Tropical Immersion: A Year in Costa Rica and Beyond

By Ethan Rogol

Everyone knows that Costa Rica is a paradise. But how does one find one’s way around when streets have no names and houses have no numbers? When does one shake hands, and when does one kiss one’s friends? "Tropical Immersion" is the wry and very personal story of a year in Costa Rica, the overland journey there and back, and side trips to Nicaragua and Ecuador. It details navigating the rough, narrow, busy Costa Rican sidewalks and learning to see doing so as a sport, eating fruit that smells like bodily fluids and discovering that it tastes delicious, and learning to respect “reckless” Mexican bus drivers—whose driving could be described by the uninitiated as "terrifying"—by deciphering their clever use of turn signals. The book offers a feast for the senses: rich, earthy aromas, warm wind on the skin, the bitter taste of dust in the air, the sound of birds, insects, children laughing, mothers calling their names, and laborers working the land. Its focus is not sightseeing but “culture-diving”; not ogling or conquest, but participation and integration. It is part travelogue, part cultural primer, part memoir, part romance and a treatise on the being present, wherever one is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781440168161

Ethan Rogol

Ethan Rogol has lived intermittently in Costa Rica for years, and has immersed himself in the culture. He and his wife, Isabella, bring a bit of sunshine and "sabor" (Costa Rican soul) to Olympia, Washington, where they own and operate Lengua Rica: Spanish Language Instruction, Interpretation, and Translation Services.

Book preview

Part I

Southbound 

1

Sneaking Into Mexico

We felt like we’d had our asses kicked. Riding and sleeping on buses for ten days was a physical ordeal after which we found ourselves in bed, literally shaking for several nights. Nevertheless, once my wife Isabella and I had stopped traveling, it was clear what a good idea it had been to have ventured from Olympia, Washington, to San José, Costa Rica, by land, even it if was a whirlwind race and we really didn’t stop and look around as much as we would have liked. We had seen, smelled, and felt the geographic, linguistic, aromatic, and cultural changes as an uninterrupted continuum. This made our arrival so much more meaningful than arriving by plane. It was amazing to watch the land and foliage change from green to gray to yellow to brown to red to green. Changes in humidity, climate, vegetation, geography, and industry all affected the smells of each place. We felt the distance, and our arrival felt natural and logical instead of shocking. It really helped us experience the interconnectedness of this continent. Plus, we only spent about $1,000 for everything: transport, food, places to stay, shipping stuff, and the rest.

Our journey started with one giddy, disorganized, and anxious push. Isabella and I left Olympia on December 1, 2001 in our 1984 Toyota Tercel and headed south. It was a cold, frosty morning—all the more reason for us to feel excited about our trip. We were tired of the cold, and fearing it, daunted by it, not looking forward to winter. We were tangibly enthusiastic about the prospect of eating papaya and pineapple every morning and listening to the screeching birds and rain on a hot tin roof.

Our plan was to drive to L.A., leave our car at Isa’s aunt’s house, take buses to Costa Rica, and stay indefinitely. The period starting with the decision to go—soon after the fall of the Twin Towers in New York—and leading up to our departure was a crazy time in which several rash, mistaken decisions were made, including throwing away artwork we had done, for which Isa will never forgive me. A big point of focus in our lives over the previous year had been paring down of our possessions, due largely to the fact that we’d spent it house-sitting myriad Olympia residences. Each time we transitioned from one house to another, we eschewed more of our material possessions. In addition, I saw the trip upon which we were embarking as a baptism, a new phase of me, of us. Indeed, we were excited to escape the Northwest and the car culture, to escape the empty streets and cold reserve of the North. We were ready for a change. But I did get a bit carried away: I regret having thrown away our original artwork.

As we entered Southern California, Spanish became more frequently visible and audible. From L.A. we took a bus to San Ysidro, California, at the border with Mexico. There was a cluster of businesses right up next to the gateway that leads across: places to change money, to buy greasy food and coffee, even places to buy appliances and clothing. It was dry, chilly, soulless: a place where nobody stays for long.

We carried a big internal-frame gray and green backpack, a much smaller blue rucksack, my mandolin in a hard shell case, and a blue and white plastic woven Oaxacan shopping basket that a friend had given us as a gift four years before. We carried mainly clothing, sleeping bags, and food. We had shipped some more clothes and stuff to Costa Rica ahead of us. That way we never had to check any bags. That saved us a lot of headaches and meant that we hardly had to go through customs at all.

We walked across the border, passing through a labyrinthine concrete structure with no fanfare, and nobody checked our passports or our bags or anything. We had entered Mexico illegally! On both sides of the border it was really hard to tell which country we were in. It was a blurry purgatory of language and culture.

