Heredia: Happy Homes & Creature Comforts…

From the mountains we were heading back into the capital city San Jose. The next few posts are going to be focused on this period in an urban centre, in contrast to the challenges of rural living. We’d arranged to get a lift with our Airbnb host, Roberto who fortunately for us had an extremely comfortable and spacious truck so we had a really nice journey. It was a couple of hours to get from the mountains down to Heredia where we had booked our next stay. We arrived a little early and although Roberto offered to wait with us we decided to grab a quick bit of easy lunch at a place just at the end of the road. Half an hour later our new host Adrian was showing us around our home for the next week.

It was a really lovely, modern and comfortable little place with a really high level of attention to detail. There are things which are easily overlooked when fitting out a home but things which we have found to make a massive difference when you do have them; iron and ironing board, hairdryer, pots, pans, baking sheets, measuring cups, cleaning cloths, bin liners, etc. All of this had been considered along with a well stocked larder containing items that are useful to have and very inconvenient to buy – soy sauce for example! It was also the first time that we had both an upstairs and a downstairs and it really felt like we had a little home again for a week. The girls were as happy as Rachael and I were with the new place.

Adrian showed us all around and told us details about the buses and where to catch them from. There was a supermarket just a couple of minutes walk away and the town centre was a short 5 minute ride by bus or taxi. Before he left we also asked him about the local feria (farmers market) as were keen to get to one now that we were back in the city. He recommended the one which took place the following morning in nearby Santo Domingo.

After we’d settled in I went to the local shop to stock up on a few essentials. Much as I dislike supermarkets it was a real relief to walk a couple of hundred metres and find one so well stocked. It had all of the usual rubbish of course but also had things like a good selection of interesting flours; these were things that we hadn’t seen since we’d left home! Another relief was that I didn’t need to do some huge shop that would see us through for the next week – I could buy what we needed at that moment in time knowing that we were going to the feria the following morning and that I could just pop to the shops again if we needed anything else. This is convenience and it’s easy to love it; not needing to think too hard or too far in advance – it’s expending the minimum of energy to get what you need and of course that’s going to feel good.

Our first morning waking in Heredia we got ourselves ready and set off for the local feria. It was our first encounter with a number of new things! One thing to note which is true of all the feria here is that there is a lot of repetition – there are countless stalls all selling the same selection of fruits and vegetables and I still don’t know exactly how the locals who are shopping there make the decision to buy from one rather than another? My guess would be that perhaps over time they come to know and trust some over others or are simply friends. For us, as first (and one) time visitors, there’s not much basis on which to decide so we walked a circuit of the stalls and then picked a few probably based on how busy they were, assuming that the busy ones would be best!

We came away with an interesting selection – blackberries, strawberries & cherries (not particularly tropical but good for the girls to have something familiar), uchuvas, guanabana, granadilla along with some staples like bananas and a handful of fresh vegetables. Before we were finished we stopped at one of the fresh juice stalls to try some of their offerings – the girls had some fresh zumo de caña (sugarcane) and we also had our first try of a drink called mozote which is made from the stems of a plant in the mallow family. I really enjoyed getting to do a bit of research at this point! I didn’t know when we bought the drink what it was but we remembered the name and looked it up once home again. We had been told by the lady on the stall that it was very good for your stomach and when we were drinking it the first thing to note was that it was quite thick and almost gloopy. Like other members of the same family it’s very high in protein and it’s these proteins which become mucilaginous and so help to line and heal your gut. It’s always a good feeling when you can weave a bit of knowledge into what you already know and so making the link between this and our common mallow back home was really satisfying; not least of all because in my years working at forager we’d never really found a mainstream use for mallow and this looked like it could have potential.

