Costa Rica 11

Its been a very tranquil summery kind of day.  The temperature must have been in the low twenties, very similar to Vancouver in July.  I walked around a lot as usual, taking a rather long dead end road full of towering trees and cow pastures.  I heard a toucan croaking like a frog with a soar throat from the trees but couldnt quite see him.  The rock star birds are often if not always the hardest to notice.  Then I wandered to a bakery cafe for chocolate cake and coffee and to finish one drawing and start a new one, then I wandered along a couple of other dead end roads full of trees and dazzling sunlight.  Lots of hills to climb and this can be daunting to the poorly conditioned and even challenging to the already physically fit.

I stopped for an early dinner at the little soda in the gringo compound.  This little  restaurant with tasty cheap eats is like an island of authenticity among the pretentious neo hippy gringo stores in the area.  One of the ladies, a woman of perhaps fifty, and I often chat in Spanish and she expressed kind of a good natured contempt for a lot of the visitors here who really dont seem to give a damn about the people who live here.  She and her associate seem really interesting, bright, strong and resourceful women whose families have probably lived in Costa Rica for generations.

A lot of people here never travel as it is very expensive, and it is so clear how we who can make these trips seem to treat it as an entitlement rather than a very special privilege. Life for the locals is becoming very expensive with foreigners, principally from North America , buying property and pushing up land prices and the cost of everything else.  This seems to be part of a global phenomonen.  I only wish that something could be done to curb the greed, especially of property owners intent on selling.  I dont see why our governments couldnt exact a maximum price on land and real estate sales to keep everything within an affordable range.  Of course, the most beautiful and livable places, such as Vancouver and Costa Rca, are also going to be the most coveted and before you know it they will become ghettos for the rich, unless concrete and direct action is taken.

I trudged back to the bed and breakfast and they really treated me well, as always.  The laptop that I was loaned, for free, wasnt functioning, so father and son teamworked together for a good half hour or so to set me up with a functioning computer.  These people are so incredibly kind and I hope to never take them for granted.