We immediately caught another bus from Tijuana to Guaymas, on the Sea of Cortés. The trip took all night. We traveled through curvy mountains and it snowed! You might not think it snows in Mexico, but, brothers and sisters, it does. As I said, we were not stopped by immigration on our way into Mexico. But at 3:00 A.M. somewhere in northwestern Sonora, the bus was stopped by customs and everybody had to climb off and drag their bags into a white room that was brightly lit by fluorescent bulbs. We waited in line to press a button on something similar to a traffic signal and pray that it would flash green; if it randomly flashed red, the person who pressed the button won the prize of getting his or her bags rummaged through. Isabella pressed the button and it flashed green. I was right behind her but the guard just waved me through—an instance of the white privilege I had experienced throughout the trip (and throughout life).

We were herded out again but they wouldn’t let us on the bus immediately. We were tired and it was raining and cold. The area outside the building where the bus waited for us was big and covered, but the metal roof was multi-tiered so the cold rain still came in on us.

Back on the bus, we rode until the next morning, when we were let off in Guaymas. Our friends from Olympia, Fran and Tim, had a winter home there. The bus station was small and rather empty. Our footsteps echoed and mingled with the swishing of the broom a woman was using on the station’s red concrete floor. There was melancholy in her face and that of the ticket sellers. But outside the station the warm sunlight made everything sweet, and despite our fatigue we were happy and excited.

We tried to call Fran and Tim on a pay phone and were troubled and frustrated by the failure of our first attempts. The number in our possession included area and country codes so that we could call them from the U.S., which I had done. But besides leaving off the country code, it was unclear how many of the other numbers were unnecessary. It took numerous tries, but finally I got the low tone used by most countries’ phone systems (outside the U.S.) to indicate that a phone at the other end is ringing, and Fran answered. While we waited for Tim, we ate some bread at a café and dime store across the street.

Tim came in an old white VW bug and took us over roads both bumpy and smooth to their adobe house, which he and Fran had designed. It was cool and quiet inside. The earth on which the house stood was red and rocky. There were many cacti around and the Sea of Cortés was within shouting distance. Fran made bread for us, and Tim took us on a tour of the area. We stayed a couple nights. It was warm, dry, sunny, and smelled sweet. It felt different from anyplace we’d ever been before.

It dawned on us that we were really in Mexico! Really! No kidding! The realization was magical and I savored it.

2

Careening Toward Cuernavaca

After Guaymas we took a twenty-hour overnight bus trip to Guadalajara. The bus had no shocks so it rode like a horse. Halfway there, near Culiacán, we stopped to pick up passengers from another of the company’s buses that had had an axle break and had run off the road. Now our bus was jam-packed and we fully expected our bus to break an axle as well. We were nervous and reluctant to fall asleep. Even though we had paid to go all the way to Guadalajara, we made up our minds to get off in Mazatlán and take a nicer, emptier bus. But in Culiacán a lot of people got off. Taking another bus would have been really expensive and we had both started to fall asleep despite our anxiety. So we decided to stay on that bus after all. We eventually fell asleep and uneventfully awoke in Guadalajara.

Guadalajara’s newer bus station has seven auditorium-sized terminals arranged in a horseshoe. Each terminal serves a different array of bus lines generally going to different places. We got there at about 7:00 A.M. and the bus to Cuernavaca didn’t leave until 10:00 P.M. We didn’t trust the bag check offices because they were rather open and usually didn’t seem to have anyone attending them. So, tired as we were, we schlepped our bags all the way to downtown Guadalajara to find some food because we had not been eating well. Traveling as vegetarians was an experience in malnourishment. We found a vegetarian restaurant that only served overcooked slop but we forced ourselves to eat it and feel fortunate.

What little we saw of Guadalajara was dirty and featured lots of graffiti. One really cool thing, true of all the Latin American cities we’ve been to, was that it had lots of well-used pedestrian-only plazas and streets. Such areas are lacking in most U.S. cities: a sad testament to car worship. Public spaces for people to be and go about their daily lives are so vital to the cultivation of community. We ignore that in much of the U.S.

We visited La Institución Nacional de Migración, Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly the INS—Immigration and Naturalization Service), in an effort to legalize our presence in the country. In Guaymas, Tim had suggested that if we didn’t, we would have trouble when we tried to leave the country. We picked up paperwork and waited in line for about an hour, only to be told that we would have had to wait at least three days for it to get processed. We told the immigration agent with whom we spoke that we planned to be out of Mexico by then. He told us we could just take the paperwork to the border and present it to the officials, where most likely we would not be charged anything.

When we got back to the bus station, Isabella and I took turns going in the bathrooms to wash up while the other watched the bags and the mandolin. At all the bus stop bathrooms on our trip up to this point, we had to pay to get in (about twenty-five cents) and go through a turnstile. Most had an attendant who took our money, and along with our change gave us about thirteen sheets of toilet paper. In Guadalajara, however, they had a coin-operated turnstile that gave change and you could use all the toilet paper you wanted!

