new

I’ve been experiencing an enormous surge of creative energy recently, resulting in a really good shift towards a different direction in my life. It all began with fruit. There is so much fruit here that I have been drying the surplus and in August began to sell blends of dried fruits at the Saturday Farmer’s Market in town. My little business is called Homegrown Organics and is expanding. The fruit is all organic, all local and all fresh – meaning it’s freshly dried the week before the market. I share the stall with Heather who’s selling plants and is expanding into herbal medicinal preparations. We also made seaweed emulsion and are carrying that too.
The blends are what I harvest so the fruits change, but in general I always have banana, pineapple, papaya, carambola and a fruit leather – often cas or guanabana. Then I have different blends, a tropical which is plain, a cacao which has cacao nibs, a hot, which has ginger, a coconut mix and a sour mix with sour carambola. It’s great fun. I love the harvesting, the prep and the social buzz of the market.
Over the last year the garden and working with plants has given me more joy and satisfaction than working in education. I’m ready for a transition. I’m growing sprouts for the market too, it’s difficult to get a good selection of seeds, but I’m growing mung and will add lentil and mustard soon. I’m also beginning growing edible leaves to make up salad bags. This is more a long term project, but slowly, slowly it’s coming together. By the end of the year I’ll be working with edible landscapes. It feels wonderful.

breathe

I feel bathed in air, the beautiful fragrant cool moist air of a tropical morning. It feels like all I have to do today is breathe, what a great feeling. My mum is here and she seems to love this place just as I do. I’m so happy, I’m hoping she’ll come to live here part time. There’s a frog to my left, a large sleeping female Red-eyed Leaf Frog, (Agalychnis callidryas), before me sitting on the orchid is another, the Lemur Leaf Frog (Phyllomedusa lemur). A leaf falls from the fig tree, slowly parting the air until it touches the grass. Everything is beautifully still.
It’s been a really busy month. The garden has been full of growth and I’m doing all I can to keep up with the weeding and harvesting. My dear friends arrived and a lot of work was needed to make the house shine and the garden just right, and then my house needed a thorough clean for my mum and then there was the trip to the hot springs and the city and then and then and then. It’s been busy. But today is all about just breathing.

back on

It’s Friday afternoon, the monkeys haven’t started their afternoon chorus, so it’s not 4:30 yet, but it must be close. The temperature dropped out of the muggy and into the cooler, stiller part of the day where the air feels heavy. I think it will rain tonight. I’m sitting on my deck eating sweet tahini from a jar and all is well. All is well. Young Jack is at my feet, Hoss and LJ are off with friends, there’s a toucan scritching his beak somewhere to my right, a house gecko above me. Surrounding the computer are vegetable starts: chili, pepper, tomato, katuk, cranberry hibiscus, pumpkin. There’s pomelo seeds drying and a mabola slowly moldering. At the other end of the deck a load of cacao is fermenting beside some sea grape seeds. Yes, all is well.
I’ve been sick, with parasites and the concoction of herbs I’ve been taking has created a massive die-off which has lowered my energy and resistance, so I have a sore throat and a cold too. But I think I’m on the turn. I’ve been running ragged for the last two weeks preparing the house and gardens for visitors, but they are now here and happy which is a load off my mind and work schedule. I’m tired, but it’s good.
My mum flies in next week for two weeks and I’m very excited. It’s been almost three years since I’ve seen her and this is the first time she’s ever travelled on her own. It’s also the first time she’s ever been to the tropics, but I think she’ll like it.

been away

This I think is the longest time I've spent away from the blog in over a year. I've been busy, but more than that my computer finally died. i hopefully will have another, a very kind friend is sending one by the end of the month, until then . . .

boa

I was cycling by the snake man’s yesterday and he called me in. he had a 10 foot boa curled up below the sink in his bathroom. She was beautiful; fat, sleek, almost marbled in her scales, curled elegantly with her head resting upon her tail. I could feel her smoothness and her weight just in looking at her. someone had seen her below his house, he was very happy to be rid of her: his cats had been disappearing. It was lucky he hadn’t killed her, perhaps because she really was big. The snake man said when he grabbed behind her head she simply pushed her head back and trapped his hand – tightly – between her head and her spine. It took two men to carry her. She certainly looked strong and very heavy. She was a chocolate brown with tawny patches above, a creamy mottled with lichen green below. He was going to take her far out into the forest. She’s the second boa I’ve seen here.

