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10 August 2005
Two weeks in Costa Rica: Day 3, 25 June 2005
The TURISMO bus had exactly twenty-two full seats and five-six foldup seats by the side of each row. It was a Toyota and was made in Japan for use as a right-hand wheel drive van, so when Juan purchased the vehicle and had the steering wheel altered either something was lost in translation or the Japanese decided it was too cumbersome to construct a door for the driver. Thankfully, the passengers could board the bus by a small sliding door behind the driver's seat. Each row on the bus was partitioned 2-1 and there were four such rows including one that rode on the hump of the hinter-wheels. Then, there was the last row that could seat five. You could say that as with every bus, Juan's TURISMO bus had a seat for each mood -- the single-seats were for reclusives who could sit by themselves, the last row was for the mischief-mongers who would occupy them with their backs to the end of the bus and the two-seaters were for the various permutations of two lives briefly entangled for the length of the trips.Then, there were the proprietary seats -- Juan in the front at the driver's seat, Chris by his side as his cohort and our filter into roadside Costa Rica and Greg the handyman with his money-bags and assortments of first-aid kits, sunscreen, anti-itch cream, bugspray and the like and Jane -- sometimes staff, sometimes bemused spectator to our frolicking and sometimes herself. For the day, I decided to seat myself just behind Juan and Chris with the intention of partaking of their Spanish conversations and hopefully picking up some nibbles of conjugation, vocabulary and colloquialisms. Besides, my seat afforded me grand views of the road ahead which I have always immensely preferred to side-views where you end up being spectated at as an item of harmless curios caged behind glass windows.
Our destination that day was the Poas National Park. On the way to the park, Juan pointed out many coffee plantations neatly arrayed by the main road -- another nostalgic throwback to the time I spent in Munnar. In many regards, this part of Costa Rica resembled mile for mile the tarred, cesspitted, puddling road and green, greener, greenest hedges of glazened leaves in the crowd-infested hill resorts of South India. Naked roads snaking up and up, wide enough for only one-way traffic but banked on both sides by sandy turf before they hit hard rock, lonesome and haggard wayfarers for whom the passage of a busload of tourists accords a singularly enchanting distraction from the ticklish pebbles and the path yet to be travelled and old women on bicycles visiting family in the neighbouring roadside village. It was then that the comparison vaporised -- for every such old woman on her bicycle/ her family/ and four million other Ticos in Costa Rica I would need to have imagined 250 old women with tattered cloth-bundles, wrinkled skin resting on parallel window-bars under listing jute-screens of a nominally 50-person seating capacity red-yellow State Tourism Development Corporation bus with a gearbox the size of a coffin meant for a short, bulky man/ each of their six children and twenty-five grandchildren/ and a billion other Indians in a land dieciocho mille kilometros away, sixty-four times bigger and four times as dense.
We disembarked from the TURISMO at a higher level than the rest of the main office of the National Park was at. After finishing our various bathroom breaks, we headed towards the crater on a two-lane path both lanes of which were being used for onward progress unsure of whether that was their intended utility. The fascinating thing about a crater is how the climax breaks at some inevitable juncture -- I still remember the uphill drive Abhishek, Tejaswi and I took to visit the Crater Lake National Park in Oregon last year before that wondrous sight suddenly was in our view and the whole of it fit snugly across the lateral reaches of our eyes. Presently, we came up upon a rail leaned upon by scores of American tourists dressed in their panama hats, khaki shorts and scurrying offspring -- gazing steadfastly on the gleaming sulphur lake down in the caldera. Admittedly it was nowhere as spectacular as a regal-blue Crater Lake but the sulphur lake still was a darned fine sight and still deserved its share of backdrop photography which our group was only too happy to oblige with. We posed in succession for each of half a dozen cameras that we entrusted to compatriot United States residents who -- either awed by the size of our group or just from the privilege of being vested with the responsibility of recording for us our various pieces of memories of the Poas Volcano -- bungled up with a majority of the shots. Having satisfied ourselves that the sulphur lake did not betray different colours at different vantage points, some of us made our way to the Botas lagoon -- an adjacent crater now filled with algae and plankton floating on water.
