Savoring an Elusive Romantic Getaway in Costa Rica through Art

Even paradise wears you down after a time, especially if you find yourself bogged down by the normal daily routines of life: transporting the kid to and from school, shopping for groceries, yard work, cooking, cleaning, etc. We have found since moving to Costa Rica that we seem to take even fewer vacations or weekend trips than we did in the States in order to break up our domestic monotony.

So, even though our original motivation to stimulate demand for Tamara's well-known mosaics was admittedly pecuniary, this trip turned out to provide us an excellent opportunity for an amorous getaway hours from the finca working together to bring Tamara's art to someone new.

A scintillating and enthusiastic art lover, Judy Fried, responded to my posting on a Costa Rica expatriates Facebook group showing off some of Tamara's past works. She had the perfect spot, a front door gable, where she wanted to display an original mosaic featuring a Quetzal, local plants, butterflies and hummingbirds with a symbolic representation of their gorgeous view over Costa Rica's Pacific mountains down the Gulf of Nicoya.

One of the original mosaic concept sketches

The 7 Harbingers of Summer in the Southern Costa Rica Mountains

Whenever I mention that "summer" is coming to Costa Rica to non-expat friends, they often look puzzled. They are thinking that we share the same summer season with North America since we are above the equator, and technically they are right. However, the tropical Trade Winds pick up this time of year and they are what divide our seasons into wet and dry.

Our summer in this part of Costa Rica runs from mid-December until the middle of April when the trades begin to weaken again. Northern Pacific provinces have longer summers and the Caribbean's seasonal changes are less distinct, but roughly reversed from ours.

Right now, it's a densely overcast, drizzly day with intermittent showers, so you'd never guess that summer is just around the corner (we hope). But, there are plenty of other signs that say, yes, the arrival of La Zona Sur's summer is imminent.

Coffee Season

Coffee cherries ready to pick

Coffee up here in the mountains is harvested later than in the lowlands and right now we are in the thick of the harvest. That means that around the corner of any country road you are liable to have delays due to farmers' trucks loading or unloading their bursting sacks of red coffee cherries. The crop this year is a bumper and the price is high too, so most of them are smiling big.

Our neighbor unloading at the recibidora

 We love coffee season, not only because it signifies summer's arrival, but because the neighborhood comes alive with the activities of the harvest and there are new arrivals, the pickers, who add a bit more color to our already colorful world. Since the neighbors are out and about more, it's also a great time to stop and chat.

When Rainy Season Arrives, We Head to the Beach!

How to Beat the Heat at the Beach

As you have probably surmised, we are not mega-fans of tropical heat when it hits the 90s. That's why we chose to build our home in Costa Rica at 4,000 ft. elevation where temps range between the mid-60s to mid-70s most of the year. When we feel the need to "visit the Tropics", it's only an hour's drive to some of our favorite beaches. 

Trash collection run on a favorite Costa Rica beach

One in particular, which we discovered recently, was the subject of our visit last weekend. It's close, small, uncrowded and has a classic tropical island look with leaning palms and reaching almond trees with plenty of sand framed by broken rocks. The nearby restaurant is high, wide and open. It's tourist prices there, but the food is not the usual gallo pinto based plate and it comes with a trio of small (non-begging) dogs that have the run of the place. One of them escorted us on the beach, happily showing us the way.

Tick, tick, ... it's that time again in Costa Rica

We have observed that in Costa Rica soon after a summer rain or at the beginning of the Emerald season that the local tick population exhibits a marked rise of activity. This year seems no exception. Whenever there is a rain day in summer, we are sure to find more ticks on the dogs. 

The ones pictured above I recently extracted from our Border Collie, Buster. They're enjoying the Big Sleep in a bit of naptha (lighter fluid).

Though it may be old hat to folks who have pets and live here or another area of the world where ticks are common, I think it's worth repeating: Ticks carry diseases, so it's important to check your animals regularly and use preventatives and repellents. It is not uncommon here for pets to contract something lethal from ticks, such as erlichia.  Tick inspection is not an easy job for dogs with thick coats like Buster, but we can usually find them by feel. It's important to check less obvious places such as the ears, between the toes and the tail and anal area.

There really is only one good way to remove them, especially if they've been in long enough to embed their mouth parts into the skin. That is, to use some twisting device, such as pictured below. There are some of these that are more like tweezers that will work in really tight places (one time we had to extract one from our puppy's nostril!). Always twist counter-clockwise.


You can pull them out with regular tweezers or your fingernails, but you risk leaving mouth parts embedded in the skin, which can infect the animal. If you pull on a tick, you can easily put pressure on its abdomen, which risks injecting the pet with even more disease-carrying organisms the tick is carrying.

All the hearsay remedies for tick extraction (covering with oil, kerosene, burning, etc.) are not always effective and at any rate take a long time during which you could have just taken the beastie out mechanically.

We also apply Revolution monthly on our pets and during bad tick periods we spray their coats with a dilution of Bañol (Amitraz) about twice a week. This repels as well as knocks off any ticks that are already on.


So, keep those pets healthy! Give them a check-over today.     - Ciao cacao

Yet Another Side Project on Our Busy Costa Rica Finca

Another of my part-time side projects this year has been the construction of a small rancho down by our quebrada (creek) in the midst of our modest banana crop at the edge of our equally modest coffee "plantation." The platform is just to one side of where my small truck landed when it rolled down the ravine, the precise cause of which is still shrouded in mystery.

Rancho platform's steel frame

As I prefer to do, I make the floor foundation and frame from concrete and steel, which I presume will weather the humidity and bugs if no other part of the building will. The remainder will be built from wood, the same way I constructed my sister's house, but in a different style, since this is a rancho.