The first was on a walk home last year. It was when I lived in Guanacaste and wasn’t so wary of snakes. I was scrambling up the hill path I used every evening. Hoss was before me and a friend visiting from the States was behind. Suddenly Hoss stopped and his energy changed from forward scout to cautious uncertainty. I pulled him back and there just by the path was a big boa, maybe 7 feet. His head was up and he was moving it from side to side. I think Hoss was happy to be pushed behind me. I shone my torch directly at him and slowly he receded. He was no threat to us. Beautiful though, very creamy colouring with large uneven patches of a greenish toned brown.

I found a dead snail eating snake on the path. He was about 20 inches long, dark grey with black stripes, below a cream flecked with black. I didn’t look too closely – the ants had found him also.

five fruits

Fruit season has begun in an explosion of scents, colours and forms. I’ve encountered four fruits brand new to me this week and rediscovered another. The mangosteen tree is a beautiful triangular shaped tree with dark green shiny leaves, it reaches about 15 feet in height. The fruits are like a child’s drawing of ‘fruit’ – round and plump and purple with a pretty, leathery dark beige/purple cap. Opening the fruit reveals a soft intensely purple flesh which cushions three seeds enveloped in white goop, much like the cacao seeds have. It is this white goop that one eats. The taste is strong and to me it tasted like tamarind: tart, sweet and sour. I liked it very much but was sorry to see so much of the fruit was inedible.
The second fruit grows on what looks like a cecropia tree. The fruits grow in clusters and look like large muscadet grapes. They too have sweet white flesh surrounding a hard heart shaped seed which dries with a green coppery tint. We can’t find the fruit in any books or on the internet, but we believe it comes from Brazil. There are several trees growing in ordered rows in an old established orchard, so we know they are edible!
The third fruit is either a gnip or a local lychee depending on who you ask. It is smallish, green and slightly ovoid and grows in clusters. I don’t know what the tree looks like but the leaf is long and pointed, and leathery, a little like a eucalyptus. Inside the thin green shell the flesh is tan and soft and surrounds a hard egg elliptical seed. Very sweet and juicy.
The fourth fruit is nanci. These small round fruits grow on large stately trees. The fruits look like large currants and are orangey yellow. Inside the flesh is again a clearish white and surrounds a single small black pip. They are not so sweet and the ones I had tasted overripe to me, in fact they tasted of blue cheese! In Guanacaste these fruits are much larger, about the size of kumquats, here 15 would fit on my palm.
The fifth fruit is breadfruit. In the past I’ve waited for these fruits to become soft before I opened them. This time I cooked it as a vegetable. George says, “when there’s breadfruit, don’t need no bread”, and he’s right. I shallow fried thin slices with garlic and chili, the taste was fabulous, like overly soft fried potatoes, but smoother and with more taste. Difficult to describe. And very filling.

Seaweed

We are harvesting at the beach, no, gleaning is a better word. Recent storms and who knows what have washed a lot of seaweed in. It’s beautiful stuff, not the heavy bladderwrack that filled my childhood in Scotland, or the giant kelp that washed up on the Californian Pacific: these are small bundles of fairy foliage, in reds and metallic blues with tiny globular air sacks, almost like moss. It’s easy to gather, and a bit like a ‘treasure’ chest, for hidden within and amongst the seaweed are many bright colourful objects: plastic trash. We gather a trash bag of plastic for every 2 of seaweed. Rainbows of bottlecaps; toys; shoes; so many straws; nylon rope; bottles, especially those little sample bottles one finds in hotels (or cruise ships??); toothbrushes; wrappers, and then minutia - shreds and shards of plastic.

Plastics, like diamonds, are forever. The pieces we gathered were, in the main, recognizable, and in this tropical sea probably looked enough like colourful fish, to be swallowed by turtles, birds and larger fishes. The shards and shreds, and straws, being smaller were probably being seen as food by smaller sea creatures. The action of waves, water and sun which has ground rock to sand and worn shells to dust, will over time wear plastic pieces into smaller and smaller ‘mouthfuls’ for smaller and smaller ocean species. “Nurdles” the raw materials of plastic production find their way by the billions into the ocean every year, as do polyethylene beads which are increasingly being used as exfoliants in products as diverse as paint scourers and body creams: just the right size and colours to be confused for fish eggs. Plastic particles are small enough to enter the very bottom of the oceanic food chain, eaten by larger creatures plastic trash is accumulating in the stomachs and intestines of most of the world’s sea creatures. In a study of fulmars washed ashore in the North Sea, Richard Thompson (University of Plymouth marine biologist), found 95% had an average of 44 pieces of plastic in their stomachs.

