costa rica olympics

I cannot say that the Costa  Rican government of Laura Chinchilla is rubbing its hands at the lack of medals for its national team at the London Olympics, but it won't be too sorry either.


Given the government's financial predicament, if Leonard Chacon had been in serious contention for the Triathlon then it wouldn't have been the Canadian in front of him crashing his bike and losing him his place, but a government crony with free Olympic tickets sent out with a long pole to give him a shove.

According to law, Ley 7706 of 1977, Costa Rica awards a prize to any one of its nationals winning an Olympic or World championship in the sum of 156,000 colones (equivalent to 300,000 U.S. dollars).
Except it doesn't.

When Nery Brenes won the gold medal in the 400 metres in the world indoor Championships in Turkey in March this year the appropriate ministry said that while it had the legal obligation to pay out, it didn't have any budget allocation to do so.
The same went for Hannah Gabriel, WBO junior middleweight champion in women's boxing.

The government has, amazingly, vast sums available to corrupt officials and contractors to build a road along its border with Nicaragua....but sporting excellence goes by the board.

As neither cricket nor rugby figure in the Olympic sports I haven't followed events closely, but it has been heartening to see and hear how the enthusiasm of ordinary people and dedicated sportsmen and women have overcome the miasma of commercialism to produce an event which has been so good humoured and celebratory.
The participants have every reason to be proud of themselves.

But being in Costa Rica has brought it home to me how little chance poorer countries have of advancing their sports to World and Olympic championship level.
When I read of the funding available to the G.B. cycling group it makes my eyes water...but, realistically, these days it takes more than having the determination to do your best to win medals.
You need backing, organisation and top class coaching, which poorer nations just cannot afford.

So I was wondering, day dreaming rather, how it would be possible to alleviate this problem and it occurred to me that it would be a great gesture if the sports federations of wealthy nations would take under their wing their equivalents in developing and third world countries...let them have access to the training programmes and the equipment...and governments to push multi national companies to sponsor federations from countries in which they operate to allow the sportsmen and women to be able to train properly, to attain the heights of which they are capable.

If McDonalds were to sponsor a Costa Rican sport to allow its participants to train with the worlds best then I'm prepared to buy one of their products each week - a hungry dog would benefit too - and it would be nice to think, for once, that the only gesture made by rich countries to the poor was not one made with the fingers.

As the run stealers flicker to and fro...

Today was the first day of the first Test Match between England and South Africa at the Oval.
This being a Thursday it was also the day when The Men would go off to work on the house in San Jose for three days.

Perfect.

Once they were off I could listen to the match undisturbed for the first three days....the fourth day would be Sunday when Danilo wouldn't be working...and given recent history it was possible that the game wouldn't last into the fifth day anyway.

Everything was ready. Clothes, pills, water bottles boxed overnight. Tools assembled and boxed. Smoked fish for breakfast as being the item in the repertoire requiring least attention and washing up.

Alarm clock on. We are seven hours behind the U.K.

Alarm clock giving tongue and silenced.
Dressing gown on, computer fired up, dogs let out, teabag tea made.
Play delayed by fifteen minutes...time for a shower.....then play starts and the England captain is out for a duck.
Weigh up whether to wake Mr. Fly to give him news of his side's triumph and decide against it.

Rush out between overs to heat water in the heavy saucepan.
Rush out between overs later to turn off the gas, put fish into water and cover with lid.
In the drinks interval wake Mr. Fly, give him the news and make toast and tea (properly this time).
Gobble breakfast. Pile dishes. Return to computer.

All according to plan.

Cooke and Trott are batting well. For some reason the South African bowlers aren't running down the pitch to make rude remarks to them. The umpires haven't had to intervene.

Then the telephone rings.
Cursing, I turn down the sound on the computer and answer it.

It is Danilo. He has a problem, Houston.

I pull up the page in the Daily Telegraph which gives over by over commentary and read while he speaks.

It's a problem with the car, which he keeps at his place to drive to work in the mornings.

It is a fairly modern one, a Ssangyong, with all the usual footling modern devices.
Including security devices.
It locks itself if you don't get there first.