Platform from other end of garden

The main difficulty with the frame was that I didn't want to go to the expense of running a 220V line to this location and my generator is not big enough to serve up my welder with enough juice to weld on location.

A Drier Than Usual Rainy Season in Costa Rica

This year's rainy season is trending mild, probably in large part due to the effects of El Niño. Certainly, it's not on track to be the soggy 2010 winter when we received a total of 200 inches of rain over 8 months and it seemed the whole country was slipping away into the Pacific.

We didn't have a drop of precipitation from New Year's until the middle of April. April offered a meager total of 5 inches, followed by 17, 18, and 10.5 inches in the following three months. August seems  wetter, about 8 inches has fallen so far and the storms have been lively.

This rate of rain feels about right. There are consistenly sunny mornings, rain mid-afternoon give or take and often it lets up in the evening.

The reduction in rainfall, however, is not good news all over Costa Rica. For instance, they are still suffering drought conditions up in Guanacaste since 2011. A lot of ranchers are going broke as they have no feed and water for their cattle. Many planned residential subdivisions have been halted in their tracks due to insufficient water supplies.

Winter's End and the Days of Las Patinas in Costa Rica

Anywhere in the world with cold or wet winters, the locals tend to be jump the gun near the end of that season in predicting the arrival of warmer, drier weather. In my native region of the Pacific Northwest, summer expectations fever infects the lot of us around late February to mid-March when a sampling of pleasant weather drops in for an all-too-short visit. Since in reality, the cold and wet there extends well into May, you try not to set yourself up for disappointment if you can help it.

Christmas Letter Home from Costa Rica

Holiday Greetings Friends and Family!

We miss you all and send you best wishes for Christmas and New Year's Day.

We see that western Oregon had a pretty good snow storm yesterday. There was even snow on the beach. Cool! Aside from the icy roads that often follow snow there that is my favorite kind of winter weather especially when followed by sunny sub-freezing weather and clear, starry nights.

It's raining here at the moment. The rainy days are tapering off now, however, as our "winter" aka green season aka emerald season is drawing to a close on the south Pacific side of Costa Rica. We had just 9 inches of rain last month. Maybe that sounds like a lot to you, but the month before ran about 25 inches. A typical rainy season here in this part of the country can bring down from 150 to 200 inches of rain from May through December.

Poinsettia in our backyard

The rain pattern is qualitatively different here than in the Pacific Northwest too. We have sunny skies until about noon give or take. Then the clouds roll in and it rains an hour or two or, less often, several hours or very rarely two or three days. When the rain is drizzly, I call it an "Oregon day", but It often rains hard too. Recall the hardest rain you've ever experienced in Oregon and double it. That hard.

Summer is just around the corner now. The rains will stop completely for three to four months. There might be a few showers, but you can't count on it. The temps go up, but no higher than 90 here on the mountain. Outside work will shift to early mornings when it's cooler. We know it's Christmas time, though, as our poinsettia is in full color. 

[Motmot video below the fold]

Our Second Trip to Costa Rica's Caribbean Coast - Part 2 - 4-Blogger Dinner

The Sunday following our arrival at 10 Degrees Above, we were set to all go together to see a children's parade in Limón, which was part of the city's two weeks of Gran Carnaval every October. Well, we ended up with a lovely tour of Limón with our guides Kim and Barry, but no parade. We asked several citizens where the parade was to be, received various answers as you'd expect in Costa Rica, but none of the directions put us in the path of any parade, let alone one of children. Oh well.

We did, however, stumble across a baseball game at the downtown stadium. One of our few regrets when moving here is that baseball does not garner the enthusiasm in Costa Rica that it does in, say, Nicaragua. I had heard that there exists a small league in Costa Rica with a short season but had never been to a game. 

I boosted myself over the concrete wall by pulling myself up on the cyclone fencing and, indeed, two teams in uniforms were playing. We headed to the entrance where we paid 1 mil ($2) each for admission and watched a couple of innings. 

Pitch coming in, Siquirres batting. Can you see the ball? Click to enlarge.

 The final innnings, as it turned out, of the first game of a double header. The visiting team from nearby Siquirres scored three runs to come from behind and win the game. Although the Siquirres team had matching uniforms, the local team had uniforms from perhaps half a dozen different teams, so I'm not sure if this was an official game or not, but the play, pitching and hitting were very much AA-quality at least.

October in Costa Rica - The Cruelest Month?

"Everyone" who has lived in CR for a few to several years will tell you that October is the worst month of the rainy season. The rain is almost constant, it's dreary, and you'll be scraping mold off your walls, books, and clothes with a spatula, they say.

Raindrops on a window

We just missed October of 2008, having arrived here the first week of November that year. So, this is our second October. Last year was a snap, and this year looks to be the same. Much, much better than September certainly. We've had more than a few days without any rain and generally the rain comes later in the day and ends earlier. Sure, there are still downpours and we'll end up with well over 20 inches, but really it is not too shabby a month, weather-wise.

In fact, it really feels like (dare I say it?) that the season is already changing. It's not just the break in the rain that gives me reason to boldly say that out loud.  There are other signs. The birds are flocking to the house to eat the bananos and platanos we've set out for them, the vultures are coming back from wherever they migrated to and colonies of army ants are on the move.  The Ticos take the recent temblors as a sign of the season's change, but I don't put a lot of stock in that.

So, now I probably have more than sufficiently jinxed the weather, still with 10 days of October to go.  Enjoy the season for those here in Costa Rica and get your corn planted before it's too late. For those up North, enjoy another wonderful Fall, and my condolences on your upcoming winter. :^)