Of course there’s more: from ‘The World Without Us’:

“free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources – copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers – readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic. One study directly correlated ingested plastic with PCBs in the fat tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount . . . the plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in seawater.”

What to do? Be aware, be conscious. Don’t buy overpackaged items, support companies which use recycled materials, reuse those recyclables. Avoid plastic bags like the plague . . . and pick up trash.

Seaweed Emulsion

Seaweed along with a good nitrogen supply can deliver everything a plant may want: up to 60 trace elements, natural growth hormones, natural disease control and a great food for beneficial fungi. Strong stuff!
Making the emulsion is simple.

First rinse the seaweed (or let it sit out in a couple of tropical storms!), to leach out salt and sand. Chop enough to fill a bucket then add water – rainwater is best. Adding molasses will speed up the process, a ½ cup will do. Let the bucket sit covered for a week stirring every day to aerate. When a foamy, filmy, yeasty surface develops the emulsion is ready. The emulsion is best diluted, 1 part emulsion to up to 5 parts water. Use as a ground soak or as a foliar spray.

#$%*!

This morning I woke to a dark house, I tried the light. Nothing. It’s not unusual for power cuts, especially after a night of heavy rain, but something felt different. Maybe a branch had knocked down the line. I went to look. I looked and looked at the place where my power line was yesterday, but there was nothing there. There are two power cables leading from the road to the houses. Our neighbour’s was there. They have the higher cable, we the lower. Ours was simply gone. I walked to the road, yes, there about 10 metres in from the road was what was left of our cable, cut and hanging in a sad, naked mess. Someone had stolen the cable. How . . . low. Cables, like everything else in Costa Rica have recently undergone a price hike, cables by 40%. So now people are just stealing them. Can you believe it? I walked back to the house staring at the place where the cable should be. It’s 200 metres from the road to the house, that’s a lot of cable. Then I got worried, what if they came to the house and why didn’t I hear them and why didn’t the dogs bark, and who were they? No point in calling the cops, no point at all. They probably wouldn’t even come out for it. There’s no point, they wouldn’t catch the thieves, and if they did they would in all likelihood be bought off.

Costa Rica is no place for law enforcement. Firstly the police make $200 a month, so bribes are taken just like tips. Secondly the police are never locals. They are stationed in different parts of the country, live in the police station for three weeks and then are moved somewhere else. The idea is that non local cops will not be part of the community and therefore not have family ties or friendships with lawbreakers. Perhaps, but the result is that I who have lived here 10 months can point out the thieves, the drug dealers, the thugs, but the cops who have no frame of reference, can’t. Every time they start with a clean slate – they don’t know where to even begin. And the community is tight, the thief or attacker or dealer is always someone’s brother, son, nephew and the family will take gather round them, maybe even threaten revenge. Then, if the amount stolen is less than $210 it doesn’t count, it’s not really considered theft. If there is no sign of breaking and entering then it’s not treated seriously, the thinking being that the ladron just wandered in and ‘found’ your valuables. And lastly it is fairly acceptable to take from foreigners because we have more. Yes, that last is true, most of the time, but it’s hardwon and certainly not easily replaced. And what the hell kind of reasoning is that anyway????

It’ll cost $700 to replace the cable. For me that’s a month and a half’s wages. And with new cable, who knows if they won’t just come back next week?

This is the kind of thing that makes people leave. Lack of trust is very tiring.

odd

It’s been an odd week. Sunday was a blur with new ideas, high energy and inspiration. Monday was the opposite in every way until a dip in the ocean balanced me out. Tuesday was laden with internet followed by delightful social surprises, and today has been a social buzz for this normal recluse. Talk about extremes and facets. Odd.

I’m working on a web site which I’m excited about. All my confusion and conflicted emotions around land purchase in this area finally burst with an idea: a guide to responsible land purchase in Costa Rica. Rather simple, but something I can get behind, at least feel I’m doing something. It’s a work in process, I’ll publish the url when I can. Thank you to Bryan for working on the site and Jon for critiquing.

