A week or so of entries

10/29/07
It is the end of the rainy season. A full 6 hours of rain in the US means a hours indoors and lots of mud (especially if you have dogs). Here, that much rain means the road you drove down yesterday might not be passable today. We went to Avellanas yesterday, which is about 15 km or 10 miles away. It takes about an hour to get there, much of it in 4L because of the mud. It’s fun driving in it since it’s like a giant 4-wheeler, but it’s a lot of wear and tear on the car too. We went down one road 4 times, and scraped bottom each time we had to navigate the biggest mud puddle. We planned to go to Tamarindo today, which is along the same road, but after the heavy rains last night we didn’t figure we could make it, given the conditions yesterday. When we got back to our end of the road, there was one solitary guy working with a tractor and a shovel, digging trenches from each mud puddle along the road to drain the standing water off to the side of the road. We love him. He made our end of the road much better, even if it’s only a quarter of a mile or so.

Tim says that it’s not always this way, but I’ve only been here during the rainy season so this is mostly what I’ve seen of Costa Rica. This year has been worse than most, with torrential rain in this part of Guanacaste. Kids have been out of school for weeks because of the rain, and so when it rains all day there isn’t a whole lot that can be done besides staying inside and keeping dry. As a result we are burning our way through our reading materials…I hope the sun comes out to stay soon. I’m still in vacation mode, so spending a day indoors doing very little feels like wasting a day of vacation. It takes a while to get out of that mindset. We’re on Tico time now, and what happens in a day is what happens in a day…however little or much. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted but it’s still hard to get used to.







10/31/07
I doubt there will be trick-or-treating tonight, since it probably rained a foot in the last 12 hours. It also rained a foot on Monday night. The rainy season is definitely not over – far from it. Tim and I walked down to the beach today, and it looks like the entire ocean is brown…think Galveston with bigger waves. It’s not anything close to inviting at the moment, but I’ve been told it is clear and blue for months on end during the dry season. As a result of the rain, we’re already worried we don’t have enough books; luckily Steve has been here for a couple of years and has hundreds he is willing to share.

Yesterday we went to Tamarindo, which is about 25 kilometers away. Steve had some errands to run and we wanted something to do, so we offered to drive since we still have a rental car. The roads here thrash a car in a very short time, so when anyone has a rental car it is always preferred over driving your own car. Even by normal Costa Rican standards, the roads are in very bad shape right now because of all the rain. Anyway, we made it to Tamarindo without incident (the local gringo population call it “Scamagringo,” so you get an idea of how seedy it is). We went to the big, shiny new supermercado and stocked up on more groceries, then headed home. After bumping, sliding and splashing along for about an hour, we were literally a hundred yards or so from Steve’s from gate when we saw a truck ahead, stuck in the river.

Out here near the beach, on almost every road there is a creek or river you have to drive through. Some progress has been made in the last few years, but by progress I mean culverts have been put in the rivers here and there, with a little bit of dirt or rocks on either side, so even though you might not have to navigate a creek crossing anymore it hardly counts as a bridge. Only a few spots have been lucky enough to get a culvert, so there are still lots of hairball crossings. The river crossing near Steve’s house isn’t very deep or rocky, but the center and one side are super soft mud after months and months of rain and the only way to get through is to swing wide to the other side. Well, the large flatbed truck swung wide and got stuck there, leaving us no choice but to turn around and find another way home. We were close enough to hit Steve’s house with a rock, but ended up having to bump around for 20 more minutes because the river was impassable. We didn’t make it home until well after dark.







11/04/07
OK, I gotta admit, the blogging responsibility is huge right now. Our landlords e-mailed us before coming, and said, “Life in Costa Rica is about improvising with a smile.” Truer words have never been spoken. We don’t have internet access at our house, but our friend Steve does, so we check it when we can and try to be as unobtrusive about it as possible. A “high speed” internet connection here is about the same as dial-up at home…the result is uploading pictures to the blog has taken a backseat to simply staying in touch with immediate family. We have a lot of pictures but not a lot of bandwidth, so please be patient with us.

