Costa Rica's Stories: Tales from the Hot Tropics

By Harvey Haber

Some years ago, the author of these columns was sitting in a Zen monastery in California, blissfully meditating, when someone slipped a folded note, underneath his cushion. The note had the word Help, and no other information, except for an email address. When he wrote to the email address, to inquire as to what Help, exactly, was needed, he received only the response, Thank you. Two days later he received a second email advising him that someone of importance had greatly enjoyed reading these columns when they were originally published, and that they, a publishing house in New York, had funds specifically allocated for a guidebook on Costa Rica, and that these funds would be reassigned elsewhere, unless a Costa Rica guidebook could quickly be assembled, and would he be the one to do this. Not being one to pass up allocated funds, he assembled the columns and produced this book, which has turned out to be unquestionably the definite book on all things Costa Rican.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467054478

Harvey Haber

The author is what is referred to as a senior citizen. This means that he is old. He has been writing professionally since he was young. Sometime during the 1950s he won a writing award of a small amount of money and a handsome certificate. At that time he observed that the girls in attendance at the awards ceremony were smiling at him. It was then that he decided that he would “be a writer”. Now, almost 60 years later, he is still writing, and long ago forgot why he started writing in the first place. In addition to “being a writer”, he has, during these 60 years, “discovered” Costa Rica. He had been given an amount of money by an eccentric multi-millionaire to go to Costa Rica and see if it might be the best place in the world to establish one of several utopian communities that the multi-millionaire wished to build. He went to Costa Rica and saw that, in fact, it might be the best place in the world to establish such a community. The utopian community was never built, but the author remained. In addition to writing, the author has found time to, among other things, become married on four occasions, including 20 years to his most recent wife, an extraordinary Costa Rican woman. He is father to two wonderful children, who are now very much adults. He has sailed around the world, founded and ran one of California’s first vegetarian restaurants, built and remodeled homes in California and Hawaii, and helped to start up Surfer magazine. When drafted into the U.S. Navy, he was obligated to spend two years living and surfing in Hawaii. At one point he became a Scientologist and was L. Ron Hubbard’s personal representative for his works of fiction, including, among other works, the lengthy novel, Battlefield Earth, which has the distinction of being listed among “The Ten Worst Novels of All Time.”

Book preview

Costa Rica’s Stories

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Tales from the Hot Tropics

Harvey Haber

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2011 by Harvey Haber. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/02/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4670-5449-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-5448-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-5447-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960093

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

It All Just Somehow Began

The Widow

Best Kept Secrets

The Season Begins

Looking for Paradise

Old John

Electricity

Rays

The Boxer

Tourism

The National Elections

Doing Costa Rica

Paradise Lost

A New Place

The Thief

Pedro the Gardener

Life at the Inn Continues

The Bridge at Sixaola

Planet Earth

The International Dominos Tournament at Maxi’s

Tennis Shoes

Bobby Fantuzzi

Santa Marta

Eccentrics

Open House

Why Costa Rica?

Victor and an angel

End of the Season

Always Costa Rican,

No Matter What or Where

My First Real Estate Deal

Costa Rica’s First Guidebook

And How I Ended Up Here

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Preface

There are those who have been here and those who are planning, some day, to come here. Approximately two million visitors actually come to Costa Rica every year. It would be difficult to narrow down the demographics on these visitors: surfers, wealthy fishermen, middle class Mom and Pops looking for a reasonable priced destination other than Mexico, the very wealthy cognecenti traveler who has no choice but to visit Costa Rica, if only because absolutely everyone else in their social circle has been here, the eco tourist and the environmentally sensitive; they all come here. Everyone who longs for Paradise comes to Costa Rica, to see if, just maybe, this is it.

This small book is dedicated to all of you who long for Paradise.

It All Just Somehow Began

I have lived in Costa Rica for twenty years and have been writing about the eccentric nature of this developing country for all of that time: Not quite Third World, certainly not First World; Costa Rica is just something else.

When I first arrived here, because I thought I needed something to do, I started and ran a B and B. The guests at my B and B often became irrationally infatuated with the country, and would ask questions about buying property and the process of actually living here, and so much later, in defense, I became a (shudder) real estate agent.