Another idea: I want a stall at the farmers’ market. Two reasons: firstly I have some beautiful organic wild harvested and homegrown goodies, and secondly I think I need to make some effort at being social, and the farmers’ market is the one place where everyone gathers. Okay, a third: I like making things. So today Heather and I trooped to the beach and gathered seaweed to make seaweed emulsion, and noni for noni tea.

worthy reads

I’m reading a couple of books just now: ‘Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans’, by Sylvia Earle, and ‘The World Without Us’ by Alan Weisman. ‘Sea Change’ is part memoir, part natural history, part warning about what we are doing to the world’s oceans. Full of beautiful descriptions of sea creatures from Humpback whales to the bioluminescence of millions of krill, Earle fills you with the beauty in the first part and then delivers a strong message of what we are doing, exactly, to Humpbacks and krill in the second. Having lived almost all my life near the coast watching sea water – slate grey, black brown, green, turquoise blue, lap against shores – boulders, shingle, shells, red, black or white sand, I’ve had the greatest respect for the ocean, and a total ignorance of what really happens below those waters. With Earle’s book, and I just finished, ‘Underwater to get out of the Rain’ by Trevor Norton, I’m learning a little more and becoming increasingly convinced about what we have to do to keep our world a livable environment.
I’m re-reading ‘The World Without Us’. This is a brilliant ecology book. It delves into what would happen if humans were to suddenly and completely disappear. Thus it takes a very serious, and potentially incredibly depressing subject – what we are doing to our planet, and works backwards, outlining the way nature would rebalance the environment. It’s a fascinating read and while it delivers a powerful illustration of how, especially in the last 50 years or so, we have really damaged the planet, it’s written with such affection for both humanity and nature that one feels that recovery is not only possible, but probable. I really believe that this book should be required reading in every 10th grade class. And again in every University.

Starfruit and Chili Preserve

1 pound starfruit
3 – 4 chilies, depending on taste and heat of chili
Juice of 1 lime
2 inches ginger
½ cup unrefined sugar
salt
½ teaspoon of cinnamon, optional

Finely chop all ingredients and cook uncovered over low heat for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. You may need to add a little water, red wine or orange juice. While hot pour into sterilized jars. A sweet sour spicy preserve, great with cheese and bread. I can imagine it would be wonderful with stilton (not having tasted stilton in 2 years, I can only imagine).

Starfruit (Carambola) Salsa

2 starfruit
Juice of ½ lime
½ chili, or to taste
2 teaspoons of unrefined sugar or 1 teaspoon of honey
½ red onion
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
salt

Finely chop the starfruit, onion and chili. Mix all ingredients together and leave to blend for at least 2 hours. Serve with tortilla chips.

today's harvest

Today was a good day: 2 pineapples, two handfuls of cherry tomatoes and a dozen starfruit (carambola). The beds I made by piling heaps of dead leaves over and again has become the most delicious compost. I started the piles 3 months ago. The only issue I can see is that it looks like it needs nitrogen – some west Indian creeper was growing from it and the leaves were much more yellow than the patch growing from the clay soil beside it.
I was very happy to take the starfruit: it’s the first time the tree has given fruit and there is quite a lot, it’s difficult to see as the fruit is the same colour as many of the leaves and each side of the fruit is the same shape as the leaf, so you have to be standing at the right angle to see the fruit. I made a chili relish and a salsa.

waking frog

A red eyed tree frog visited last night and spent the day sleeping on the deck. Sleeping he’s paler, the colour of a banana leaf, and in profile he is streamlined, clamped tight shut against the surface he’s clinging to, all limbs tucked in. Above he is green, below he is pale yellow with blue or purple vertical stripes on his sides and orange and blue legs with big orange feet. His eyes are blood red with a black elliptical pupil.
I happened to be passing him at dusk just as he awoke. He was several shades of darker green, like the colour of a old fern. He raised up and stretched just like a cat, arching his back, straining his skinny legs so they shook with the stretch. And he yawned. I’ve never seen a frog yawn before, it was the same as you or I, a great big mouthed gape and the skin of his neck folded upon itself several times. He closed his mouth and blinked and then with one leap jumped over 8 times his length and landed on a vertical post in the most perfect impersonation of spiderman: you know the pose with back legs apart and crouched, hands almost together below his chest? At that very moment the frog chorus began and he turned his head to the direction of the closest sounds. He looked very alert, clearly listening and watching and then off he went in great bounds towards the others.

Addendum:
This morning I shared the bathroom with a toad. He was delightfully full and round and his front legs were bent out at the elbows, his feet tucked under him like an old man with rickets. The line of his mouth took up the bottom of his head, such a wide mouth, I think as wide as mine. He was an olive brown above and a muddy cream below. His eyes were black and he watched me with his head slightly cocked. I marveled at the difference between this stately, rotund, placid fellow and last night’s athlete with the spiderman crawl and the go faster stripes.

muscle rub

A good long day in the garden can leave muscles sore and tight. This recipe makes a super simple and effective muscle rub which also eases sprains. And it’s actually good enough to eat.