Let me say a bit about where we live: the house, although smaller than I thought, has absorbed all of our belongings and is very easy to live in; it is a wonderful place, and the beach is at the front of our property so we feel really, really lucky. That’s why, when we upload some pictures, most of what you will see are sunset pictures. J The rain seems to have stopped, and lots of the locals say we may still get one or two more storms but the rainy season is over. The roads are drying up and travel is somewhat easier without the mud. The trouble now is not the mud but the ruts created while the roads were muddy. There are many places where trucks and cars have gotten stuck and been dug out of the mud, leaving huge craters that may or may not be visible. We have the cheapest, most light-weight “SUV” (the 4WD is a button on the dash), so driving around is slow and extremely bumpy. We won’t have our own car here until 11/17 so we are about to turn in the rental car and rely on bicycle transport until our car is here. It’s a bit daunting, even though many of the locals have nothing but bikes. In the mornings we see lots of people walking to and from the Mini Super (grocery store in our neighborhood), and we are about to be among them. I think it’s about a mile from our house. We’ll be without a car for at least 2 weeks, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tim and I have been walking on the beach at least twice a day, and add the dogs to that mix and we are getting lots of exercise (and so are they). The water gets more and more clear everyday; when we first got here 2 weeks ago, the water was brown and murky with lots of debris because we are next to the mouth of the estuary. Today was the clearest day yet, and Tim and I headed out at 7 am with him on the surfboard and me on the boogie board. We both caught some fun waves right out in front of the house! As the summer goes on and there is less rain the water will get more and more clear, so the local wisdom goes. I welcome it.

It still hasn’t really sunk in that we are not just vacationing here but this is where we live. I’m not sure when that feeling will wear off; the difference is I don’t sweat the small stuff because if I didn’t spend the day the way I wanted today, I have a chance to do it right tomorrow; it’s not a day wasted on my 2 week vacation. I’ll let you know how that goes too.

11/06/07
GOING FERAL

Got no telecommunication, cables haven’t gotten out this way…

Today is the day we turned in the rental car and decided to hunker down until our Montero arrives. Knowing that our time was limited, we decided to capitalize on having a car and make a run into Santa Cruz yesterday. Santa Cruz is about 38 kilometers, and it takes about an hour to get there. I don’t know how big it is, maybe 5,000 or so, but there are lots of stores. We had an odd assortment of things we were looking for: a bicycle, a set of king size sheets, fishing hooks, a rolling pin, a rice cooker or a pan with a lid, plus we wanted to get some groceries that we can’t get at our local Mini Super. There are no large stores, everything is just a storefront and crammed from floor to ceiling with stuff. Almost every store sells rice cookers and crock pots, since many Tico kitchens have only 2 burner propane stoves that sit on the counter (we are very lucky to have a convection oven as well as a propane cooktop with 4 burners). We found fish hooks and a bike in the same store (they also sold rice cookers); we never did find king size sheets so we’ll have to keep looking.

We haven’t been off the muddy, rutted roads by the beach since we got the new Playskool rental car until yesterday. After a particularly rough ride last week (sideways in the mud, water lapping against the car door crossing a river), the Dhiatsu developed a noise. Since it still started everytime we asked it to and still moved forward, we didn’t think much of it; besides, it can be hard to hear a specific rattle on the car on bumpy roads. Yesterday we were on our way to Santa Cruz and when we reached the paved road (about halfway there), I asked Tim if it was a good idea to drive in 4WD (which, remember, is only a button on the dash). He pulled over and stopped and disengaged the 4WD. When he put the car in gear and tried to take his foot off the clutch, there was no movement at all and a LOT of grinding. Same with reverse. He put it back in 4WD and it moved fine. We had no choice but to go on so we did. This morning we cleaned it up as best we could (maybe if it’s clean they won’t notice the transmission, eh?) and drove it to Iguana Azul, a hotel/restaurant in the area that everyone knows. There we met with the rental car reps and told them what happened; we are hoping that we are not held responsible for mechanical problems…I’ll let you know how that goes. We have already had the rental car gods smile on us, because the last one we turned in when we traded down to the Dhiatsu had a crack in the windshield that wasn’t there when we rented the car (thanks to a rock on the road in San Jose the first day), and the rental car company didn’t say a word about it!

The swell is HUGE today. After turning in the car, we walked home from Iguana Azul along the beach as far as we could. Since the tide is still high, there was a point that we couldn’t navigate with such big waves so we took to the road. Some of the waves are probably 12 feet high right outside our house…I’ve only seen swell like this in Hawaii. I think we walked about 4 miles to get home.

This morning the power went off at 8:00 am and stayed off until almost 2:00 pm. The reason is because a 5-star Marriott is being built up the road about 45 minutes from here, and so every Tuesday and Thursday all the residences and businesses in the area have to go without power for 6 hours until the construction is complete at the Marriott. Welcome to Costa Rica!

So let’s see…we have no TV (we play lots of dominoes, Uno and Scrabble…the other night Tim let me get away with playing “cooter” as a word because I didn’t have anything else; he had an “s” and instead of making it “scooter” he made it “cooters”), no internet access, no car, we are washing clothes by hand, and for 6 hours a day 2 days a week we are without power (which means no hot water either). Yep, that’s pretty much feral.