We have moved again and are now in a small bed and breakfast in the mountains overlooking Cartago. We started the day in lush La Fortuna and climbed up into the mountains and the cold. The B&B is on the road to the Irazu Volcano, so we ascended from the tropics of La Fortuna through the traffic and smog of Central Valley and San Jose and finally up into mountains of clouds and a cold drizzle. Grey clouds drifted across the yard, shrinking our view of the world to at most 25 meters. We quickly learned to praise the thick blankets and the small electric heater in our quaint log cabin.
Today, the storm has moved on, leaving behind a bitter wind. Tonight, there is a crescent moon, and the lights of Cartago, some 300 or 400 meters below, look brilliantly clear against the dark.
Cartago was the first capital of Costa Rica, but earthquakes and volcanic eruptions knocked down the churches and municipal buildings so many times that they moved the capital to San Jose. Unlike La Fortuna where everyone spoke English and all the prices were in dollars, few tourists come this way. The guide to retirement in Costa Rica states that only ten expats live in Cartago, but this is probably and exaggeration.
Cartago is a town for Ticos (Costa Ricans), rather than tourists, and as such provides a view of Costa Rican life not found in the hotspots of the country. Here, people go to bed at 8 pm and wake at 4 am, this according to a native we talked to. While most Ticos are only nominally Catholic, the people of Cartago are particularly devout. Other Ticos joke and say that there is a church every 100 meters (328 feet) in Cartago. The biggest attraction in Cartago used to be the arrival of the train, but an earthquake destroyed so many bridges that Costa Rica to not rebuild the train, depending upon a network of buses instead.
It is a strange town in some ways. We spent about two hours looking for a CD of a Costa Rican band for a friend, only to discover that there weren’t any record stores in the entire town. We asked police officers, parking attendants, and people on the street to no avail. We tried two large supermarkets, one whose logo was a giant blue whale, which either meant the store was really big or that they served whale steaks. The Blue Whale, which is actually called the Hypermas, did have some CDs featuring Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and a multitude of ancient crooners, AKA lounge lizards, singing the Costa Rican equivalent of elevator music.
We found a surprising number of Chinese restaurants, most of which offer hamburgers, fries and chop suey. We stopped at one of the better Chinese restaurants and had a very good meal, better than we found in either Mexico or New Mexico. We had a chance to talk with the chef, who was in fact Chinese. His great grandfather had come to Costa Rica in the 1880s to build the railroad, as he said that the Chinese had a better resistance to yellow fever than the previously imported Jamaican laborers. The chef said that his family still spoke Chinese and made trips back to China. We enjoyed talking with him, not only for what he told us, but the normal speed in which he said it. Most Costa Ricans speak at a rate slightly slower than a machine gun.
We took a lovely drive through the Orosi Valley in morning. The valley is beautiful, filled with field after field of coffee plants edged by a living fence. The fence starts off as a run of the mill post and wire fence, only in Costa Rica, the posts begin to sprout and soon grow into small trees, whose roots prevent erosion. The drive reminded me of the trip to the Wachau Valley that we took with Toni’s cousin, Andrea, and her husband Michael. The Wachau Valley was filled with vineyards, castles and great restaurants. What with coffee and wine, I only have to go through a valley of chocolate for my life to be complete. No, that’s a lie. I also want to drive through a bread valley, a salami valley, and beer valley before I die.
Sadly, the bread in Costa Rica is not very good. Most of it is similar to Wonder Bread, a tasteless white bread that is inflated with air pumps. Earlier in our visit to Costa Rica, we took a trip to Atenas, which is hyped as having the best climate in the world and has a sizeable contingent of expats. We stopped at a German Bakery, which was run by a young German couple, who make their own sausage, bread, pastries, and schnitzel, all very good. Toni struck up a conversation with the woman who told her why good bread is so scarce in Costa Rica: the moisture gets to the flour and changes its texture and other qualities. As a result, I have been scheming about how to bring in good flour to Costa Rica and then storing it in a climate controlled locker. We would have to do the same with Toni’s photographic paper if in fact we move here.
Today we are off to one of Costa Rica’s many national parks. We will do a little bird watching as we hope to see a quetzal or two. There are over 850 different bird species in CR, and more than 50 different types of butterflies.
