Let the Great World Spin

Last night our book club discussed Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.  Jan chose it because she thought it would be about the man who walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.  While that story wove its way through the novel, it was not about him.

Like other novels these days, this book is a collection of stories about unrelated people.  And yet, these disparate characters manage to intersect with each other in surprising ways throughout, especially near the end.

Our group thought that while the novel had potential, it tried to cover too much and did not integrate the various threads enough.  I think I liked it, but a second reading would be much more helpful in trying to clarify themes and characters.

Palendromic Odometer Reading

Lois Lowry at Vista

Last Friday, Lois Lowry, Newbery award-winning author, visited Vista!  I have particularly enjoyed her dystopian novels that began with The Giver, as well as her All About Sam books.  She spoke to our 3rd and 4th graders since our 6th graders were at Outdoor Science School and the 5th graders were on a day field trip.  One classroom from Sycamore Elementary even walked down to join us for the entertaining and informative assembly.

After the assembly, Lowry went to the Vista library with some students to view the blog in which students had discussed some of her books.

It would appear that just because rarely read children's books anymore doesn't mean that Lowry has stopped writing, and there are a few of her recent books that look interesting to me...

Vacation Reading

When we travel, we allow for downtime, usually by late afternoon and early evening.  This gives us plenty of time for reading.  While in Costa Rica, H read The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett while I read The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea.  I chose my book because of its Latin American setting.  It's historical fiction about the Mexican saint Teresita of Cabora.  Urrea has some kind of familial relationship with this "Queen of the Yaquis" who healed the sick and was also "considered a heretic by the Catholic church and an Indian agitator and political rabbit-rouser by the government of Mexico at a time when both the United States and Mexico were oppressing and exterminating large numbers of Native people."


While this book does have some elements of magical realism, it reads quite differently, although the prose is lovely, too, than Garcia Marquez and Allende, perhaps because of all of the research Urrea poured into it.

Getting Around

After all our driving tickets in Italy, we thought we'd use other modes of transportation in Costa Rica.  We started out with a taxi ride, one of many.  Having ridden in taxis in the US and Belize, I have to say that the taxis in Costa Rica are in much newer and better condition.  

Every town seems to have a Parada de Taxis which I thought meant parade (which is what it looks like), but I think it just means taxi stop.  Just go to the head of the line and ask the driver quanto questo (how much?) to a certain place.  We tipped the first driver, and he was so surprised that we looked up the etiquette on tipping and found that you don't need to tip taxi drivers in Costa Rica.  

Taxi rides are for short distances, so we took the Interbus system to go from town to town.  We booked ahead online, and got a deal that if we took 3 legs of a journey, the third one was free.  The Interbus picks you up at your hotel and drops you off at your next hotel.  They are very organized, come when they say they will, have printouts of who is going where, and has enough seats and airconditioning.  On our 3 hour journeys, we always stop at a place where you can buy souveniers, snacks and use the facilities.  We found all our drivers to be good, even though they liked to go pretty fast.   I think they get paid by the trip, not by the hour.

 Between La Fortuna and Monteverde, we took the "Jeep - Boat - Jeep" trip so we wouldn't have to go all the way around the lake.  This trip is actually "Van - Boat - Van", but I like the original name best.  I think we had about 25 people crammed into our first van, but the boat ride was spacious and smooth-going.   The roads to and from Monteverde are very, very bumpy and slow-going.  We almost needed seasick pills, but we managed without them.

Food

The typical plate of food in Costa Rica is called a casado.   Casado means married - and this is a plate where all the "tipical" food comes together. You can order these in a soda (a little family-run restaurant). Your only choice here is what kind of meat you'd like.  All the rest is standard. Here is my casado in La Fortuna with Pescado (fish), rice, beans, plantain, cole slaw, salad, and some root vegetable in the middle (not a potato, though).  This plate ran about $6 and also came with a little rice pudding for dessert.

This meal was NOT typical!  We ate lunch at an Argentinian restaurant in Monteverde called Cafe Cabure.  My wrap was chicken mole and H had a carne al chipotle wrap.  Delicious!  Not only does Su create these great meals, but Cafe Cabure also makes chocolates, and we loved our truffles for dessert, too.  Heavenly!

Lodging

We were quite pleased with our three hotels in Costa Rica.  Our recommendations came from the Lonely Planet guidebook, and they are spot on.  All our hotels were clean with friendly hosts.  All had wifi, but since we didn't bring a computer, we were able to use their computers.  All rooms had cable tv with a Florida feed as well as airconditioning.

This is our first hotel - Las Colinas in La Fortuna.  We arrived just after dark and were pleased to find out that they had to bump us up to the nicest room in the place.  Our room was the top one here on the front of the hotel with a view of the volcano (if the clouds had permitted).

