whom she hadn’t spent time in several years), and they started hugging
and celebrating. It was great!!
At that moment, of course, the driver showed up, and we took
off. We did manage to stop by the wall
and take pictures of the sign that says “Antes de ser viejo y sabio, hay que
ser joven y estupido” (Before you can be old and wise, you have to be young and
stupid). So I got that picture and we
took off through San Jose. Got a couple
of shots of the ever-present McDonald’s ads (I don’t think I’ve been anywhere
in the world without seeing at least one of the following: the Golden Arches,
McDonald’s, or Burger King. All three,
along with Pizza Hut, Tony Roma’s, Subway, and I don’t know what else, are all
in Costa Rica). We drove past the
Central Valley, and I got some shots of the soccer stadium (the park beside it
used to be the airport, but as the area grew, the airport was moved to Alajuela,
and the former airport site became the site of the soccer stadium and a
park.
We drove up to the Barceló San Jose Palacio, an apparently
luxury hotel, where we waited for a transfer from another group. They arrived,
and we headed up to Poasito where we would make the final transfers, some going
to the waterfalls/botanical gardens/zoo, and others going to
Dokka/Grecia/Sarchi. On the way, I had
very nice conversation with a young man named Tomas. He’s a biomedical engineer and travels all
through Latin America. He loves animals,
so I showed him my dolphin, parrot and stingray pics and talked to him about
visiting Jamaica. He thinks he’ll do it.
We got up to Poasito and we all split up. Our group was
mostly Spanish speaking: A mother and adult
daughter; a mother and adult son (Rodolfo, who gave me a pin that is a Mexican
flag) from DF, Mexico; a woman who’s Guatemalan but has lived in Nicaragua for
30 years; two friends, one from Birmingham and one a retired professor who’s
just moved from Boston to NYC, and me.
Before leaving the Central Valley, we’d passed by a park
with a big statue of a coffee bean.
Coffee undergirds much of this economy, and I forget how much is grown
here, but 99% of it is exported. We got to the Dokka plantation. We saw the Arabica plants, saw the coffee
picking buckets, saw the Eucalyptus trees and banana trees that are also grown
on the plantation, and saw lots of coffee beans on the tree. They are still green now; they will turn red
when ripe.
Once ripened, they go through a process of being sifted ad skinned
and washed and air-dried and toasted. We
saw a big bodega (in the traditional, warehouse sense). We looked at the various stations for each of
this and got to see the different types of beans and the effects of different
kinds of drying. We went to the roasting
room where we saw the coffee being roasted and packaged (all by hand).
After the coffee tour, we had another typical Costa Rican
lunch. After that, we got to look at souvenirs,
then headed down the mountain to Grecia.
In Grecia is a church made entirely of metal. The story goes that the coffee barons told
the citizens of the town that if they wanted citizenship, they had to build a
church in the town. They built a wooden
church which burned down. Then they
built a stone church but it was destroyed in an earthquake. Finally, they had a metal church shipped in
from Belgium. It arrived in pieces, and
it was years before they got someone who could put it together. But they did, they painted it with some sort
of red Rustoleum-like paint, and it’s been standing ever since (don’t know when
it went up; think it was the late 1800s).
We went in to worship and take pictures, and then I went to a park and
took pics of a guy building a replica of the church. Leaving the church and heading down the
mountain we passed through sugar cane processing plants, but didn’t stop.
Our final stop was at Sarchi. Sarchi is where they make oxcarts. The oxcart is sort of a national symbol of
Costa Rica. In the late 1800s, they were
used to transport coffee and sugar cane.
We saw a monument to the Oxcart, which was a giant oxcart in a public
square. Across from there was another
church, so we went in to worship and take pics again. Next we went to the actual place where they
make the carts. It was a holiday, but
there were still craftsmen around, doing both the making and the decorating. We
bought gifts and headed home. Rodolfo
and his mom invited me to Mexico.
As I travel around, I wonder why it is that we Americans
make so much money, but I see so few of us on vacations. I wonder why so many people from “poorer”
countries can afford to vacation for 2 and 3 weeks at a time, but we often can’t? I wonder if it has to do with
priorities? I don’t know, but do know
that I’m going to start saving now for next year.
You can find pics from the day here:
(https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10202870766824041.1073741878.1048146180&type=1&l=ec0f18d16d)