Which is what has happened.
He was emptying it when he was called into the house by his daughter who thought she'd seen a snake.
At that moment, his dogs, excited by the squawks from the house, plunged to the rescue and, being hefty dogs and the car being parked alongside the house, made room for themselves by pushing past the open car door.
Which shut.

Excitement over, he returned to the car and found that he could not open the door...because the keys were in the ignition. Inside the car.

What about the spares?

Ah, that was the problem.
On the last visit to San Jose he had locked up the house on departure, only to discover while driving home that he had left the spare keys on the table in the house.
Mr. Fly had decreed that it wasn't worth turning round to get them. After all, what could happen?

By this time Mr. Fly had arrived and I handed over the receiver, belting out to the balcony to fire up the laptop while sparks flew over the telephone line.
Ah. Relief. England hadn't lost another wicket.

The rumbling stopped. Mr. Fly emerged.

He says he'll work here this morning and nip into San Jose on the bus this afternoon to get the keys.

Hell and damnation!
Tea breaks and worse...lunch!
I had reckoned on having the remains of last night's balti for  my lunch and now I'd have to feed the pair of them.
Blast!

Upend myself in the chest freezer to find tilapia.
Tilapia found.
Sound of motorbike announces the arrival of  Danilo.

Tea made, I retire to the computer.
Cook and Trott still batting. South African bowlers still polite. Umpires undisturbed.

Danilo retires to the cafetal. Mr. Fly appropriates the computer. I remove myself to the laptop on the balcony.

Trott is out. Pieterson comes in to replace him.

Time for coffee. And cake. Remove myself to the computer.
Evicted at end of coffee time.
Wash up and rush back to the laptop.

Pieterson still in.

Bring knife, board, plastic box and tilapia out to the balcony.
Filet and skin  tilapia.

Pieterson and Cook still there.

Plunge into kitchen to bake tilapia in stock with carrot and celery.
Rush out to balcony. Reassured, plunge back to kitchen.
Peel and boil potatoes for mash.
Rush out to balcony. Plunge back to kitchen.
Chop ginger and garlic, throw into pan with oil and red pepper flakes. Slice chinese cabbage and throw on top.
Rush out to balcony. Plunge back to kitchen.
Mash potatoes, stir fry cabbage and add soy.

The  Men appear, looking for lunch. As I dish up in the kitchen I hear a roar from the laptop.
Pieterson is out!
Blast!
What happened?
They don't know how he got out, they're discussing fertiliser for the coffee.
Useless!

I serve lunch and Bell, who has replaced Pieterson, plays sensibly as South Africa take the new ball.
Play ends and Danilo takes his leave.

The motorbike returns while I am washing up.
He had forgotten that his set of house keys were with the car keys so he can't get into the house in San Jose.
I give him my spares and he leaves again.

Mr. Fly appears while I am investigating the fridge for likely suspects with which to prepare supper for two.

You'd better get something out for lunch tomorrow too. There's no point going in just for two days.
We'll put it off until next week.

Ye gods and little fishes.....!

Later, from up on the mountainside, I hear the sound of a car alarm.....
Danilo's wife rings.
Do we have the car keys because she tried to open the door to get Danilo's tee shirt out for the wash and the alarm went off....

Something's gone AWOL....

Further to the item on Bailey bridges it would be salutary to read this post on Flies in the Ointment, which wonders aloud where one might find the Bailey bridges bought and lavishly paid for....but invisible to the naked eye.

A super blog on the underbelly of Costa Rica for those whose Spanish isn't up to reading the Infierno - also on the blogroll on the right.

The Saviour of Costa Rica....and British at that!

Costa Rica is a small country abounding in rivers...which makes travel by road a problem as these rivers need crossing, and river crossings need to have an eye kept on their maintenance.

Which is exactly what the Transport Ministry (MOPT) and the Roads Authority (CONAVI) have not been doing for several years.

As our own experiences have shown.

While we were still holidaying here we decided to take a trip to the National Agricultural School on the other side of the Central Valley and decided to go cross country to avoid retracing our steps for some forty kilometres by going into the suburbs of the capital and out again.

