Tico Storm in Quepos

On my way up to “estados confundidos” I stopped in Costa Rica to see my friend Fiorela (she’s a Peruvian Yoko Ono). This was on December 15th of this year. My port of origin is Santiago, Chile, where I’ve been living for over a year now, teaching English and filming a documentary about a Mapuche radio program. My three-part trajectory to LAX (Santiago-Lima, Lima-San Jose, San Jose-Los Angeles) afforded me this unique opportunity to revisit the country I had left only a year ago on the tail-end of our majestic drive down the Pan-American Highway (stay-tuned for future posts on this ground-breaking voyage and the documentary we filmed on the way). It was in San Jose in 2004 where I met Fiorela. She had just started to work at the hostal we were staying at near the center of the city, right across from a magnificent Argentinean restaurant with the best empanadas I’ve ever had (and also across from the San Jose tribunales de justicia, just as important). San Jose turned out to be our last destination on the journey for the three of us (Monique, Spencer and I). I continued on to Panama on a bus, and from there I took a plane to Lima where I stayed for a day before continuing south into Chile. In San Jose, I had needed at least a week to sell my Nissan Maxima (“Maximus”). I ended up selling my car to a used car dealer whose cousin we had met earlier in Liberia (North of Costa Rica). On that night, back on the 18th of September, I remember we almost crashed on the highway, which is why we decided to stay in Liberia for the night. I remember feeling extremely exhausted from the whole trip and was looking forward to checking into a decent hotel with a decent bed. On my first visit to San Jose I also sold my tent to another guy, Fabian, who was also working at the hostal and who eventually became our good friend as well.

Fiorela is a very special person and I care about her very much, although our relationship hasn’t always been that clear and I’ve been less than patient with her on many occasions (her patience with me, on the other hand, shows almost no limits). In any case, seeing that I’d be forced to switch planes in San Jose, I decided to conjure up a few days at the beach in Costa Rica with Fiorela.

I arrived in San Jose in the early afternoon and had to wait for Fiorela outside the terminal for about two hours. In those two hours I observed the familiar interactions between cultures, for example, between the Tico Taxi drivers, or the Tico tourist agency “representatives” and the gringos just arrived from Don’t Mess With Texas. It never seizes to amaze me just how arrogant North Americans are, especially when they travel. I don’t know if it’s because their stress level rises and so they are inclined to counteract by showing very little patience and a lot of intolerance. Not all Americans are like this in any case, but it saddens me to think how low Latin Americans are forced to go in order to “suck up” to these obnoxious people whose behavior is excused because they bring the money into the country. It’s also a pity that, for the most part, the people who really need the money never get it; gringos will prefer to get ripped off by a local who speaks educated English rather than deal with “people on the street” who “always wanna rob me”. The relationship between the North American and the Latin American will always be a one way relationship of subservience. I spoke with a young Taxi Driver myself, interesting guy, young, full of pride. When I talk to people on my travels, I try to invert the hegemony that has governed north and south interactions since Theodore Roosevelt, I’m always there to learn from people, even the woman who cooks “maduros” on the street knows more than I do. I try never to forget that. Of course I get annoyed when people treat me strictly as a potential customer and refuse to see me as something more than a gringo tourist (often people will continue to speak to me in broken English even after I’ve made it clear that I’m fluent in Spanish and that for all intents and purposes (as far as they know), I’m a Chilean and not a gringo. My cousins back in Chile would laugh at that statement. In any case, he talked about wanting to return to his studies at the university (the taxi-driver, we’re talking about the taxi driver!).

Fiorela arrived after a while and we went straight to her house to drop off my stuff. She had been burnt on her shoulder by a flat iron, which is why she was late. After packing a few things, we were off to the “coca-cola” bus terminal to catch a micro for the beach. Walking through down-town San Jose reminded me of mexico city but on a much smaller scale. Ticos are alive, you can sense the overwhelming energy and it makes you believe that people are alive. In Los Angeles, for the most part, the people you encounter are all dead, they’re lifeless, they’re walking droids, consumers of roles and identities. You don’t see that in San Jose, but I do sense an overall feeling of desperation. Everyone sells crap. Everywhere you look, people are selling and selling crap, some call out the name of the piece of crap they’re selling, others have little signs that communicate its price, others sing about crap, and the veterans of crap selling just sit on a stool and get old waiting for some lucky customer to buy that yellow plastic comb with the rubber handle you always wanted. The eternal hunt for someone to buy that pathetic thing you’re selling. It’s so decadent. No less decadent in the states, the only difference is that in the states the selling has a much more professional ambiance to it, so much more “respected” and you don’t really see the person who sells that same pathetic thing. There’s so much more glamour to it. In the end, it’s the same mediocre relationship between human beings.

“Quepos is much cheaper” we were told, so we decided to take the bus directly to this sleeper fishing town hoping to catch some sleep in a decent hostal and then head to the Manuel Antonio nature reserve the following morning. I tried to sleep, but it was too uncomfortable. We arrived exhausted at midnight and thought only of rest. The plan was to step-off the bus right in front of a comfortably cheap (or cheaply comfortable) hostal and rest, that was it, we didn’t want anymore excitement. Unfortunately, Quepos had decided to welcome us with a tropical storm of mammoth proportions (ok, maybe not a storm officially, but it was raining hard). Since Quepos is lower in altitude than the ocean, all the rainwater passing by Quepos doesn’t actually pass by Quepos. It just stays there. So, the streets and sidewalks were completely flooded. We waded through the water, which was up to our knees, for about an hour looking for a hostel, as cars drove by, huge waves would crash on us making visibility very difficult. I felt like I was in Cancun mexico. By the time we found one we were drenched, fatigued, and….. thirsty. The owner of the hostal was exploding with personality. The last thing he wanted to do was get up from his desk to help us, he just gave us a few towels and mumbled a few words in Tico. Basically, he told us to fuck off and leave him alone. “Fuck off!”, he said, in so many words. Since we weren’t sleepy we decided to go to a bar and get drunk (like you do). We found a floating restaurant full of Quepos residents who didn’t seem too impressed by the absolute flooding of their town. I remember noticing the level of calm inherent in the people at the restaurant; it’s a different world, a different pace. We talked for a few hours, drank a few Imperial’s and then swam back to the hotel.

We woke up the next morning and the sun had dried everything. The only visible hint of the storm’s wrath were the people sweeping water out of their homes and places of business. We left in search of breakfast. The best thing to eat in Costa Rica is the garden variety Gallo Pinto plate. This consists of fried rice and beans accompanied by your choice of meat, chicken, cheese, egg, etc, and a serving of maduros (fried bananas) on the side. This is heaven. There’s nothing like it anywhere. After a very satisfying breakfast, we were off to Manuel Antonio to spend the day at the beach. A very interesting marimba band playing on a makeshift platform in the “bus terminal” bid us farewell as we drove up the mountain, into the jungle and away from Quepos.