Wide mouthed jar
Sesame oil
Ginger
Turmeric
Lemongrass

Fill the wide mouthed jar 2/3rds full with grated ginger and turmeric and finely chopped lemongrass, add sesame oil to fill the jar. Screw on lid and shake vigorously. Leave in a warm spot for up to two weeks shaking daily. After two weeks strain oil into dark glass bottle. Spread this warming, relaxing oil into sore muscles or sprains.

If you live in the new world tropics, add juanilama, hoja de estrella and zorillo for a super muscle rub / insect bite oil.

snakebite

A friend got bitten by a snake last night. I wasn’t with him, but I was passing on my bike when he and his wife and dog came bursting out of the undergrowth trying to stop a car. Heather was wide eyed with panic, the dog was going crazy, and Cache looked like he was trying to hold it all together. They got a lift home on a truck and I followed stopping to get the snake man on the way. I was expecting us all to get in the car and drive to the clinic. But he was sitting on the grass sipping water while Heather piled green clay on the bite and on the machete cut above it. He said he felt fine.
It was dusk and they had been climbing around a fallen tree. Bad idea really. Dusk and dawn are big snake times. He said the snake had just leapt out bit and disappeared in an instant. From the description it sounded like a hog nosed pit viper: it was short, about 18 inches, dark brown with a red vertebral line, stocky, triangular head and it had been coiled up. The bite marks were about a good ½ inch apart. He had got bitten right on the ankle bone, a vein ran between the incisions. He said he felt something like a sting and looked down and saw the snake. He swiped at it with the machete and managed to cut his leg. The bite bled a lot and Heather sucked on it before running into the street. Vipers venom causes the blood to flow to the extremities, with great swelling and burning at the site. After 20 minutes Cache was feeling nothing, except tingling where the machete had sliced him. There was no swelling and he was totally coherent. His heart was fast. The snake man arrived and looked at the puncture holes and wanted to go find the snake. It was dark, no-one else wanted to go. Heather had started feeding Cache mother in law tongue (Sansevieria) and rubbing it on the incisions. The snake man said the clinic wouldn’t give anti-venom until he began to react, everyone thought he might as well wait at home. We swapped snake stories and then scorpion stories and then stories of things that had died mysteriously. And we waited. Nothing happened. The snake man said that 70% of bites were dry and this, after 3 hours of nothing, certainly seemed like a dry bite. Heather gave me a lift home. He was lucky. Snake boots from now on.

Chili Spread

I’m delighted that I can use tomatoes, chilies and ginger from the garden, all organic too!
Pound of tomatoes
3 – 4 chilies
2 inches ginger
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons unrefined sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup of red wine
salt

Finely chop tomatoes, chilies, garlic and ginger. Mix all ingredients in pan and simmer for 30 minutes until everything is soft, and the smell is overpoweringly good. Spread on bread with a little cream chess, or use with vegetables.

back to the garden

Back to the garden
It seems a quiet season. I’ve been spending time harvesting bananas and pineapple and drying, drying, drying. There are scotch bonnet chilies to be plucked too and cherry tomatoes. I made a chili spread this morning which I’ll test out on the bread that’s rising on the deck.

My weed whacker is slowly whacking its way through the garden. I can handle about an hour and a half of whacking before my eyes start to vibrate and my sweeps get faster and more hysterical. Then it’s time to stop. We really do have a lot of grass.

I have sweet peppers to plant out today and the third generation of pumpkin. I’m disappointed with the second generation, the leaves are small and the growth is slow, not a hint of the luxurious, abundant foliage of the first generation. And they seem to be susceptible to grasshoppers this time too. The seeds came from the first batch, and all the first batch came from one pumpkin. I wonder if it’s too much interbreeding? Is this possible? I don’t know if I’ll get any pumpkins from this second planting.

