by John Higham
When we left Thailand we had said good-bye to September’s mother, Marie. When we arrived in Costa Rica, we said hello to September’s brother, Perin, his wife Ashley, and their three children.
We had come to Monteverde because of its much-hyped cloud forests and rain forest tours that were conducted along walkways suspended a hundred feet and more in the air, or by whizzing above the forest canopy on a series of zip lines. The hype was well deserved, although Katrina and Jordan feigned polite interest. After having no other kids their age to play with for more than 30 straight weeks, what they really wanted to do was to spend time with their cousins building a fort behind our cabin.
Katrina’s Journal, January 21
When I woke up this morning, I found a big black scorpion in the shower. It was pretty cool. It saved me from taking a shower! After breakfast we worked on the fort with our cousins. But after a few hours, Mom and Dad made us stop so that we could do a tour over the rain forest on zip lines. Fortunately, there was still enough daylight left after riding on the zip lines for us to work on our fort again. It is almost finished.
When the fort was completed it was time to move on, and we descended to the beaches of Montezuma. Within the space of about 40 miles, the scenery and environment changed from pleasant temperatures in the mountainous forest to hot sun, sand, and surf.
You don’t just “pass through” Montezuma. After a two-hour ferry crossing, then a couple of more hours to the end of a long and bumpy dirt road, Montezuma has that magical quality that makes you forget there was ever life at the beginning of the road.
That magical quality also has the tendency to create a population that comes and forgets to leave; it became immediately clear where all the Deadheads went after Jerry Garcia died. All those college-age kids spend their days not wearing enough clothes and lining the only street selling handmade necklaces, T-shirts, earrings, navel rings, and other rings that I don’t even want to know where they are intended to go.
• • •
September came running down the worn trail from town. Trying to catch her breath, she said, “The EMT is on the way.”
The waves at the beaches of Montezuma were a bit on the wild side. When I predicted someone would get hurt, September chided me, “You’re such an Eeyore!” Little did I know that the “someone” was going to be one of the adults. September’s brother Perin had been body surfing when a wave had used him to demonstrate a perfect pile driver.
We had already learned that health care varies dramatically throughout the world—not the quality, but the administration. For example, we couldn’t even get doctors in Denmark, Turkey, and Japan to take our money. When the EMT showed up at the beach in Montezuma, Costa Rica, bearing a credit card reader that was connected to the world via satellite phone, I knew that accounts receivable wouldn’t be an issue.
The EMT spoke excellent English, and surprise of surprises, he wasn’t an EMT at all, but a physician. What happened next was a bit of a blur, and I’m not even the one who went into shock. There were a lot of needles and dire talk of worst-case scenarios. When it was settled that Perin’s credit card was valid and that his insurance would reimburse all the expenses, a four wheel drive ambulance took him and his wife to an airstrip 50 minutes and 15 rough-and-tumble miles away. From there a private chartered plane, complete with an EMT, flew them another 50 minutes to the capital.
Poof. They were gone. And we had no way of communicating to see if Perin’s injuries would require anything like amputation. The following day was dedicated to reuniting anxious children with parents. The trip to San Jose took Perin and Ashley two hours; it was 16 by car and ferry.
When we finally reunited Perin and Ashley with their three children, Perin was wearing a sling. “I see all the important bits are still attached,” I observed.
“Not quite. I was administered a massive wallet-ectomy.” Perin explained that the hospital staff seemed captivated by this concept of private medical insurance, and how, regardless of the procedure, insurance would “cover it.” Even when it was clear that his injury was limited to a separated shoulder, the hospital insisted on an overnight stay and whipped up a potpourri of drugs and tests to keep themselves amused.
“Clearly, they’ve done this before,” I said.
“Yeah, it seems that it has become a cottage industry for the doctor. He has his own private ambulances cruising the country looking for adventurous souls who push their adventure too far. When the hospital finally let me go, the doctor was nice enough to offer me a cash discount for services rendered. One thousand dollars.”
Over the previous months we had seen evidence of multitiered health services: a public tier where services are free or low cost, and another private tier that presumably offers better and more upscale service. It would seem that the darling of the medical system in Costa Rica is yet a third tier—foreign tourists with insurance.
Perin explained to the doctor that his cash supply was a tad short of the required amount, so the doctor eagerly offered to drive him to the nearest bank. It turns out that the doctor started demanding cash after a surfer suffered a partially severed penis in an accident and then put a stop payment on a check, stiffing the doctor for the reattachment fee.
• • •
Post wallet-ectomy, Perin, Ashley, and family went home and we found ourselves in La Fortuna, known for its proximity to rain forests and Volcan Arenal. I was making breakfast at our hostel and September was doing math with Jordan. I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying, but as there wasn’t anything rattling around in my head at the time, September’s voice came into focus.
“James works at a store 15 hours per week. If James works five days per week and works the same number of hours per day, how many hours a day does James work?”
“James must be French!” Jordan responded.
A wave of relief rushed over me. I had worried that our children might be too young to learn anything by traveling, but here was proof that they could absorb important information from their surroundings.
