Miraculous coincidences // Costa Rica 2 - 9 June

"She is the luckiest traveller"

At 4:53am on Sunday 2 June, Julio my Airbnb host sends me a WhatsApp voice message, "we're about 10 minutes away". We are actually nearly 250km away from his actual Airbnb. But he's picking me up from Alajuela, near SJO airport, where I spent a cold sleepless night in a windowless room (closet).

How?!

Aspirations

Rewind back to about 3 weeks ago, when I was sitting in my room in Ojochal where I got too bored of cleaning casitas and not talking to people, and was looking at alternatives to how to spend the rest of my time in Costa Rica, and decided to go to Nosara to do a 1-week intensive Spanish + surfing course. I had also applied for their homestay, but their affordable homestays were fully-booked. So I looked at Airbnb, narrowed it down to 3 according to distance and budget. One was an entire apartment to myself with A/C but the host sounded like a Gringo; another was a room in a house with a pool with a lady who did yoga and meditation and also some kind of spiritual stuff that made it sound kind of iffy; and then there was Julio's place, a room in a Tico family house in a Tico area, with shared kitchen and shared bathroom and laundry facilities. I chose Julio's - while it was basic, it seemed the most "normal", and it was the closest thing to a homestay.



A few days before heading to Nosara while I was frolicking around Drake Bay, Julio contacted me and asked where I was coming from and how, and I told him I had planned to take the 5AM bus from San Jose. I also told him I was coming to Nosara to study Spanish at the Spanish school.

Turns out...
1. Julio is a teacher at that same school.
2. He was coming to San Jose Airport area to pick up his wife at 5AM on Sunday morning - the same morning I was planning on taking that 5am bus.

What were the chances of those!! 

So I booked a room in a guesthouse near the airport, and on Sunday morning was picked up from my guesthouse by Julio and his lovely wife. We talked about books, travel, Costa Rican landlords and how to tell the difference between salsa and bachata. Julio even did my pre-entry language ability assessment in the car, saving me the 10 minutes on Monday morning.

And then on Monday morning (and every morning that week), instead of walking 20 minutes along a dusty road to school, I was given lifts to school on the back of my host's motorbike.

Luck...is a give-and-take thing. Booking.com didn't tell me the room at the guesthouse near the airport was going to be windowless. But I got free door-to-door transportation to Nosara and a good start to knowing my Airbnb hosts so I'm feeling pretty grateful.

Lunes, Martes, Miercoles...

It was Spanish 101 - which I needed. I was trying to learn Spanish with an audiobook but it was slow, required a lot more discipline and free time where I could concentrate (I started about a year ago while working in Tokyo and would listen to it for 20 minutes on my commute each morning; then completely stopped when I worked at Hakuba ski resort), and was mostly 'tourist' Spanish - where is the tourist office? What time does the train arrive? I would like a coffee and 2 paellas please. Not very conducive to any friendly conversation outside of requiring some kind of service or food.

So it was good to learn the basics - introductions, dates and days, adjectives, nouns, pronouns and how to string them all together. It was definitely a good way to spend 3.5 hours every day for 5 days.

Surfboard realisations 

For 2 out of those 5 days I had surfing lessons in the afternoon. Nosara is known for being a surfers' paradise, with waves for all levels of surfers. We beginners mostly stuck to the white water,  which was pretty easy to catch and ride on. The hard part was getting back out, battling the incoming waves crashing on you, waiting for the right wave, and positioning yourself at the right place and timing. After 2 lessons and 3 more days of practicing by myself, I realised that unless I lived by the beach and could go surfing 4 or 5 times a week, I would never improve beyond what I can do now (which isn't very much). 

Or perhaps I should look into seasonal work by the beach....?

Nosara, and some heavy-ish stuff about travel and colonisation

Nosara was beautiful, incredible sunsets - like, never-seen-before-incredible, a quiet long beach with nicely packed-in sand to walk on, which then gets a little more crowded from about 4:30pm onwards with surfers and surfer-watchers. 

I mean...these sunsets are just insane.

But...the town itself felt distinctly un-Costa-Rican. The majority of people I saw were American, and seemed severely lacking in locals. Many businesses seemed to be owned by Americans, but run by Tico staff. And hence everything was very expensive - tuk-tuks cost US$6 for a 5 min ride. A single ice cream scoop nearly US$4. 

All of this made me feel slightly uncomfortable. All I could see was rich white people moving to a developing country to buy up property, open businesses that cater to other rich white expats or travellers (who are also mostly white). I pondered whether this was bringing 1. jobs and 2. money to the local economy. But wouldn't the money be mostly pocketed by the business owners? And wouldn't this be causing increased prices and driving out locals from their original homes, and they have to commute further to get to work? As for jobs, sure it probably creates a lot of construction-related and tourism-services related jobs, but they're not exactly jobs that require high levels of skills or qualifications, and hence remain on low-ish incomes.

Perhaps it's a bit extreme to call it colonisation - but it does feel like a soft form of it.

There's still a lot of critical thinking and research to do, but what stemmed these thoughts was reading about the decolonisation of travel culture. An excerpt from this online magazine:

Let’s talk about why it’s important to decolonize travel culture. What does it look like to decolonize travel culture?
Decolonizing travel culture is, for me, a question. It’s like, how do we look critically at the business of tourism and its historical relationship and present relationship to imperialism and colonialism? How does that affect people of color who not only travel, but who depend on the tourism industry as workers and laborers, usually cheap labor and menial labor? What is the relationship between these tourist workers—these communities who often experience sort of an occupation of foreigners, of Westerners, of mostly white people coming into their communities and shifting the local economies, the local culture—and how those communities relate to their culture?

Backpackers and other tourists like to go where it’s cheap for them to travel even though they have the money to travel in other ways. So that shifts how Indigenous people will relate to their cultures and if they have to kind of perform them in order to make a buck. So all of that creates very problematic effects for those people, these communities, and that industry. It relies on that money. It relies on all that oppression to keep going. 

It was actually pouring with rain at this point - and the sunset STILL looks incredible

Yes I realise I'm as guilty the one being written in the article. Working on it.

On a (slightly) lighter but vaguely similar note 

It's a surprise I haven't actually slapped anyone yet, considering...

1...the number of times I've heard a (white) person (esp a guy) ask a Costa Rican (or a Central American or any non-white person for that matter) the dumb question of "how come your English is so good?". The response they get is usually "we learn it in school". Why do people from English-speaking countries assume that people from non-English speaking countries are naturally bad at English, or aren't supposed to be good at English? Why do they give so little credit to local education to teach their people English, or assume that someone who works at a coffee shop couldn't possibly have gone to an English-speaking private school, or studied English abroad, or simply worked hard to be proficient at the language?

2...the number of times i've been asked by white people why I speak English so well when I tell them I'm from Hong Kong / China. Sure, many people may not know that Hong Kong was a former British colony and so everyone had to learn English from a young age, or is a very different city to the rest of mainland China, or that even in mainland China a lot of people speak really good English.  But again, same questions about assumptions as above. Am I being over-sensitive in thinking that the association of where you grew up or the colour of your skin has any relation to what language you speak or what language you can speak??

At least my surfing coach is Costa Rican and speaks really good English and doesn't ask dumb questions.