13th november

I had been given the guest room, which was on the ground floor just off the conservatory. A perfectly adequate room with its own bathroom and a single bed and enough furniture to enable it to have the right to be called ‘bedroom’. Dave Jnr explained to me that I shouldn’t be surprised if it smelled. Apparently, his grandfather had stayed in there before he died and went around urinating all over the place. Charming. I have to say that it did, in fact, smell.
The mattress was weird too. It was as if you laid down in it and it moulded around your body, and then you got up and the mould remained – more like soft soil than a mattress. The conservatory had a couple of birds in cages. In the evening, somebody had put covers over these cages to put the birds to sleep but in the morning, with the conservatory facing east and the sun streaming in, the covers wouldn’t stop the bird from knowing it was dawn. The caged cockerel was just around the corner too. So it was that I was woken on my second day by an avian symphony of two chirruping canary types providing the strings and the horn section of a cockerel. The percussion came from the banging in my head.
Dave SR had some business in Alajuela so he took me with him for a ride around. He gave me a guided tour of the town of Alajuela, which it has to be said, didn’t seem to consist of anything much at all. Indeed, even the tourist book that I had didn’t have much to say about Alajuela and the glossy tourist photos in the book were of a petrol station, the airport control tower and three teenagers sitting on a wall looking very dispassionate about being there at all. And the photos were taken on a cloudy, glum day. They didn’t know too much about hype, did they? Quite refreshing, really.
The streets were on a childproof predictable grid system, with such glamorous and evocative street names as ‘Avenida 1’ and Avenida 2’. In fact, there was a street down the centre of the town called ‘Avenida Central’ which went roughly East-West. All the streets to the north running parallel were numbered oddly, (avenida 1, 3, 5 etc) and the streets to the south numbered evenly.
The streets running north to south that were perpendicular were much more imaginatively named. There was ‘calle central’ down the middle, and then you guessed it – ‘Calle 1, 3, 5’ etc to the east and ‘calle 2, 4, 6, etc,’ even numbered to the west. Avenida is short for avenue and calle means street.
Everywhere we went in the towns were hawkers, and their prey was ripe for the kill when they had to dutifully stop at junctions and traffic lights. In the UK, you don’t get them, this transient and opportunistic race of people, these junction-dwellers. In the US, they want to wash your windshield. In Costa Rica, they want to sell you their bracelets, amulets, clothes, cell phones, chickens and their wives. I noticed a high proportion of these hawkers were disabled or deformed in some way too. There was also a tribe of people going around wearing yellow t-shirts proclaiming themselves as graduate members of some drug rehab club. It seemed they wear these t-shirts to declare that they have been successfully detox’d and to promote the clinic/ programme and if one is nice one can give them money in a charitable sort of way. Dave is sceptical, saying that if you give them money they would just go round the corner and buy them come more drugs.
The traffic had to be seen to be believed. And it seemed to me the bus drivers were the worst. I would say that the Costa Ricans would scare the living tits off the Italians in the hair-raising driving stakes any day of the week cos they just don’t care. Also, many of the roads don’t have any pavements so pedestrians have to walk in the road to get anywhere, which is akin to showing an unhealthy disregard for one’s own current number of limbs and short to mid-term future in general.
Dave having performed his ablutions at some store that he went to went to the bank and we soon headed off into the neighbouring countryside talking all the while of the pros and cons of Costa Rica and various other things. He went some distance into the countryside giving me a commentary and it occurred to me that this was for my benefit, as he really wasn’t doing anything himself. He showed me one grand project that consisted of a mostly finished bridge over a ravine with a nearly finished road that hadn’t quite been tarmacced. He explained that one of the ongoing problems in the country was corruption and so a project would get started and somewhere along the way, the money disappears. At some point then, there would be a shortage of money and the work would stop, the project remaining incomplete.
He was enthused about the latest president though. Abel Pacheco came to power in 2002 and by 2004 had investigated and thrown into jail three former presidents on corruption charges. No messing! Around 62% of the entire population of the country works for the government in some respect or other. That is a very difficult amount of people to keep tab son. In fact, that’s ridiculous
I was waiting for the roads to improve but they didn’t and if anything, they got worse. A current statistic is that only 14% of the roads in Costa Rica are paved, and even the ones that are paved are frequently rutted with potholes that spring up all the time. Whether this is due to bad gypsy workmanship who come along wanting to tarmac everything in sight because they had a job down the road and luckily have some left over, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s the amount of water that flows everywhere washing everything away, but if the other drivers don’t get you, the potholes will, and some of those holes are BIG!
He took me to meet the Frisius and their Macaw sanctuary. Living in Alajuela not too far from the airport but not it seems under a flight path, the Frisius are a married couple, Richard and Margot, who established a non-profit organisation with the aim of protecting the endangered species of macaws – the Scarlet Macaw and the Great Green Macaw. Dave introduced me and I was given an abridged guided tour.
Amigos de Las Aves is the name that the sanctuary has given itself and they had the breeding centre there in Alajuela. The Frisius had been going since 1992, breeding in captivity and releasing the birds at selected sites within the rain forests of the country. They have around two hundred macaws, some of which they bred from babies and they can sell privately for up to seven thousand dollars which is a strange situation considering the species is endangered.
After the tour, we sat down in wicker chairs in a conservatory and chewed the fat, having a civilised cup of tea from cups and saucers. There were parrots, parakeets, ducks and other birds flopping, flying and waddling around the large conservatory, free to come and go which I like. I hate seeing anything caged unless it is absolutely necessary. If it is constrained, the boundaries should be as large and as natural as possible. I admit I haven’t been to a zoo or circus, or anything that demeans wildlife since I was old enough to make that decision for myself. For me, there are very few circumstances that should present us with a pretext to put wildlife in cages. One such pretext is if they cannot survive elsewhere (and even this is subjective and by no means a closed argument.) I do not believe that entertaining children or educating the public or about animals is reason enough to take them out of their natural habitat or thwart their natural instincts. The public can watch the telly! Close the zoos! Let them eat cake!!
Quite often, you get the argument; ‘well they can’t survive in the wild now.’
Of course, they can’t! You’ve seen to that! Congratulations, idiot!
All these birds were waddling around us while we took our high tea with Richard and Margot. They seemed quite tame. So did the birds. Outside, there were huge cages that contained the captive macaws, squawking away and making lots of noise. They are very impressive birds indeed with their size and their demeanour, not to mention their incredible plumage. I couldn’t wait to see these babies in the air. However, I couldn’t help wondering why there were so many in captivity here. See how cynical I get when I see something caged? Two hundred? They didn’t seem ill or featherless and I thought that the longer an animal is captive, the harder it is for them to readjust in the wild. Still, they know better than I do – benefit of the doubt and all that.
The family went to an embassy function that evening so I had the house to myself. An embassy function, I ask you! I’ve walked into Pygmalion, Central American style!
I watched TV.