This morning I ordered fried eyes for breakfast. That´s right. Fried eyes. A Spanish Freudian slip if ever I made one. I was going to ask for huevos, or eggs, but the word ojos, meaning eyes, slipped out of my mouth instead. Esteban and I of course laughed about it. We also all more or less woke up with difficulty this morning, hence the fried eyes. The establishment next door, a hotel that doesn´t appear to have a name, had another party last night. Even after the manager here phoned them after ten, which is the legal time limit for noise, to ask them to turn it down, they carried on partying till after eleven. I did mention that this hotel next door doesn´t appear to have a name. While lying awake last night reading and waiting for the noise to end I came to the conclusion that there is more going on there than what meets the eye. I am not sure what to assume, really, perhaps money laundering or worse, but something doesn´t smell right about that. This morning I was chatting with Esteban and his mom, all of us bleary-eyed and wanting to strangle the neighbours, and I simply mentioned to them that, hey, I wasn´t born yesterday, try maybe the day before, and that popular tourist destinations also attract entrepreneurs with a poor ethical sense, and it appears that you guys are stuck with some very bad neighbours. No further discussion necessary. And to quote the late great Walter Concrete, ¨and that´s the way it is¨
It was on my second visit here in Monteverde in 2008 that I got a whiff of the dark underbelly to this community. I was befriended by a local cafe owner who also has a coffee plantation that he took me on a tour of. On our way there we were stopped by two rather grim, scary looking guys. In those days my Spanish was intermediate level so I didn´t really understand their conversation, but my friend looked very uncomfortable about the encounter and refused to say anything when I asked him what was going on.
I think especially in a community like Monteverde, as well as in a country such as Costa Rica, there is going to be a dark criminal underside. The social and family and extended family structures and connections in this country are very tight and very complex and there are going to be all kinds of things going on that you would never read about on Tripadvisor, nor hear from your travel agent. Neither are you going to hear much from your average Tico. They tend to be very tight-lipped and it is next to impossible to discuss anything negative with these people. Here, North American-style directness is considered gauche, even the gentle and watered-down Canadian version, of which I am rather proud.
The American connections and investments in this country are also interesting. During a conversation I had here today with a new friend who is on his way back to the US tomorrow we were both musing on the implications for Costa Rica during the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution and the civil war with the Contras that followed. It appeared that Costa Rica was harbouring a lot of refugee Contras as well as their friends from the CIA. During my first visit to Costa Rica in 1994 I actually met one of those CIA operatives. He seemed kind of wound up, scary and arrogant and with quite a violent streak. We were chatting in a bar in Alajuela when a local teenager came in and this CIA operative, Pat, rushed over to him, started to throttle him, and threatened him with severe violence if he ever pissed him off again.
So, this morning, even though I still had a decent sleep despite the noise disruption, I did wake up feeling hungover. I am still keeping things in perspective. The magnificent local cloud forest I was privileged to visit yesterday is a vivid and present reminder of the absolute natural beauty and wonder of this place. The many fine, friendly and helpful people I have met also help me to remember that the dark side to our humanity is just that. It is only one side. The day before yesterday, I had lost one of my pencil sharpeners. The next day one of the ladies at the soda had it ready for me to pick up. Today, in one of the local bakery cafes one of the staff returned to me a small green pencil crayon that I had lost there when I was last there almost a week ago.
I think we are always going to have to reckon with darkness, our own and other people´s, but this also somehow makes the light seem brighter.
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