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18 July 2005
Two weeks in Costa Rica: Day 2, 24 June 2005
Following the customary lights-on the previous night at 434 S Catalina where I nodded and nodded on the velvetty couch with a laptop by my side as my sole companion of pleasures, I would grab the first opportunity to fidget around in my aisle seat looking for the optimal balance of comfort and gumption not to overstretch my limbs onto my distraught peep-hole companion's territory or towards the aisle where the frequent stream of flight attendants and septagenuarian women in penguin-steps would mind my intrusion. The aircraft hums, whirs, whooshes, jolts, beeps and hums but I am lost in deprived sleep, the most tranquil of them all. At Miami where we deplaned to catch our next flight to San Jose after a couple of hours, we had the option of staying within the security area or risking a frisking and venturing outdoors to have a pig's breakfast of things. The airliners are financially struggling and so they slice the meat off food perks, but is that also the case with so many of the food outlets within the airports? And why is there no Quizno's every 100 metres in every terminal in every single major airport in the United States? These are complex questions and the likes of the starved are better off attending to the call for comestibles than to tackle them. We -- blasphemously enough to some other fans of the game and definitely sacrilegiously enough to the people of San Antonio -- had decided to travel on the night of Game 7 between the Spurs and the Pistons. The Pistons had come back in good style to level the games 3-3 and questions were asked of the Spurs. Tim Duncan's beaming face and right cheek rubbing against the trophy seemed like a good enough answer. I digested the Spurs' win with my poli of yonder age. We are assembled on a Friday morning at a major international airport -- there are many hordes of families, single men and women and strollers milling about, fathers applying the backrub to oversized daughters, husbands unasked of them dispatching soft, little charges of spousal affection through shoulders, cheeks, arms and backrubs to their wives, mothers pretending to be in on teen-chat with daughters that are on the cusp of filial obligation and fast-sliding towards disaffection from family and as if to seize on that trifling moment of estrangement the mothers resort to backrubs on their thick, warm and woolly sweaters and boyfriends in naughty jest and domineering style going beyond the pale of backrubs. We shall sadly have to leave this scene and board our flight to San Jose anon.Turquoise water, feral green, fungal clouds, black and white spores -- coral reefs? -- we pass over Cuba. From so high up in the sky it looked shorn of its ideology and years of political and economic strife it has gone through. Communism proliferates down below and I ask for a round of Bloody Mary mix with no ice and just to make sure that the "no ice" applied both to my water and to the drink I repeated the phrase at which time I was promptly scolded by my stately-looking African-American flight attendant in her conchshell-deep matronly baritone "I know, I heard you the first time". I like to think that my facial features, bony and hunched shoulders and less than remarkable height make me look younger than I am to flight attendants -- perhaps it is also to do with how eagerly I peer out through my double-screen oval window into forty thousand feet of altitude separating this flying machine from the tiny motes of cars -- for on a previous flight back from Philadelphia one of the Southwest flight attendants referred to me as "Sweetie". I later found out though when she called a sixty-five year old woman Sweetie, that Sweetie was the epithet she picked up from the Southwest raffle of euphemisms for Sir and Madam.
We touch down into a beautiful airstrip surrounded by mountains much closer and more ravishing than those around LAX. Sharp blades from palm trees and shredded leaves from banana plants mingle with the colours of sunlight, mountain rock and the azure from which we dropped. Closer to our craft are caravans and young-looking airport staff. They have their fluorescent vests on. They are my first glimpse into Tico culture -- the boy has shades on and is impervious to visual penetration, chews gum and awaits orders with a smirk while the girl is petite, demure and seems to be relishing equal opportunity employment as she shares a joke with her male counterparts.
After a momentary separation for two hours nearing three of the flight trip, our group is reunited just by the mouth of the aerobridge. In no time, we are divvied up again into the many immigration lines. Passports are fished out from satchels, pouches slinging around necks and Sierra Club bags -- maroon, navy blue, black, green, all aristrocratic looking, many stamped with visas, exotic seals, illegible handwriting, esoteric scripts. To smooth the frowns of the wary traveller, surprisingly good music fills the vast space from ceiling to six feet off the floor. In no uncertain terms are we reminded of Costa Rica's commitment to battling human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children. There was a time when the government would look the other way and consequently the country became a haven for depraved paedophiles and sex tourists but having straightened up, it warns of the toughest and most rigorous punishment for offenders. Even the kiosks housing the immigration personnel are not bereft of inner-lit panels with traumatic photographs of children with imaginary names and pasts and warnings written exclusively in English leaving no doubt in anyone's mind as to where the officials suspect these culprits come from. The red passports sporting the insignia of the crown (United Kingdom), the navy blue ones sporting the eagle with arrows and olive branch in its talons (United States) and the green ones bearing a version of the yin-yang (South Korea) all sailed through over to the other side into real Costa Rica. The government did have issue with the three-headed lion insignia and the Satyameva jayate slogan. Somehow, the fact that we were Indian citizens living in the United States on student visas could not be reconciled with. Feet tapped, hands folded and shoulders shrugged but I was careful not to upset them especially when they had my travel documents and so I kept a wan smile on my lips until such time as the gentleman handling my case returned from consultations and computer updates and stamped his seal of consent on the passport and I was let go.
It seemed like a miniature model of LAX outside the airport. Two-three different lanes for different types of vehicles with a public parking lot across all of them with helpful signposts pointing to restrooms and baños. We were gheraoed by the universal livery of porters in cahoots with cab drivers in cahoots with cheap and tawdry hotel-owners in cahoots with pleasure-merchants. But thankfully Juan had already arrived and after a solid, warm embrace and rapid exchange of Spanish pleansantries with Chris, he quickly took leave to get the bus over to the kerb.
