Final Full Day in Costa Rica

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)