This meant crossing the Virilla River, carrying the pollution of the Central Valley towns down to the Pacific Ocean.....but the map showed a way across so off we went.

Costa Rica is not well endowed with direction signs, and certainly none existed on the dirt tracks which had succeeded to the asphalted roads once we left the better populated areas.

We passed a large pig farm - and were surprised that we knew and were known to the man with the tractor working there.
He gave directions.

At a junction by a mango plantation we asked again.
Down there....pointing somewhere equidistant between the two tracks available.

Down there, we came across men cutting cane.
Yes, down there.

So down there we went, cautiously as the track had turned into a quagmire after the rains.
We turned a corner, and gasped.

There was the Virilla river.
A long way down.
Crossed by a suspension bridge.
A suspension bridge which had seen better days.
To the point that there were more gaps than planks.

Turning was impossible...it was the bridge or bust - and luckily it didn't.

We arrived safely at the Agricultural School, to find it was closed to visitors, but the man selling cheese produced there took pity on us and made a 'phone call, which resulted in us having the undivided attention of the deputy director himself, giving us a guided tour of everything from artificial insemination of Bramah cattle to a crocodile farm via water buffalo to produce proper mozarella.
Scots blood might have helped...the place had been founded by Scottish veterinary surgeons before being handed over to the state.

It was a wonderful tour guided by a real expert and we had almost forgotten about the terrors of the bridge when we saw a news item on the television.

A similar bridge further downstream over the Tarcoles River had collapsed, taking a bus and its passengers into the fast flowing waters.

The living escaped onto the roof of the bus to be rescued by Red Cross workers and volunteers.

That there were only five deaths among the thirty eight passengers was due to the abnormally low level of the river.
This  video shows what crossing that bridge was like in the rainy season that year.

The bridge collapse meant that communities were cut off.....so a replacement was needed, urgently. And, as always, the answer was a bailey bridge.

                                                                        

These bridges, the product of British wartime ingenuity, are the mainstay of road transport in Costa Rica with at least eighty in service to keep things moving both on the backroads and on the major highway between San Jose and the international airport where lack of maintenance led to a huge sinkhole forming recently, closing half the road and reducing most of the Central Valley to gridlock until two Bailey bridges were set up while repairs (still unfinished) took place.

The bridge was designed for warfare. It was made of light prefabricated parts which could be  transported and assembled without the need for heavy lifting gear and being modular could be made as long and strong as was required by doubling up on the component parts.

It took the British army and its tanks across Africa and through Europe to final victory, the brainchild of Donald Bailey, a civil servant with a passion for bridges. An amateur.

And now, in a fine example of swords turned into ploughshares, it is keeping Costa Rica on the move, from the farmer taking his crop to market to the lorries hauling goods between Mexico and Panama on the Interamericana Highway. 

But without the genius of Donald Bailey Costa Rica would be at a standstill.

With a Bimbo in his arms and a Gleam in his Eye...I blame Gordon Ramsay

Mr. Fly is a man for gadgets.
Not the ipod, ipad and ipoke sort of thing, luckily, as both of us are defeated before we start by things with buttons to press.

The mobile telephone spends more time being hurled away in despair than it does being used...because we don't know how it works.
It can - and does - play music at us, display a calendar worthy of an optician's bottom line, show imperative messages when its owners want more money, but as for calls...forget it..
It makes a noise like an authoritarian frog when the inevitable wrong number appears on the screen and on the rare occasions that we recognise the number the caller at the other end has given up by the time we work out which section of which button to press.

So he is attracted by nothing covered by the generic term 'implode'.

Kitchen gadgets are the favoured species.

I have lost count of the times I have been presented with a machine for cutting onions which always seems to involve persuading the onion to plop into it at the right angle and then risking permanent damage to the wrist while trying to force the cutting part through said onion.

Corkscrews. We have an entire battery of implements for uncorking bottles, from models made from 1914-1918 shell cases, via things with two handles which involve making sure the bottle is on a non slip surface, Swiss army knives and two pronged butler's devices. The only thing so far lacking is a sabre for the champagne.