Perhaps it says something of Ticos, but my first impressions of Juan stayed through the end. His attire made a simple but elegant statement of a warm invitation to savour the unpretentious charms of his country -- white shirt fitting nicely into light-coloured pants, and mind no curvature in the midst, a man whose immense prowess is obvious though left unstated and only peeks from his rich and lustrous whiskers. Oh, what a fine set! That moustache no doubt receives spoiling, overweening affection. Trimmed and pared, just the right size, not too lean and not too pouty as the man himself -- or was it that the man was trimmed and pared, just the right size, not too lean and not too pouty as the moustache itself? His face had the oily glow of middle-aged contentment and the colours of a tanned Iberian king -- a cultivated mane-medley of grey, white and black and an absorbent brown complexion of skin. He would chew his words well before gently raining them out, exercise economy of expression and display euphoria only at the most delectably common of sights -- his native women trying to mount motorbikes and falling, little kids standing by the road with their mothers in tow, aldermen convening by shops in every town that he would pass through who he would greet with patrician hand-gestures as if to bless their gathering -- and he would keep a sometimes unjustified distance from our party believing himself to be the foreigner amidst us.
Hauling our luggage onto the top of Juan's TURISMO bus needed more help than what most of us tired souls could provide. And so, in the true spirit and economics of tourism we engaged a trio of help-alls turned makeshift porters. As we drove away, I noticed how the youngest of the lot -- a boy of no more than fifteen, though this must be borne in mind, that Costa Ricans when young look much older than they really are, and when old look much younger than they really are -- commandeered the money from to whom it was given and took it away presumably to share the spoils with the grand coalition of for-the-large-part underutilised menfolk at the airport.
From the outskirts of the city where the airport was based, we coursed through our way into it. The expressway used a lane system but did not distinguish itself from regular streets and in that respect once again, it resembled India. Trucks were larger, the smoke denser, mountains were in fuller view and lay to the front and back instead of on the sidelines and people drove scooters with helmets on. But there may also have been others to whom a sight such as that of narrow roads, a few sombrero hats, dogs running parallel on sidewalks and large, earnest financial edifices with glass-tinted windows posited on the main street would inspire as first thoughts escapist visions of a mellow Third World happily ensconced between mild penury and wilful complacence. The extremes are dampened and the middle road more tread on.
We were soon within the core of the city. We had briefly stopped to visit Banco Nacionale and exchange dollars into colones. The bank security system was particularly intriguing -- in order to enter the main hall comprising of cubicles of tellers and cashiers embanked onto one side, there were two revolving doors which operated on a per-person regulated access basis. You would need to press a button to indicate a desire to enter the bank and wait until the system ordained it safe for letting you in. It worked likewise to exit the bank as well. Once within the bank, the eighteen of us formed a haphazard queue that naturally enough started at the mouth of the queue and arched to the doors. The resident cleanshaven security official with locked jaws and a perpetually thin smile disapproved of our train and instructed us to keep our patterns on specially painted black squares that snaked in crunched zig-zag manner. This no doubt made better use of the limited space and allowed for more to be let in through the guarded portals.
Right side of the road goodness + metric goodness, narrow roads + lane discipline, open sewers side-by-side + octagonal red ALTO signs, prickly hallucinogenic smell of petrol burning slowly, inefficiently in a noisy four-stroke engine relic looking straight out of the Raj, steep roads + football colour shirts, cigarettes crackling within tainted windows hiding the nicotine fumes + Doña Maria figurines guarding the collective conscience of an entire city from triangular cemetery-medians, spaghetti yellow hair on bikes + thick, rich, long, daily-washed Malayalam hair -- minus the sketchy "Y" plait. After a minor traffic jam, we repaired towards our hotel, La Amistad.
La Amistad sported the cream colour of a crumbled sky at twilight. A reasonably reputable hotel and still it lay in an obscure, almost residential neighbourhood if it were not for the stylish canvasses of the bar across the road. Its manager owned a vestibule compartment of a cottage right by the entrance and spoke admirably good English. I suspected him to be a lifelong bachelor who kept a quiet profile of good pro-tem friends that stayed in the hotel but his constant references to the underground gay community of San Jose left me in some doubt. At the room Dan and I shared, the TV was higher up than the ceiling fan itself in what could be forgiven as either a cruel joke or some lunatic's vision of Apocalypse. There was a good mix of English channels along with Spanish and so cable-wise it never seemed away from Motel 6. We fixed -- Dan had more patience in testing out channels than I had -- on a special edition of Iron Chef Japan with the secret ingredient being a live slithery eel in a pail of water. Five dishes on both the challenger's and defendant's tables were neatly arranged at the end of the cooking bout comprising mainly of sushi variants and small pickings of eel served with accoutrements.
For our own dinner, we chose to go to Macchu Pichu -- a Peruvian restaurant well-known in San Jose for its cerviche, a dish made out of octopus, squid and other miscellaneous unpalatably exotic fish. I settled for a Plato Vegetariano -- a huge plate of excellent vegetable fried rice -- and a glass of piña. After the sumptuous meal, we decided in favour of returning by bus even though the plan was to walk back to the hotel after Chris felt it was not safe to walk about these parts of the town even if there were eighteen of us. Back at the hotel, there was a small congregation at the hotel lounge before we each took our leave to make the best of a full night's sleep in a new country -- what new and wondrous dreams would enter our weary minds and what premonitions would hold for the morrow, we knew not.