One of the big pastimes in La Fortuna is to sit in the natural hot springs, go to the swim-up bar, and order margaritas in the shadow of an active volcano spewing red lava. Using the logic that everyone else was doing it, so it must be okay, we went and let the kids order non-alcoholic margaritas.
Jordan sat at the swim-up bar and wore this huge grin. He kept talking to himself, but the only thing he was saying was, “I really like this place. I really like this place. I really like this place …”
I was worried he might injure his brain with all that fervor, so I interrupted. “So Jordan, why is it that you like this place?”
“I don’t know.” Which is, of course, the standard kid reply to everything.
The eruptions weren’t tremendous, but the volcano was impressive. At one point a cloud of ash shot up several hundred feet in the air. As it got dark, we could see the glowing red quite clearly on the mountain.
Then Jordan did something that surprised me. He actually volunteered information. Usually I have to use a crowbar to pry information out of him but he became a spring of nonstop volcano facts that I never knew was inside him.
“Oh, really?” I said. “And how is it you suddenly know so much about volcanoes?”
“We studied them in first grade.”
Ah. Come to think of it, all my volcano knowledge probably went back to the first grade, too. I guess Mount Vesuvius didn’t do it for him when we were in Pompeii, but the red glow flowing down Volcan Arenal was enough to bring out the data that had been hibernating inside him.
Just as suddenly, Jordan blurted out, “I really like science.”
Where did that come from? It didn’t matter. My heart swelled. There was hope.
• • •
We came to love almost everything about Costa Rica—everything except the money. Prior to Costa Rica, the most obnoxious coins were Swedish, where the five-kroner coins are roughly the size of a hubcap and are worth a fa
ir amount of money. If you had one in your pocket, there was no mistaking that it was there.
But the Costa Rican coins are worse. First of all, there are eight different denominations. Second, they look alike: There are four silver and four bronze, but all are nearly the same size. Their sheer bulk means if you have a pocketful you are either trying to get rid of them or you are on the way to see your chiropractor.
Trying to get rid of our coins is how we discovered that Costa Ricans are terrible at arithmetic. In Cambodia, the street kids selling newspapers could instantly calculate change and seamlessly make transactions using any combination of three currencies.
That ain’t happening in Costa Rica.
I was buying groceries for 4,500 colones. I had a 5,000-colone note, but I did not want 500 colones in those infernal coins. Since I also had 500 colones in coins, I handed the cashier these plus the 5,000-colone note, expecting a 1,000-colone note in return.
The cashier looked at the money I handed him with utter confusion across his face, then handed back the 500 colones in coins, opened his cash register, and handed me another 500 colones in coins as change. Now I had 1,000 colones in coins. He acted like I was trying to rip him off. I stuffed the coins in my pocket and limped away.
If this had been an isolated incident it would not be noteworthy, but math huddles—a stumped cashier who had to call for backup support—were common.
During math huddles, we would give the problem to Jordan to solve, to see if he could beat the cashier. Typically the cashier would call for backup, and two adults would punch a calculator until they got the answer they liked best. Jordan liked being able to out-cipher an adult, and finally started to see the point of his morning math lessons.
John’s Journal, February 2
I remember leaving Greece thinking that our trip had really just begun. The people in Europe are not that different from those in middle-class America. But everywhere we have traveled since then has been hugely different. “What makes us different?” is a question that lately keeps me up at night. Why are the street kids in Cambodia such whizzes at arithmetic and the clerks behind the cash registers in Costa Rica so abysmal? Why are stores in France open 30 hours a week while the stores in Turkey are open 18-plus hours a day? Why are Germans so fanatical about punctuality, and the Italians so … late all the time? And last, but not least, why does the entire world, other than the United States., speak more than one language and Americans just expect that one of those is English?
I certainly don’t know the answers; however, it is equally intriguing how we are all the same. We all just want to raise our kids and have a few of the comforts of life. It’s odd how many homes I have seen of the desperately poor that sport a color TV.
One of the best things about travel is meeting people who live life differently and think about things in ways you’ve never dreamed of. Perhaps no one person embodied all that was different from me more than Daruka, an American who happens to live in Uganda. He and his Arizonan girlfriend had made a rendezvous in Costa Rica.
Daruka was easygoing; you couldn’t imagine an easier person to talk to. He was a merchant marine. To maintain your status as a merchant marine, Daruka explained, you have to work at least a hundred days per year. If gaps in employment span more than 300 days, you lose seniority and have to recertify your training. So Daruka worked the system. He worked 100 days and then took a 300-day vacation. His hundred days’ worth of pay covered all his expenses in Uganda.
I admired the guy as someone who worked to live and not the other way around. Daruka asked, “So, what do you do for a living?”
I was at a loss for words. Back home in Silicon Valley your career defines your status in the socioeconomic structure. I used to relish the looks people gave me when I told them I was a rocket scientist. Yet, I choked on those words now, realizing it would sound hollow. All I said in response to his question was, “I’m a taking a break from being a cubicle warrior,” and went on to explain that we were traveling around the world, never explaining about what had long been such an integral part of who I was.