With our bounty of fresh goods and easy access to food stores we headed back to our house and simply enjoyed being able to cook. We also had a good internet connection and made the most of being able to catch up with people back home. Each day passed fairly easily in this way and it was also probably the first time that I’d managed to get into a reasonable routine with playing my clarinet. I’d made the decision in the end to leave behind my tenor saxophone as it was going to be a nightmare to carry it around but the thought of having a year with more free time (not necessarily the case as it’s turned out) and not being able to get back into playing some music was distressing. So I ended up buying a clarinet which is easy to transport but also needs a bit of relearning as it’s quite different to the saxophone. I had also bought a folding keyboard for Zia as she is keen and also very quick to pick up tunes. So we managed to work on a couple of tunes together in the house which was really good fun!

Now that we were back in the land of convenience it left us with a little more time (and interestingly more budget) to spend on other activities. One day we went to the nearby Rescate which was formerly known as Zoo Ave. It was about a 40 minute ride in an Uber. Just worth mentioning that like the shops this was also a huge difference – we would call a car and it arrived within 1 or 2 minutes and we didn’t need to concern ourselves with whether it would be able to cross the terrain! The ease and proximity of everything in an urban centre kept making itself apparent. We had a good journey there with a driver who recounted to us the huge variety of pets that his family had when he was younger. His cousin worked as a park ranger and consequently they had wild pigs, monkeys, huge lizards and all kinds of other rescued animals in their house. It was interesting for us to note how much this has changed. In some ways this must be a good thing – some of the historic trade in exotic pets must have been very damaging and often inappropriate. However, it was also interesting how this has simplified our relationships with animals – cats and dogs have become a kind of monoculture of the pet world. In modern society it’s an accepted format, to own a feline or a canine and there are whole industries which exist to support that relationship. It’s curious how in a very short space of time we have lost the diversity of human-animal relationships which used to exist. Even as a child I remember people having ferrets, snakes, all kinds of different pet birds – acknowledging some of the problems there must have been with this it also seems like simplicity is generally preferred over complexity and diversity. Those diverse human-animal relationships were more complex but rather than find ways to work with that complexity they were made taboo and simplified. Even between here and the UK it’s possible to observe a difference in the relationships between people and dogs – back home people feed their dogs dog food whereas in much of rural Costa Rica the dogs are eating leftover bones and food scraps. Roll back 70 years in the UK and it was much the same. Since then even the way in which you have a pet dog (or cat) has become much more prescribed with certain norms evolving about how that relationship should look.

It was with this conversation as our backdrop that we arrived at the Rescate. The centre operates as a kind of zoo but it is first of all a rescue centre. The animals are all rescues and there are a lot of large iguanas and peacocks which have free run of the park. One of the main reasons that we decided to visit was because it seemed like a very neat way for all of us to see and learn the names of the animals we were most frequently seeing on our journey. The idea was that it would save us having to scroll through images on google or try to find a wildlife book and flick through the pages. In a fairly short space of time we would get to walk around and see all of the different birds which we would catch a glimpse of in the wild or hear their song in the morning.

The park was really good. I don’t much like zoos and wildlife parks on the whole but this was well laid out with ample space in the enclosures. Knowing that the animals were there as part of a rescue effort was good too. You did need to be a little careful at times getting past the huge iguanas which would sometimes take up the entire path – they can give a nasty swipe with that long tail they have!

It was a really good day out and we saw some fantastic huge ants which were not one of the attractions as such but I am constantly fascinated by ants, and there are a lot of them in Costa Rica! We also got to see and hear lots of birds with the wonderful Oropendola being the one that really stood out – so much so that I managed to annoy all of us by downloading a sample of it’s amazing song and setting it as a notification on my mobile phone! Along with their amazing song they perform a kind of acrobatic trapeze move to show off their bright yellow tail feathers. All in all the day worked out how we had hoped and we all felt a little more familiar with the animals that we would continue to see as we travelled around.

Our week in Heredia passed quickly and other than little walks out and about and trips into the centre we were busy planning out the next part of our journey. Our plan was to head off on some more travels but in the meantime we were enjoying a break from everything being such a challenge. We had booked our next stay in the South West corner of the city in San Rafael de Escazu…