All of it, the entirety of living here has been unplanned and thoroughly inevitable. One thing became the next thing and then the next thing became… Things just happened.

At times it all seemed so impossible, so wonderfully out of the ordinary, the life here, and so I began a newsletter to talk about it: The unpredictable things that happen when creating a life in Costa Rica. The wonderful wacky weirdness of living and doing business and constructing a life in this small country.

As well as the newsletter, I wrote a column for Central America’s English language newspaper, The Tico Times, as another outlet, another venue to talk about it all. There were days when I couldn’t believe how fortunate I had been, in finding this place, in falling into a life here in Costa Rica, at this particular moment in its development.

This collection of stories is taken from my columns and newsletter. From observations on life in the small village where I lived, where my B and B was located, and the internal, ongoing conversations with myself on the parade of guests that passed through the B and B; these are stories of a life in the tropics. And they are as eccentric as Costa Rica itself.

The Widow

My B and B, for some reason always referred to as a country inn, is surrounded by high adobe walls. The walls separate the B and B from the highly animated and sometimes overly vigorous life of the village outside, and with the inn’s magnificent tropical gardens, and impossible orderliness, these walls frame a highly idealized version of Costa Rica that the guests at the inn believe to be real. Inside there is only rarely the messiness of an actual life. Yet there are endless stories just beyond these walls, and occasionally those stories pass through to the gardens of the inn.

My neighbor, on the other side of the high adobe wall, is an older Costa Rican widow. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of her and though we have never spoken to one another, I believe I know her, or rather I feel that I know about her life. She appears bent by everything that has happened to her, saddened by things that I will never know about: unseen losses that the years have bequeathed. And, though I try to avoid seeing her, I find that just her unsmiling, forlorn presence is enough to darken the morning of an otherwise cloudless Costa Rican day.

I rarely see her. For the most part, she has succeeded in locking the world out, and in doing so behind those high estate walls, she has also locked herself in with the faded legacy of her younger life. The bowed body of the old woman, on those infrequent mornings when I see her in the outside world, at the Saturday farmer’s market, or in the village silently going about her life, cries loudly of a dream gone sour. Her private, shrouded history suggests to me a sad tale of losses. Of lost family, wasted loves, squandered youth. When I hear her behind the wall shuffling around, moving her potted plants, puttering around her verandah, I imagine her life as a tragic story, a grievous account of what came to pass when she was blessed with the prospect of a lifetime in this luxuriant tropical Eden and how the promises all failed her.

Sharing this closed and darkly private world behind the wall with the widow is an ancient green macaw. And when the sun is shining and the air is pleasant and temperate, the large old bird is taken outside onto the patio and placed on a perch, from where it talks incessantly and loudly to and about departed household members: it mimics children that have long ago grown up and moved away; household employees that years ago left to attend happier families; it imitates a stern husband that has died. The macaw betrays all of the ancient family secrets. There are days when it takes on the persona of the family maid, loudly scolding the children, yelling at them to not run in the house, screeching at them to close the door, complaining that they don’t eat all of their food.

And whenever deliveries are made to the side entrance, the bird imitates the long departed family dog and barks manically at the intruders. At other times the macaw summons up voices of the children, laughing, speaking loudly in street slang. And there are quiet times late in the day when the old bird becomes la señora and one can hear, even as the bird chatters in nonsensical phrases, the edges of melancholy as it intones her formal voice; her staid, decorous, upper-class social Costa Rican presence.

It’s difficult for me to ignore the old green macaw. On mild, sunny mornings I find myself as an intruder, attending to the bird’s chatter, an avid and enthusiastic listening-Tom, waiting to hear more of the family’s concealed past.

On a recent clear full moon night, when the air was almost syrupy, I went out into the night to walk around the grounds of the inn. Not a breeze stirred the high palms and the moonlit night was balmy, still, and overwhelmingly full of the fragrance of white gardenia lilies. As I passed by the section of high wall between the inn and the widow neighbor’s patio, I heard what seemed to be sleepy gurgling noises from the old macaw. The sliding door to the house had been left open and the bird, I was sure, was looking out from its cage into