• • •
The tiny town of Tortuguero is another haven from the world of cars. Like all such places we had visited, the quality of life just seems so much richer in the absence of cars. Access to Tortuguero, on the Caribbean coast, is by boat or plane, and like many such places, getting there would be half of the adventure.
Our shuttle driver, Juan, needed very little encouragement to talk. Juan was to drive us from La Fortuna to a place called La Geest, and from there we would take a boat the rest of the way to Tortuguero. Juan embodied Costa Rica’s rallying cry of Pura Vida! which is literally interpreted as “pure life.” Juan was full of life and love for his country and wanted to make sure his passengers appreciated his country as much as he did.
Juan pointed out every tree and bird to us on our drive, slowing down and offering to take our picture in front of, say, a coffee bush. It wasn’t just toucans and coffee bushes that got Juan excited, though. I have never seen an adult get so excited to see cows before. I thought he might roll down his window and start mooing at them.
Juan told us a lot about Costa Rica, such as that the country is proud it has no army. To think that a country was comfortable enough with its place in the world to negate the need for an army was intriguing.
This was juxtaposed with what Juan said next. “Over the past several years immigrants have been flocking in from Nicaragua and Colombia, fleeing poverty and war. Over one million of them! It burdens the healthcare system and is why you see so much razor wire in San José.”
I wondered how much fact there was in Juan’s statements and how much was hyperbole. With Costa Rica’s population at four million, it was difficult to imagine one in four people were illegal immigrants. I was reminded again about our similarities, in spite of obvious differences: Juan from a country with no army, we from the country with the biggest army, both of us from countries struggling with real and perceived immigrant problems. This was just for starters.
“Would you like to see some iguanas?” Juan asked, taking the conversation in a completely different direction.
We had seen iguanas before, so we politely declined. “No, thanks. We just want to get to Tortuguero.”
“Oh, you have never seen iguanas like this before. You will love it.” With that comment lingering in the air, Juan made the detour to see the iguanas.
He stopped at a bridge that was already loaded with tourists, each with a camera stuck to his face. I politely stuck a camera to my face, snapped a few iguana photos, and got back in the car.
After we left the iguanas and had driven for another half hour, Juan asked, “Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“Okay,” said Juan, “we’ll stop at a restaurant.”
“But we’re not hu —”
We stopped anyway, and he led us into a small, outdoor roadside cafe.
“What would you like to eat?” Juan asked.
“Nothing.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll order you some pineapple.”
In a previous life, I think Juan was somebody’s Jewish mother.
After we were once again on our way we came to some banana trees, row after row after row. Juan came to a complete stop in the middle of the road. “Would you like to take pictures of the banana trees?”
Cars behind us started honking their horns. How was I supposed to tell Juan these weren’t the first banana trees I had ever seen? I doubted I would go home and frame the picture of the banana tree and display it prominently in my living room as a memory of our visit to Costa Rica.
By this time, Juan had rolled down his window and was shouting something to some workers in the plantation. One of the workers got up, walked to a metal pole, and flipped a switch.
It wasn’t until then that I noticed a long span of metal track suspended about ten feet off the ground, hanging from which every three feet or so were hundreds, no, thousands of bunches of banan
as. The elevated track paralleled the road for several hundred feet and then disappeared as it wound its way through the trees.
The track sprang to life and started to move the bananas through the field, and then—surprise!—right across the road.
We were at a bona fide banana crossing.
The track crossed the road right in front of us and then on to a processing plant. When the banana track was moving it created a little train that chugged right across the road with the bananas hanging at about windshield height. I wondered how many motorcyclists had caught a bunch in the face when not paying attention.
And yes, I took a picture of the banana train. It is now framed and displayed in my living room. Really.
• • •
La Geest is no more than a dock on a river in the middle of a massive banana plantation. We boarded a boat that instantly reminded us of the boats on the Jungle River Cruise at Disneyland, except the captain didn’t tell lame jokes, and the crocodiles weren’t fake.
When our jungle river cruise came to a rest an hour later, we were in the village of Tortuguero, population 690. A 30-second walk to the east of our guest house was the Caribbean Sea, and a 30-second walk to the west was the river on which we’d arrived. Sixty seconds south was the entrance to a national park and to the north was about a five-minute walk through town. Unfortunately, we arrived three months too early to observe turtles coming in from the sea to lay their eggs.
John’s Journal, February 4
I have come to hate roosters. “Hate” is a very strong word. The flagrant use of it is punishable in our family, but it is applicable in this situation.
I remember my grandpa telling me when I was a little boy that when the rooster crowed, the rooster was really calling out my grandpa’s name to tell him it was time to go milk the cows. Now, every time I hear a rooster crowing, I can hear the four syllables distinctly:
“MIS-TER-BLACK-BURN!”
Every time I hear one, I marvel that roosters all over the world know my grandpa’s name. Then I struggle to try to remember what country I am in and why, and then there is just no going back to sleep.