Fruit juicers are in disfavour after it was discovered that the expensive Braun model took more time to clean than it took fruit to ripen, but in its brief span of life between leaving its carton and entering the kitchen cupboard it left its mark in local folklore.

We had picked the grapes on the vine round the house and I had them in the kitchen ready for making jelly.
The Braun, not yet in disgrace, was on the worktop.
Someone who shall be nameless decided to make grape juice.
The combined efforts of the Nameless One and the Braun resulted in a decor with a strong emphasis on purple and it was at that moment that Gaston appeared in the doorway with a bucket of lettuces for us.

Oh no, he said, coming forward in fascinated horror.

You'll never make wine like that...you'll be here a twelvemonth.

Attempts to convince him that we were making grape juice got nowhere...
Who would make grape juice when you could let it ferment and have something worthwhile.

We hadn't long moved to the area  and to distinguish us from other British immigrants we were thenceforward referred to as the ones who tried to make wine in the mixer which at least was one step up from the couple referred to as the ones who were discovered in their underwear in the church.
They say they were sheltering from a thunderstorm. The village was not convinced.

I have had long warning of the new gadget.

The standard of sausage roll in the caff across the road from the San Juan de Dios Hospital had suffered a noticeable decline....the pastry having won its battle with the filling...so Mr. Fly cast an eye over the choices made by other customers and decided on a toasted sandwich.
The filling here was romping home by five lengths.....lettuce, tomato, ham cheese....
It cast the poor sausage roll into a shade more like Stygian gloom.

From then on, the toasted sandwich was the snack of choice, comparisons between the produce of various caffs being made and close attention paid to the items of which they were comprised.
You want the equivalent of a Michelin rating on the toasted sandwiches of San Jose...look no further.

So it was no surprise to find a toasted sandwich maker among our other purchases at the duty free store in Golfito.
It was duly delivered to the house in San Jose and brought home.

I've never had one of these gadgets, so, wondering what the little plastic cup was for, I read the instructions.
This was a mistake as they were generic for several models and mine had an unexplained green light as well as the red one mentioned in the text, so I decided to ignore it.

The hotplates washed and dried and anointed with cooking oil, we are ready for the off.

This is where the baleful influence of Gordon Ramsay comes in.
At the advent of every new gadget, Mr. Fly assumes control of the kitchen.
Things are reorganised....working methods overturned....explanations are demanded as to why I keep the alarm clock on top of the pickled onion jar.
The answer - because I can see it there when I'm timing something - judged to be inadequate.

The ideal position for the sandwich maker being the spot where I keep the slow cooker the latter is thrust into my arms and, in extremis, I put it on top of the oven housing.
I shall, no doubt, be wondering where it is later....

The fridge had been ransacked among cries of

What are you keeping THAT for?

An array of items stood ready.

I cut four slices of bread.

NO! Not slices! They just cut the loaf in half...

Well yes they do, but their loaves are the Costa Rican equivalent of a baguette and we were dealing with a torpedo shaped wholemeal number.
Still, in the spirit of the Light Brigade, mine not to make reply, mine not to reason why even if I was pretty damn sure that someone had blundered, I cut the torpedo in half crossways and in half again lengthways and awaited the next instruction.

Butter the outside. Outside buttered.
Lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and mayonnaise. Duly applied.

Put them in!

I open the lid, plonk the torpedoes on the bottom plate and cannot close the top.

With cries of frustration Chef replaces me at the hotplate but cannot close it either.
He then demonstrates with a wooden spatula how to poke the torpedoes to the back of the plate with one hand while squashing the lid down with the other.
It still doesn't close, but I suppose it sticks to the batter as it does not rise again.
Chef retires to the balcony warning me not to let the sandwiches burn.

Torpedoes duly toasted we ate them and, though the bread to filling ratio needed attention (let no one mention the sausage rolls) they were surprisingly pleasant.

We returned to the kitchen.

I suppose you'd better use those slices.
Oh, and you can use this up.
'This' being the remains of a smoked fish dip I had made for  lunch the previous day.