 Here is the breakfast room of Las Colinas.  They serve a wonderful breakfast here.  If you order the typical Costa Rican breakfast, you get scrambled eggs and toast, beans and rice, and plantains.  Plus coffee and juice.

In Santa Elena, we stayed in the Monteverde Villa Lodge run by Heiner and his lovely wife Ana.  This is our room (#6).  Each evening the wind came whipping along until after breakfast the following day, so  the plants in front of our room were loud all night long.

Our last hotel in Quepos doesn't look like much from the outside, but it is really lovely inside.  Marcos was our great host here at La Sirena.  Although there was a pool here, we didn't take advantage of it, except to look at it while we ate breakfast.

Manuel Antonio National Park

We think the best way to end a trip is to go to the beach, and Costa Rica has a multitude of choices.  One popular place on the Pacific side is Manuel Antonio National Park where the rain forest comes right down to the ocean.  Like the in the cloud forest, we took a guided tour and saw many animals.

Here is a three-toed sloth, behaving sloth-like.  There are also two-toed sloths in the park, but we didn't get as great a photo of those.

 Manuel Antonio has three kinds of monkeys.  Here's a howler, hiding behind the leaves.

 Here is an adorable ti ti monkey, also known as a squirrel monkey.  They jump long distances from branch to branch.  We even saw some mothers with babies on their backs jumping.

Here are the mean white-faced monkeys, or capuchins. They are all over the beach trying to steal food from your backpack and baring their teeth at you.  

 The park has many iguanas and basilisks.  This is a Jesus Christ lizard.  Here's a little video about this kind of basilisk which can run across the water.

 There are several beaches in the park, but the best one is Manuel Antonio Beach, also called Beach No. 3.  We spent quite a few hours just sitting under a tree and soaking up the warm, moist air and watching all kinds of people.

Monteverde / Santa Elena

The second third of our vacation took us to the mountains and cloud forest at Monteverde and Santa Elena. I guess the easiest way to see frogs here is not by tromping through the forest, but by going to a little frog zoo called a ranario.  Although we saw a number of frogs, they were mostly sleeping (being nocturnal), and they were all behind glass which made photographing them a little more difficult.  

In the same facility as the ranario were four mariposa (butterfly) houses where we saw many different species, including the beautiful blue morpho butterfly.  I did not get any good pictures of the blue morpho as they open their wings and close them so rapidly.

The two towns of Monteverde and Santa Elena are about 7 km apart, and most of the activity happens in Santa Elena where we stayed.  Here is one of the main streets of Santa Elena.  Notice how nice the cars are.

 Probably the highlight, or one of the highlights of the trip was our day in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve where we were very lucky to see two Quetzales.  Although this is not the national bird of Costa Rica, it plays an important role in Mesoamerican mythology, and sightings are rare.  We took the advice of many and booked a tour with a guide.  Elvin, like all guides we saw, carried a great spotting scope and could show us this bird perched high.  H was able to use the long lens of our camera to get this shot which shows off the great tail of the male.

 Besides the lush growth of the primary and secondary forests, we saw a number of birds, including many hummingbirds.

Also exciting in the cloud forest was our afternoon adventure of taking a canopy tour, otherwise known as ziplining.  I had previously thought I would be too scared to fly over the treetops on a cable, but then I envisioned what it might actually be like, and I thought I could handle it.  Really, it wasn't scary to me at all, and we had fun.  Monteverde is where ziplining was first invented, so we thought it fitting to try it out there.  Although it was fun (and we couldn't take photos along the way....), we probably won't do it again.

La Fortuna / Arenal Volcano

Although we landed at the San Jose airport, we only spent a few hours downtown while waiting for our shuttle to take us north to the town of La Fortuna which sits at the base of the active volcano Arenal.  This building in San Jose is the National Theater.

In La Fortuna, our hotel was just a block away from this city park, and if the clouds had lifted, we would have seen the whole volcano.  Apparently this is rare, and we had known that ahead of time, so we knew that we had a few other options to entertain ourselves.  Also, no lava was flowing at this time, so we decided not to take the trek into the national park. 

Instead, we went to the catarata about 5 km outside of town.  We thought that this 70 m waterfall was named catarata until we found out that it is the Spanish word for waterfall.  The official name is Catarata Fortuna.  You can walk to the base of the falls and swim and shoot photos.

We thought that hike might take longer than it did, so we were left with an afternoon and evening to enjoy the Baldi Hot Springs.  The hot water flows from the volcano, and this resort has 25 pools with various temperatures and styles of pool.  We enjoyed this particular pool with chaise lounges made of tile which are wide enough for two people to share.  Included in our package was dinner, a buffet, so we enjoyed a relaxing soak in the pool before and after dinner.