Paradise Without a Pool…

This should hopefully be one of those rare occasions when I succeed in writing a short post. From Uvita, we were inching our way towards the Osa Peninsula where we were hoping to go on a mangrove tour and then assess if we wanted to delve further into the wilderness. To allow ourselves a bit of breathing space and get ahead with our planning we’d booked a remote place that had a pool to keep the girls occupied while we got on with the boring bit.

We have so far managed to do almost our entire journey without having a car. It’s only ‘almost’ because we did have use of the truck when we were on the farm but other than doing our shopping each week at the same time as we delivered the orders, we didn’t go anywhere further afield. At this point in our travels we had been weighing up whether it made more sense to hire a car. Uber doesn’t seem to operate as you get to the more remote areas and the options for places to stay get more remote. A 4×4 vehicle is pretty much essential for getting around a lot of the South Eastern part of Costa Rica as the roads are rarely anything other than extremely bumpy. Coupled with the fact that when staying somewhere remote you either need to take lots of food with you or be able to get to the shops we thought that it would probably make sense. Turned out we were wrong. Hiring a 4×4 worked out at a minimum of £100 per day! I was really shocked by this because it does seem that for the majority of people visiting Costa Rica the default model is to hire a car and drive themselves around. Maybe they’re not here for as long us we are or maybe they have a lot more money. Either way we decided that even if we had to get a few taxis over the coming week there was no way that we would get anywhere near that figure. Ultimately, I’m kind of happy that the economics work that way; everyone getting their own car and heading off to their personal locations is a cultural behaviour that we really need to quit to curb our emissions.

So we booked a 4×4 taxi to pick us up from the house in Uvita and take us to the next stay. Our driver Francia arrived around 11am and we set off. Because we weren’t going to have our own transport we did have to stock up on food so we had quite a few bags to load into her car and last the next 4 days. The journey was going to be about 40 minutes. As we made our way along the main highway we were explaining to her that we wanted a place with a pool so that the girls had somewhere to play while we relaxed and also that since my stingray encounter that they were reluctant to go into the sea. She agreed emphatically that with kids in Costa Rica, a pool is essential.

The drive there was fairly hard going but nothing too difficult by local standards. Francia didn’t seem bothered as we climbed the steep rocky trail to our next stay. When we eventually reached the last part of the journey we all agreed that the views were stunning. There were only a handful of houses at this point and that ascent had provided us with views right across the mangroves at Sierpe and of Corcovado in the distance. It was pretty impressive. Considerably less impressive was the view of an empty swimming pool when we arrived at our villa! This was a shock. We unloaded all of our baggage in a bit of daze and under the spell of some freak breed of optimism telling us that this was a minor setback which would be easily resolved. Francia offered her sympathies but also seemed to have fallen under the same spell as she drove back down the hill. At least we had a taxi driver with a 4×4 who knew our location when we next needed their assistance.

To add insult to injury we also discovered that we hadn’t been provided with all of our check-in details so we were now stood by the side of our empty pool with all of our food in bags and trying to get in touch with the owner. We had fallen victim to one of the tricks of AirBnB which is that a new property often has a discount for the first few stays. Sometimes this has worked in our favour and we’ve ended up with a bargain but on this occasion we had ended up with a pool which was missing the main ingredient plus a slightly inept and unresponsive host! Eventually we received details for the keylock and got into the house and our host assured us that he would look into things with the pool.

At this point we were probably still thinking that the worst case scenario would be that we needed to wait until the following day to get the pool sorted and that hopefully we would receive an additional discount or an extension to our booking. Lamentably, after quite a few hours of Rachael chasing our host for a response she received news that the pool would be at least a couple of days until someone could have a look and that it would then be at least 2 more days to fill the pool once it was repaired. Bugger. So here we were in what was for once a very well provisioned and beautiful house, in an absolutely stunning location which would have been completely perfect for enacting our plan except for the small detail of an empty pool. Bugger. It didn’t take us long to hatch a new plan. There was no reason for us to be there and little for the girls to do. We told our host that we would leave the following morning.

On the plus side it was interesting to see. Around the house we were in there were a few other houses and then a lot of plots for sale. Empty plots which were cleared and levelled and awaiting a buyer who wanted to build their own house up there in the mountains. It reminded me of a sign that I had seen a few days earlier when walking back from the shops for a local real estate company with the distasteful slogan ‘We Sell Paradise!’.

Presumably they came up with that slogan as a motivation for prospective buyers but it had the complete opposite effect for me; making me reflect on how even our renting of such properties was problematic as it might incentivise their creation in the first place as everyone and their brother pursues the dream of a passive income and the 4 hour working week. It also made me think about a couple of terms which we all use quite happily but it gave a little more body to them: ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ with reference to our own and other countries. A lot of parts of Costa Rica you can see the ‘developing’ nature of things – it looks like a country which is still under construction with lots of half-built elements of the infrastructure and much of it still in a raw state. This is even more pronounced as you find yourself at the edges of this process where the roads are still rough tracks and pipes jut out of the ground waiting to be connected to a house which has not yet been built.

We spent our one evening in that house searching through AirBnB for another place to go and fortunately we had another one in our wishlist which was just a little further along. It would take us closer to our destination in Sierpe and looked like it might be an interesting place to stop. I made a point of checking that the pool shown in the pictures really did contain water this time and booked a few nights! So we got back in touch with our new favourite taxi firm to arrange a collection for the following morning and continue our journey eastwards.