Please adjust your dress before leaving....

Image by mikebaird via Flickr

This notice adorned, to the best of my recollection, the inside door of the loos on the steam trains taking one to Scotland.....and I think its day has come again.

It could be posted with advantage on the inside door of the hotel rooms occupied by American tourists in Costa Rica's capital, San Jose.

Before anyone thinks I have it in for the American abroad, let me just reassure you...I have seen the British abroad as well.
Equally discouraging...but different.

For example, while on holiday in Tunisia at Hammamet I came across two British archetypes in quick succession.

The first family was led by a gentleman with shaven head and heavily tattooed arms. What else might possibly have been tattooed was mercifully hidden under a singlet. The lady accompanying him was unshaven, and sported lighter tattoos. Alongside was a boy of some seven years with red on white crosses of St. George on each cheek while father was in charge of the pushchair, nattily lined with a St. George's cross towel and containing a small child in a jester's cap in red and white and a tee shirt adorned with...well, you can guess.

Dragons would have been well advised to steer clear of this little party.

A safe distance behind them came the second group.

Father, all floppy sunhat, black sock and sandal was leading his brood....two teenage girls so covered in sunblock as to resemble ladies of the court of Queen Elizabeth I with their white leaded cheeks, a younger boy - in sunhat - carrying bat, ball and stumps with which to bring the family to the brink of heart failure while re enacting Flintoff's finest hour under the Tunisian sun - while mother, sunhat, droopy skirt and vast beachbag full of food looted from the breakfast buffet brought up the rear.

The American version is different.

I first became aware of it when meeting a friend in the elegant surroundings of the coffee shop at the Teatro Nacional...all painted ceilings, fluted columns and marble tiles...a quiet haven in the city centre.

We were well into our coffee, cake and gossip when a new group of patrons appeared to take centre stage.

Think a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Crocodile Dundee......

Broad brimmed safari hats, those shooting party waistcoats with bands for cartridges...thankfully empty...shorts, knee length socks and walking boots.

In the coffee shop of the Teatro Nacional. All painted ceilings, fluted columns and marble tiles.

I awaited the arrival of their order to see if they would produce machetes with which to cut their cake...but I was disappointed. They made do with cake forks.

Walking across to the library, I became aware of more of them....all dressed as if about to face the wilderness but strolling the streets of the capital of Costa Rica, among the monuments, the parks and the shops.
Why hadn't I noticed them before?

Well, mostly because I only toddle up to the centre of town if I'm meeting friends or going to change my books and because when I do I'm  usually concentrating on not putting my foot into one of the many unprotected holes in the pavement rather than on my fellow man.
Where I do my food shopping, the streets around the Mercado Borbon, the tourist is firmly discouraged from putting a socked and booted foot for fear of crime.

Image by Néstor Baltodano via Flickr

Reading the guide books you would imagine that once you enter that area you would be torn limb from limb by muggers intent on parting you from your watch, earrings, necklaces, cameras and wallets.
Absolute nonsense.
You might have to keep a wary eye out for gentlemen barely in control of barrows laden with pineapples, plantains or coconuts, but that's a different sort of hazard.

Where you are more likely to find crime is where the intrepid Great White Hunters roam....in the town centre, with the casinos, the tourist hotels and the golden arches of McDonalds.
More chance of grabbing a mobile 'phone, a camera or a wallet up there than down round the Mercado Borbon where all that people carry are their shopping bags.

Still, to return to the tourists.....they must know that they are staying in a town, so why dress as if about to go whacking the bush?

I think the answer is that they have, or have been sold, a certain idea of Costa Rica as a third world destination with oases of modern hotels from which they can venture forth to visit rain forests, frighten the wits out of wildlife by screaming their way along ziplines and have their hats stolen by monkeys in the Manuel Antonio National Park.
The idea that Costa Rica contains towns has never entered their consciousness, so they haven't packed for urban strolling.

That San Jose has some stunning architecture passes them by too....you'd be hard put to find mention of it in any guide book....so they spend their obligatory day in San Jose sticking out like sore thumbs and buying expensive coffee in the tourist hotels. Where they speak English...or, rather, American.

Other tourists I've always been aware of...the backpacking kids changing buses in Coca Cola, heading from one coast to the other...goggling their way through the Mercado Central, all burned red by the sun, the girls wearing skirts which might be better described as pelmets and the boys wide legged long shorts that give them the air of seventeenth century Dutch burghers, the air resounding to cries of
'Oh My God!'
as cameras record their presence among the pet shops, the stalls selling religious figurines - bondieuserie - and creche characters....the herbalists, the souvenir lairs, the butchers, the petshops and the veg stalls, before they stop for an ice cream and a fresh fruit drink at one of the many foodstalls.

And then there are tourists for whom the sign on the door is the most apt.
I never see this lot as they tend to be nocturnal.....only heading out into Gringo Gulch as darkness covers the earth.
The sex tourists.
Those who come to Costa Rica because prostitution is legal...because they can buy human flesh for an hour or two and compensate for their inadequacies.

In their case, it's not just their dress that requires adjustment....it's their morals as well.