16. Coffee in Costa Rica

Greetings from Limon, in Costa Rica. The currency of Costa Rica is the Colon (there are approximately 748 Colons to the pound. Try converting that in a hurry). Yesterday we were in the city of Colon, which is not in Colombia but in Panama. This is quite confusing.  Anyway, Colon is the second city of Panama, built when the Panama railroad was being constructed in the 1850s and now also at the eastern end of the Panama Canal. We didn’t go exploring there, having been warned against independent exploration and being pretty tired in any case. Instead, I spent much of the afternoon practising – since most people were out on their tours the two lounges with pianos were empty, and it was lovely to have all that time to spend playing a nice Steinway. Tomorrow we sail back to Colon and through the Canal, which I am so looking forward to seeing. The landscape in this part of the world is spectacular, rich and jungled (I know that’s not a word but it should be), and the air is heavy and smells of flowers and fruit. In the little park in central Limon the trees are so tall and so lush, so different; and the street bushes and trees are brightly coloured too – everything is. There are so many different and beautiful birds – since we have been on the ship I have been enjoying watching pelicans – two different types, one big, brown and grey, and another slightly smaller, grey with a yellow head. Last night a whole bunch of them were flying around and over the boat at sunset and it was just beautiful.

 

 

Sunday night was the first ‘formal night’ on board; this is a big occasion. We had been swimming until after 6 (which is when you’re meant to look respectable in the lounges and dining areas). Instead of putting on our (normal) clothes to get back to our cabin to change again into our formal wear, we thought we could get away with just making a dash for our cabin; since the lift would take us straight down there we thought we had a reasonable chance of not meeting anybody. Unfortunately we got in the wrong lift, and when the doors opened at deck 2 we were not in our quiet cabin corridor but in the central atrium, milling with people dressed in tuxedos and floor-length dresses – and we were standing there dripping, barefooted and with towels wrapped around our waists. So we dived for the lift buttons, hit a deck number at random – anything to make the doors close – and got out of there before we could be recognised (we hoped…).

 

Overheard: couple talking to one of the waiters. ‘You’re from India… do you speak Indian then?’

 

Better still, yesterday at lunch I was asked (with the rider ‘I don’t mean to offend, but…’) ‘do you ever play nice music?’ (The previous night’s concert had included Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Albéniz and Benjamin’s Jamaican Rumba). Restricted by the injunction that one must be polite to passengers at all costs, I held my tongue (with some difficulty) and asked him sweetly to elucidate. ‘Well, I mean, popular classics, you know?’

‘No, no nice music, I’m afraid…’

 

But worst of all was the woman who, when we asked her how she had enjoyed her morning in Limon, spat out, ‘I was not impressed.’ All the disdain of centuries of ignorant colonialism in one short sentence. I was furious. Because I had felt ashamed, walking around Limon. There is so much that is admirable about Costa Rica – it has been a stable democracy since the late 19^th century, it abolished slavery in 1823, it disbanded its army in 1949 and has never reformed it, the country as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, 28% of it is set aside as national park. But despite its name, it is not wealthy, and when we walked around the streets we saw so much poverty. Most of the shops were selling cheap trash, the same stuff over and over again; the cafes were offering the most basic of foods (stew served up from big metal cauldrons); the roadsides were a mess, the buildings were rundown. Wandering those streets was fascinating, in a strange, guilty way – I’ve never seen anything like this before and there was so much that was picturesque. But we felt so obvious, so white and Western, intrusive. I guess the town needs tourists, but I wished I was a more educated and unobtrusive one. Yet people were so cheerful, helpful, patient with our halting Spanish; and the streets and buildings were colourful, full of life, noise, smells. We bought an iced coconut from a street seller. He cut the top off and stuck a straw in and we drank the cold milk. And we had good Costa Rican coffee in a little cafe (which had two machines, one, a filter machine, for American tourists, and an espresso machine for everyone else). And we bought a few beautiful hand-crafted things from the market at the port – which is only open to passengers coming off cruise shops, not to locals. They, apparently, are meant to buy the cheap plastic rubbish in the shops in the main street.

 

I was impressed by Limon. In French, I’d say it was impressionante – it made an impression on me.