Tag: Costa Rica
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UNDER THE MATAPALO TREE
I was homeless in Costa Rica for a spell in the summer of 1983. But a mate had heard of a gringo who had just moved to San Jose and might be looking for a roommate. So I called the guy and we decided to meet up at Key Largo, the local watering hole for ex-pats. I found Ladd sitting at the bar nursing a Pilsen. Easy to find … I just followed the gaze of the women in the bar. Ladd was a tall slender Texan, moustachioed with sandy blonde…
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ASK THE WOMEN
A long time ago a client asked me to document a forestry project in the rural town of Hojancha in northern Costa Rica. I took photos of proud men standing by amazing stands of introduced eucalypts, Gmelina and teak. The trees were grown for both timber and firewood. But I learned the women weren’t too crazy about eucalypts as firewood. They said they didn’t like the smell and it made their gallo pinto taste bad. No one bothered to ask the women about their preferences before the trees were planted. That…
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SAKE IN AN IZAKAYA WITH A FRIEND
In December 1981, I was standing on the sidewalk in San José, Costa Rica while watching the fireman’s parade. A marching band clad in blue uniforms pounded away on their instruments. I looked out amongst the band members and spotted my mate Glen Snyder blowing away on his trombone while keeping in step. Glen and I had arrived in country six months earlier as Peace Corps Volunteers assigned to environmental education projects. Glen lost no time and had already integrated himself into his local community and joined the municipal band. I…
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THE WRITER’S DEN
I had a good job in 1984 at an agricultural research center called CATIE in Costa Rica. I was tasked with writing a complete textbook on agroforestry. It would have taken a year, maybe two. It was a secure job at a very reputable international center. I quit the job after about five months. I didn’t want to write a textbook. I didn’t want to work in a big organisation. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to write a novel. So, I found a cabin on the slopes…
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VALE MARIO
With great sadness I learned today of the passing of my friend, mentor, former boss and co-founder of the modern Costa Rican National Park Service. Mario Boza passed away yesterday at the age of 79. He had been suffering from mouth cancer since late April. His death comes as a shock as only a few weeks ago he wrote to me and suggested that he was on the path, albeit a very slow path, to recovery. Cancer rarely presents a straightforward path to recovery and in Mario’s case it took a…
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WEEK ONE AS A PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER
Forty years ago today, I set foot in Costa Rica for the first time. I arrived as an altruistic, just-out-of-college, cleanly shaven youngster who was determined to save the world from an impending environmental disaster. I figured I could do that in two years as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. Those two years evolved into five years. I tried but I didn’t save the world. But I set a path for my life and experienced some of my greatest adventures and joys. On the flight from Miami I was sandwiched in…
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THE TOUGHEST JOB YOU’LL EVER LOVE
It was 35 years ago today that a bunch of recent college graduates in agriculture, forestry and environmental education and I landed in Central America to begin our two-year Peace Corps Costa Rica Volunteer assignments. We all got to know each other a few months earlier in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. The Peace Corps flew all us in for a bit of psychological testing. For a few days we had to do all kinds of role playing or small group discussion under the watchful eye of some psychologist types. The idea…
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TORTUGUERO
Recollections from travels in Costa Rica – 1981-1986. Many images are scanned from duplicates (hence the poor quality) as the original Kodachromes remained in Costa Rica In the far north-east corner of Costa Rica, lies Tortuguero National Park – a park bursting with biological diversity and an important nesting area of four species of sea turgles. The park is bordered by the Caribbean on the east and consists of a maze of interconnected canals. A naturalist’s paradise. There are no roads leading into Tortuguero. You arrive either on boat by travelling…
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CHECKING OUT CORCOVADO
Upon arriving to their host country, Peace Corps Volunteers go through a very intensive three-month training course. About a month after arriving in Costa Rica, my fellow volunteers and I finally learned who we would be working for and where. Three of us were assigned to Mario Boza, of the Environmental Education program of the Costa Rican Open University (UNED). Mario visited our Peace Corps training grounds with our assignments and said he wanted ‘books, books and more books’ as he said there simply weren’t enough books about Costa Rica’s natural…
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