It started out bright enough, mellow sunlight bouncing off the sulphur, off the green lagoon and off the corrugated roof over the walk-way by the souvenir shop and the museum of artifacts which also contained amongst other items of curios pictures bearing testimony to an unexpected collaboration between Taiwan and Costa Rica to promote tourism in the other country and to help develop infrastructure in Costa Rica. And then, as seemed to be the norm the sun followed up with gentle patter made all the more musical as it dipped and collected on the ridges of asbestos above us. By this time the majority of us were already inside the souvenir shop -- some of us with honchos at hand, some others exhorting some of us to get our honchos out and still some others who were quickly weighing their purchasing options amongst the many intriguing mementos and souvenir items. It was around when I looked at a nicely polished sliding-door wooden dice-box containing six wooden dice that the hush-hush of pitter-patter was slaughtered by a deafening and ferocious roar of monster-sized water-pellets dropping like shots of lead from the sky onto the roof. No cover -- honchos, two layers of honchos, or even thick raincoats seemed adequate to counter their barrage and fortunately for all of us the torrent did not last too long. By the time we had finished raining our own shower of colones onto the cash-boxes of a hitherto deprived Volcan Poas National Park souvenir shop, the rain retreated to being iota-sized thistles falling pin-drop about us. From the souvenir shop, my collection comprised of the dice-box and a cute, colourful, cartoonish stereometric map of Costa Rica while the others bought toy parakeets, postcards, photoframes and T-shirts. I resisted the urge of buying the $80-wooden miniature replica of a 1930s pickup truck.
Our lunch stop was at a restaurant which adjoined another souvenir shop and perhaps as an intended concomitant carried many exotic paintings on its walls. But the one most offensive to a little girl not more than seven years old was that of a stylish woman in nude and the girl quickly ran to it and covered parts of the painting that she thought objectionable. Deprived of a fuller appreciation for the restaurant's art, we concentrated instead on hearty platters of potatoes, excellent fried plantain leaves, rice and beans and subsequently headed back to San Jose. The only sight worth reminiscing about was that of an overcrowded funeral service of a seemingly popular now-departed soul at the local iglesia on the way to San Jose. Funerals in Costa Rica are perhaps as colourful as birthday parties are -- and why should they not be, if death is not but a celebration of life -- for the women peeking over the shoulders of their husbands and men at the threshold of the church underneath hoods of spiny umbrellas were murmurring with gossip, their little children re-energised running rivalries carried forward from past funerals and the men themselves were not too shy of praying for the bereaved and the bereft with cigarette smoke.
Our plan for the afternoon was to go shopping. On a Sunday afternoon, nothing else could have suggested itself better. We ambled past a huge gathering assembled to watch a street performance of bumbling clown-jugglers who sported the customary red ball noses and some white cream on their faces. There was still some light rain as we headed into the street-bazaar quite reminiscent of the sabzi-mandis in Bangalore on 8th cross, Malleswaram and the dark mausoleum-labyrinth of vegetable-stores in T. Nagar in Madras. Each shop had a characteristic set of items on display -- little trinkets, T-shirts, woodwork, keychains, stuffed toys -- and a small hinter-compartment that housed stand-in volunteers who would take over when the main vendor wanted a break to take a snuff or make small talk with their neighbours. This was the closest it came to feel like the gypsy colonies so colourfully illustrated in Tintin: there were teenaged girls in denim shirts and skirts but with immensely powdered faces and penetrating stares of morning marijuana, brushed up eyebrows and loud lipstick, drag queens with maladjusted toupées, short men with earrings and wattle-necks in close-necked T-shirts moving nimbly with the gift of attractive women walking in a crowd. I muttered my apologies in "disculpe", "con permiso" as I rambled from stall to stall not particularly set on any more purchases. The others however had not been simultaneously flush with excitement and anxious with fear at the thought of having so many colones to spend for nothing and so that little dark corridor sheltering us from the intermittent drizzle played host to student-tourists from America in addition to their regular cache of passers-by, mothers-daughters, uniformed schoolchildren and body-piercers.
On our return to the hotel, the party acquired a new member -- a mangy and shrewd dog that loyally followed us through the jaywalking, through-parks cutting and step-climbing except on occasion when a sniff through parallel sewers would excite him temporarily before he recognised that there was more by way of bounty if he set store by his new pack of tourists. He attached himself to Jane who seemed to be the most receptive amongst us though admittedly -- stray or otherwise -- the dog was quite a hit with the surprisingly large number of dog-lovers in our Group of Eighteen. There were however some boundaries the dog was not meant to cross and so he stayed by this side of the hotel doorstep behind the heavily-secured gate system.
It was not two hours after we reached the Amistad that all of San Jose was bombarded with yet more of the loud pelter of rain. A screen of pastel watercolours descended on the hillside view and rain sluiced its way through the path of least resistance. It was a sight to watch and behold and listen to but not one to wander out. Chris let us know earlier that this kind of rain was unusual even for Costa Rica and was a consequence of a little indigestion over at the Atlantic. Perhaps the dog outside was in the minds of some but Dan and I were back in our room looking up to our television set in chaste reverence and seeking guidance from it.