While we were waiting for the bus from Guadalajara to Cuernavaca, we did the sequence of yoga stretches called the sun salutation on the dusty green marble floor in an abandoned corner of the bus terminal. After that, we were so tired we could hardly stay awake and decided to take a nap behind the altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe. We weren’t completely out of sight but nobody bothered us. I used my mandolin case as a pillow, mostly because I figured that was the best way to keep it from being stolen.

What I was able to observe of driving habits in Mexico led me to overcome the fear they inspired at first. It was true that the buses passed other vehicles on blind corners and careened around at breakneck speed and appeared to just barely pass other buses before an oncoming car was about to smash into them. But I perceived that the drivers communicated with each other using their horns and blinkers in ways that nobody I know in the U.S. does.

When one vehicle wants to pass another, for example, the driver of the vehicle that is to be passed uses the left turn signal to indicate that it is safe to do so. The right turn signal means don’t pass. Turn signals have nothing to do with turning. They aren’t turn signals; they are pass signals! Oncoming cars actually slow down or move over as necessary when a bus or other vehicle is passing. When I figured this out, I was able to sleep better.

In addition, and this seems even more true in Costa Rica than in Mexico, there is a very different notion of physical space and what is possible. The philosophy appears to be that it’s best to go as fast as possible, and assume that everybody else—dogs, pedestrians, motorcycles—will get out of the way in time. If this does not work, use the brakes. Pretty simple. Also, there’s no difference between a stop sign and a yield sign.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m being critical because I just see it as different, not bad. Not that I’d want to drive or ride my bike there.

In Guadalajara we realized we had no desire to actually go to Mexico City. But everybody told us it was absolutely necessary to go through the capital to get from one end of the country to the other. Stories of crime, hassles, and polluted air had inspired a good deal of anxiety, and we carried it around in our backpacks with us. We especially didn’t want to have to navigate from the northern bus terminal (for all the buses to and from the north) to the southern bus terminal (for all the buses to and from the south): they’re on opposite ends of the city! So we figured out that we could bypass the city by catching an overnight bus to Cuernavaca, then going from Cuernavaca to Puebla. From Puebla we could catch a bus to Oaxaca! From Guadalajara, as planned, we took an overnight bus to Cuernavaca. On all the buses we took in Mexico, except one, there were two drivers. One drove while the other slept in a little room under the bus. The room was just big enough for a bed and had a little window in it. That would make me so claustrophobic! There was a phone in there so the resting driver could communicate with the driving driver. But I’d still never get in there. On all the buses we saw movies. Movies, movies, movies. Too many dang movies! And most of them were really violent action films. We saw more movies than we’d seen in the previous two years. And all of them were from the U.S., with the exception of one Mexican film—El Profe—featuring Cantinflas (the Mexican comic actor whose real name was Mario Moreno and who is best known in the U.S. for his role as Passepartout in the 1956 version of Around the World in 80 Days).

3

Hop Out!

In Cuernavaca, we caught a local intercity bus to Puebla. This was the kind of bus with plastic seats not meant to be sat on for hours at a time, and it had no toilet. The trip took three hours or so. About twenty minutes into the trip, I had to pee. It rather surprised me and I had to go bad. I thought I could wait. But after another twenty minutes, I finally got up the courage to ask the driver if he had a planned stop somewhere. He said, "Sí, adelantito. (Yeah, just up the road a piece.) But just after that, traffic on the two-lane road got held up by construction, which allowed only one lane of traffic to pass. The driver turned and looked at me and said, ¡Salga aquí!" which meant to hop out. So I hopped out and ran over the stretch of bare earth next to the road, which was about forty yards across, and stopped where the tall grass started. I was pretty visible out there and tried my best not to think about what all the bus passengers and people in other vehicles might think.

When I was done, I ran back to the bus, thanked him, sat down, and didn’t look around. Isabella was laughing and told me that everybody on the bus had looked and laughed when I was out there. Nevertheless, I was very grateful for the opportunity to relieve myself.

We got to Puebla by about 11:00 A.M. and decided to take a bus to Oaxaca immediately. The next one left at 2:00 P.M.

Puebla has a big, complicated bus station with a very high ceiling in the main terminal. There were ticket counters for all the bus lines, a bakery, magazine stands, food stores, and toy stores in there. There were also restaurants and pastry stands. We didn’t leave the terminal. We ate gorditas with cheese and hot peppers. They were fat tortillas. The first one I asked for had, to my unpleasant surprise, grease ladled all over it. Oh well, I thought, and took it to where Isabella was sitting. Isabella said, That’s pork fat. I took it back and they gave me one without the melted pork fat. I ate it. Then I had another one.

We felt dirty and tired. We bought some bottled water. I also bought a couple of sugar cookies with white lemon pudding stuff on them. Then we got on the bus to