Sandwich assembled, toasted and tasted.
Absolutely disgusting...the dip had deconstructed itself under the action of heat and had become fishy primeval slime.
I now understood the purpose of the plastic cup.

I said you shouldn't use slices.

Calm restored, toaster plates cleaned, life resumes its normal aspect until a bright idea strikes.

If I take the toaster into San Jose, Danilo and I can have toasted sandwiches for lunch on two days......that will save eight thousand colones! The toaster will pay for itself in two weeks!

So, on the Thursday morning the toaster is packed up together with butter, cheese, tomatoes ham cheese and mayonnaise and whisked away to the renovation project.

On  Thursday night I telephone to ask how went the day.

I've got indigestion.

How?. Didn't you make a toasted sandwich?

Well....I bought a baguette - the way they do it here.

And?

Well, it went all soft and squidgy......they can't have cooked the bread properly....it was like a lump of lead...

But you ate it?

Well, yes. I'd made it so I ate it. And then Danilo pipes up and tells me I should be making it with sliced bread.

So will you?
Thinking that in this household sliced bread is usually regarded as being akin to the Beast of Revelations, something against which the door is securely barred and bolted.

I'll give it a try. I haven't bought this machine for nothing....

Friday night. The telephone call.

How was the toasted sandwich?

Much better...they must have industrial toasters in the caffs to do those baguettes...I got a bimbo and it worked like a dream.

While thinking to myself that in the estimation of most men things work like a dream with a bimbo on the scene I was a little surprised.....
Up to that point Mr. Fly's oft stated view had been that, taken overall,  the expenditure required to maintain a bimbo was well out of synch with the gratification afforded by said.

And then it occurred to me.....the leading brand of sliced bread in Costa Rica rejoices in the name of

Bimbo!

I'll bring a couple back with me....

You do that....one for each arm.

The Wrong Side of the Volcano

We took a trip to see a volcano this week.....Volcan Arenal, seen here from across the artificial lake created to supply hydroelectric power for Costa Rica.

Looks cool and sleepy, doesn't it? And so people thought who farmed its slopes until in July 1968, without any warning, it erupted, killing 87 people, covering an area of some fifteen kilometres in ash and lava...rocks weighing several tons being launched into the air.
A tragedy.

But as activity, less violent but very dramatic, continued, it was put to good account in Costa Rica's burgeoning tourist business.....where else could you see this, for example?

                                                      An amazing sight!

Hotels began to be built offering their clients views of nature's fireworks from the comfort of their own rooms...or sitting on the terrace, glass in hand, while the volcano rumbled and spat fire at close range.

As the tourist demand increased, other activities prospered too. Hot springs establishments....bird watching visits to the wetlands to the north...fishing and windsurfing on Lake Arenal...

And just as well, because Arenal began to nod off again....

First the flow moved round to the other side of the volcano - depriving the expensive tourist traps of their main attraction  - and now seems to have ceased completely.
No fireworks...no rumbles.

I still see some pretty misleading publicity about Arenal...I have no idea if the guidebooks have caught up with the situation...but eventually the distributors will run out of postcards and flyers showing molten lava running down from the cone and the businesses dependent on its presence will die or adapt.

Death or adaption has been the choice of whole areas of Europe where traditional industrial production was a way of life.
Coal mines, steel mills...filthy dirty things that ruined the health of as many as they employed, if not more...but regarded as essential to produce the necessities that the nation required to be independent.

Governments decided that they did not need to safeguard these  industries any more...any more than they needed to maintain control of transport and energy supply.
The mines and factories closed, private enterprise took over the transport and energy industries - but never without a hefty subsidy from the public purse.

The same public purse that funded governments'  preference for maintaining able bodied people on benefits rather than making any effort to replace the old industries with new.
Inculcating the dependency culture they would pretend to deplore.

Governments abdicated their responsibilities both to people and to nation, putting everything up for grabs in the name of the market.

The market.
Where everything which affects our lives is bought and sold to enrich others.
The market.
Pelf its only pride.