Joni Mitchell in my head

How does the song go, “Going to camp out on the land, going to try to get my soul free . . . got to get ourselves back to the garden”?
Today I went with friends to look at a piece of ‘the garden’ they want to buy. We drove into the hills over rutted dirt roads, pulled off eventually and walked the rest of the way. It’s beautiful back there, a different microclimate, hotter, stiller. The noise is different: the birds are louder than the insects. A keel billed toucan flew across our path, a 6 foot black and yellow snake disappeared before us. We passed the shack where the cat man lives. The shack is maybe 12 foot square and made of recycled scraps of wood, pieced together like a linear jigsaw puzzle, some had been painted long before in previous incarnations and so the house looked mottled in pinks, blues, yellows, greens. The sides we could see from the path were hung with plastic crates, bicycle baskets, little fishing net hammocks. There were cats in every available space. Kittens of various ages were scampering or staggering on the ground. Before the house was a structure with a tin roof and walls made of sewn together rice bags, more cats sat inside. The smell of cat shit was strong. The cat man appeared from behind the shack. He knows my friends by now and was full of smiles. Did we want a cat? No. But we had brought him some bread. He is old, early 80s, thin and wiry. His wide smile reveals one tooth and his eyes are a pale brown. The knuckles on his hands are huge. He’s worked all his life and clearly continues to do so, his shack was surrounded by banana, cacao, coffee, cassava and malanga.
Further on we came to the farm. We went to see Don Ulysses the farmer. Ulysses isn’t quite as old as the cat man. He is thin and wiry, with short shaven hair and a strong curved nose. His pants, like the cat man’s are held up with bailing twine. He has several teeth. He’s smoking a roll up cigarette and hacking. He has no cats but chickens everywhere. His house is a stronger shack made with posts. The lower level is storage, he lives above. Most of the space upstairs is open with a room at the back. His kitchen is outside under a tin roof. There’s no electricity, his stove is clay with a space for fire and a metal grate for pots – a barbeque. There are chicken sheds made of sticks and bailing twine. Around the house are cacao, banana, breadfruit and citrus trees.
Don Ulysses is angry and frustrated. He wants to sell his farm and has a contract with a woman we know. His farm is 14 hectares and he wants it bought in one piece. The deal is that he will be paid in installments until the end of the year. He wants $80,000 for the farm. My friends want to buy 2 hectares and have the cash ready. (They are paying $8,000 per hectare, the woman is making a nice easy profit for being in the middle.) But there are complications, she’s stalling and doesn’t have the money for the installments, he’s tied into a contract and can’t sell off a smaller parcel and two sets of lawyers are involved. It’s officially ‘frontier land’ being only 2 kilometers from Panama and that makes it all harder. As a simple farmer he doesn’t understand why it’s so complicated. Selling it is clearly difficult for him – it’s been his family’s land for over a century, but he’s getting sick and can no longer work it.
We walked out through cow pastures to the parcel my friends want. It is beautiful. Open pasture land with frequent graceful kapok and almendra shade trees. Natural springs feeding clear pools full of fish and frogs. The land is bordered by indigenous reserve – virgin rainforest for miles and miles. Looking into it was looking into darkness, dense vegetation all the way to the canopy. Their parcel is an irregular shaped field sitting on a small hill backed by jungle. There is a natural spring and a low marshy spot filled with malanga. Sitting where the house would be we looked out to forest, to the east was another pasture, to the west flatter grazing land, neighbours would be hidden from view. The sun was behind us, the house would be in shadow in the afternoon. There was plenty of room for growing a garden. Not enough for goats. It is beautiful. I was surprised at how familiar it looked – a green cow pasture with a wire strand fence surrounded by big trees. It didn’t look tropical. It looked a bit like Guanacaste, and a bit like home.

So many people here have the same dream: buy a piece of land, retreat. More and more people are arriving. Ulysses is selling his farm for a lot of money, it’s completely and absolutely unaffordable to a native. And he is frustrated because these white folks, who obviously drove and who have cell phones and whos’ pants are held up with belts won’t give him this money, which for white folks is so little. Via Campesina is a peasant organization which campaigns for land for peasants to work sustainably. I completely support it. And yet here I am supporting my friends in their purchase of this part of the ‘garden’ which will give Ulysses and his family comfort and ease for the rest of their lives but take away another piece of land from native Costa Ricans. It’ll never return to working farmland, it’ll never again be owned by Costa Ricans. Things are changing here rapidly. Ulysses has worked hard all his life, it’s his land. He can do whatever he wants with it. The world is changing, if borders are to become meaningless then land should be owned by whoever will respect and care for it. It’s grazing land, the cattle are for meat. My friends will build a house (and a cabin for guests), they will put in a garden, it will all be very green, very eco-friendly. They will drive 40 minutes to school each way.

There’s a billboard in the horse field next to the school. It wasn’t there yesterday. It advertises a development of 12 luxury villas with security and beach access and “Italian Standards”. The architects drawing shows an ugly two story blue structure with a deck, one can just make out that the car in the garage is a mercedes.
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.” Sing it Joni.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone . . . “