Tell Us A Story, Jaco-Nory.

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One curious thing about living away from your friends and family is that your attitudes to things that you would ordinarily consider to be ridiculous ideas changes quite a lot. For example, if it was a Friday back home and someone I had met briefly on one previous occasion was talking to a group of us and asked if anyone fancied going to the beach the following day, I would probably not answer because, a) I don't know them and would assume it wasn't addressed to me, and b) I don't know them and if I happened to be the only person who said yes it would just be weird. Here, however, things seem to be different, and so that was how a very enjoyable day in Jaco with a girl I barely knew came about.

One of the problems with travelling on cross country buses in Costa Rica compared with, say, National Express buses in Britain where you know that on a journey you will have one stop each in certain named cities, is that here you have loads of stops in each place and so if you don't know where you're going, (hello!) and given the total lack of road signs the chances are that you wont, you end up either guessing, which hasn't worked out all that well for us in the past, or staying on till the end and hoping for the best. We employed the latter tactic on this occasion. The end of the route, as it turns out, was about 400 yards from the beach, so like a couple of lemmings we headed straight for the sea. It wasn't as pretty as Puerto Viejo and it didn't have the wildlife of Nosara, but I really liked it. The sand was dark, not black exactly, a kind of dirty grey, but the majority of the beach we were on was made up of small pebbles. Now, call me a Judas or a sellout if you like but surely pebbled beaches are the way forward. The downside of course is that there are no opportunities for fun with a bucket and spade or digging massive holes (although these are activities that the good folk of Costa Rica don't seem to welcome as much as, say, people in Whitby), but on the plus side, you're not finding sand everywhere for the next week and a half and I'll take that over sandcastles all day long.

Again, the waves were huge and the undercurrent was very strong. There were points were the waves coming into shore were met by waves that were somehow heading back out to sea. My A-Level Physics never mentioned that particular phenomena, but it was fun to watch.

The food there was not dissimilar to everywhere else here really. One bar had a sign outside saying 'Traditional Cuisine', but this was undermined when you looked at the list of available foods printed underneath, which were 'Burgers, Pizza, Fries'. In fairness, it didn't say which country the food was traditional too.

It's about a two and a half hour bus ride from San Jose, with five buses a day from the Coca Cola Terminal. Doable in a day and well worth a trip, despite the fact that, being the good Samaritans we are, we ended up with no seats on the way back after we took pity on a Mum and her three screaming kids and gave them our places. I know I am, you don't need to say it. Thanks though.

My plan was to head back to Jaco the following weekend, but unfortunately San Jose got hit by what Meteorologists refer to as 'the arse end' of one of the hurricanes that is knocking around Central America. This resulted in six days of pretty much constant rain and seemingly left the centre and East Coast of Costa Rica with no roads. The television and newspapers were full of stories and pictures about roads that had sunk into the ground, roads that were covered by mudslides and roads that simply weren't there anymore, and so the decision was made to abandon the trip because it wasn't worth risking death for. Although, for the record I didn't and don't agree with this and I spent most of the decision making time repeating Mrs Doyle's "They've taken the roads in, Father." line from Father Ted, which in heinsight wasn't very helpful and if anything just made a bad situation much more annoying. Still, as everyone knows, we are all obliged never to miss the chance to get a Father Ted reference into a conversation, so I stand by my actions. The same rule applies to Police Squad and Kinky John Fowler quotes so bear that in mind.

Anyone who knows me may remember that one of my reasons for coming to Costa Rica ahead of anywhere else was that I really liked that they didn't have an army. Infact, in my list of reasons it was just below "Paulo Wanchope" and just above "seeing a Sloth". Which is why it came as quite a surprise on Friday when I saw on the news that Costa Rica has pretty much declared war on Nicaragua. This has been brewing for the last couple of weeks* and although I thought I had read in the previous days paper that they had reached an agreement, what I saw on tele makes me think that my Spanish reading skills may still need a bit of fine-tuning as what appears to have happened is almost the exact opposite of that. It is all to do with a small island which is more or less on the border between the two countries. Apparently it is Costa Rican owned but both countries use it and usually all is fine. Then, a couple of weeks ago some Nicaraguans decide to claim the island for Nicaragua because they heard that google maps had listed it as their property. Seriously.

So, now Costa Rica has called in it's mates in America, Canada, Columbia, Panama and elsewhere to come and give them a hand. I appreciate that they need to protect their land and all but it kind of jars with the 'peace loving country with no army' ideal that they are so keen to promote. It's a bit like somebody annoying you and you saying "I'm a principled pacifist and so I will not harm you" before phoning your bigger friends and getting them to come round and kick the crap out of them, while you turn and look the other way with your fingers in your ears.

Of course, given that I have heard all of this exclusively in Spanish, it could be that relations between the two countries are the best they've ever been, and that I need to work on my listening as well as my reading skills.

Pura Vida

Dave


* Apologies for the twelve day gap between the last entry and this one by the way. In short the reason for this is that the company I'm here working for thought it would be fine to take £265 out of my bank account without asking me. I disagreed and it took a week of panicking, arguing and several phonecalls to my bank to make them see that they should probably give it back. Nice, huh?

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