Governments - or rather the financial - media - political nexus which has replaced the traditional model - have been farming the slopes of green and pleasant lands undisturbed since they renounced their traditional responsibilities....their peoples drugged by the bribes of easy credit into falling into hedonism.
Lotus eaters.
But the lotus are running short on the shelves of Tesco.

Governments - or rather the political - media - finance nexus which has replaced the traditional model - are savvier than the farmers on the slopes of Arenal in the sixties. They know that those waked from a drugged sleep can be violent - thus all the 'security' measures justified by the fear of 'terrorism'.

How long before there is a social explosion from the other side of the slopes that sends pieces of their corrupt edifice flying to destruction?

And should it come, and when it comes, remember that you, middle class, law abiding, protesting peacefully at the loss of all you and your parents worked for, will be treated as though you were a lawless lout on the rampage. For such you will be in the eyes of those who make the  law. The law of the market.

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Steaming along nicely

This photograph, which I owe to the blog of Pedro Erik Wesson, shows a steam locomotive in its pomp working the tracks in the south of Costa Rica in the 1950s.....when Golfito was the port used by the American United Fruit Company to export produce from the region.

I've loved steam engines since I can first remember, not just locomotives but all and any of them...beam engines, steamrollers, paddle steamers...you name it.
But then I grew up in a period where steam had not yet abdicated its rule....mighty steamrollers with the driver perched high up in his cab worked the roads, with foolish boys throwing pennies under the rollers and looking half delighted, half aghast at the results.

Dr. Beeching still worked for ICI and steam trains of all shapes and sizes roared or snuffled their way from end to end of the country, from the great expresses to the slow trains, serving quiet country stations. Not quite 'Oh Mister Porter' and Buggleskelly station....but not that far from it either in some cases.

Placed in the care of the guard for the journey to Glasgow on the Royal Scot no journey could begin without the ritual visit to the mighty locomotive at the end of the platform, the driver and fireman smiling down at the children gathered beneath them, the expulsions of steam indicating that the beast was ready to go....
Peering through the window as the train took a curve...the bridal train of white steam running back over the carriages -
The tunnels where it behoved you to close the tiny window panel if you were not to undergo the castigation of the aunts' reception committee when alighting with your white collar marked by smuts...

So what has all this to do with Costa Rica?

Well, we took a trip to Golfito in a light 'plane....
The company had a mad promotion of a trip for five dollars so we plumped for the south, thinking to go on to  botanic gardens on the Panama border.
As it turned out, the weather turned to persistent, heavy rain on the second day so the gardens will have to wait, but on our first evening we took a walk along the shore and came across this:

Standing idle, abandoned, rusty, this is the very train from the photograph at the head of this post. I reckon it has been there since United Fruit pulled out in the 1960s...the pursuit of profit being more important than the economy of whole region. No adjustments, no compensation....just upped and went.

There is something unwholesome about American colonialism.
First, the denial that is it colonialism.
Second, following from the first, that no consideration has to be given to the colonised...as it is, after all, not the affair of government but that of business, which knows no morality.
Third, the willingness of American government to interfere in the governments of countries in which American business has an interest.
And fourth, the total unwillingness even to try to assume Kipling's 'white man's burden'. Decried as it is, there was at least a sense of responsibility underlying it.

To try to revive the area, the Costa Rican government decided to attract people there to shop....

They set up a duty free area...the Deposito Libre...where people could buy goods at reduced prices.
These days, you can buy one thousand dollars' worth of goods twice a year.
You have to take a ticket on day one, stay overnight - which helps the B and Bs and the caffs - and shop the next day.

All clear and simple you would think. But suppose you want to refit your house...it will cost more than one thousand dollars. Do you come back in the next six month period?

Of course not. This is Costa Rica.

Inside the Deposito Libre are any number of ladies and gentlemen of the area who, for a small consideration, will let you use their tickets.
If you are on a spending spree you go to the checkouts accompanied by enough ticket holders to make up a crowd scene from a Hollywood Biblical epic and no official turns a hair.

So, unlike poor old train number 82,  Golfito is still steaming along nicely.