San Ramon & San Rafael: From Clouds to Condominiums

Having finished our trip around Lake Arenal and spent a wonderful few days near La Fortuna we were getting ready for the next phase of our journey which would take us to Colombia! We’d booked up the last few stays with a view to making our way back to San Jose with plenty of time to catch our flight.

From La Fortuna we had booked up just a couple of nights in a place near San Ramon as a halfway point on the way to San Jose, saving ourselves a long journey. It was one of those drives which took us along a lot of very winding roads and once again poor Rachael had the centre seat in the back of the car giving her the worst journey of us all. It was reminiscent of the journey we took up into the mountains near San Gerardo de Dota; as we ascended the winding roads the vegetation changed, the breeze became cooler and soon we were passing through low clouds drifting by. Once we arrived we had a brief panic trying to negotiate our entry as the lady who kept the keys was not there and we didn’t want to keep our driver waiting so we were dropped off with all our baggage hoping that she would arrive soon. Fortunately, she was there a few minutes later and showed us in.

It was a beautiful house and again had the feel that we’ve found in just a couple of other stays, that we were in a house which people had lived rather than just a rental investment. The kitchen was well set out with plenty of trays, pots, pans, plates and so on and we’d arrived with some food and ingredients to cook up. At this point, less than 2 weeks from departure, we were having to think carefully about the ingredients that we had been carting about and how we would use them up in the lead up to leaving. With only a couple of nights at this house we quickly got on with getting some bread under way, Rachael made a cake and some oat biscuits and we cooked up some chicken for dinner – keeping the bones for making broth of course.

The house was remote and it was just as well that we had stocked up in advance – coupled with our need to use us the remaining supplies it afforded us a couple of days to do little more than cook, eat and enjoy the surroundings. Once again it was a dramatically different side to Costa Rica – misty mornings and clouds blowing past through the daytime. We had an open fire but this time we were blessed with a healthy stock of well seasoned wood so in the evenings we had the comfort of a lovely warm fire.

With such a short time in this place there wasn’t a huge amount to observe other than I was struck by what a good area it would be for growing food. With the constant passing of clouds through the area even out of the rainy season it was lush and green and I would imagine less likely to suffer from the water shortages which can be a problem in some areas at present and are almost certainly going to become more of a consideration in future years.

A couple of days later we packed up and were on our way once again. Our drive took us down through the centre of San Ramon, from which we were probably about 10-15 mins. It was staggering how quickly the climate and vegetation changed! Just a few miles from where we had been staying the temperature was at least 8 degrees higher. It felt like driving from Scotland to Spain in a matter of minutes.

For our next stay we were edging our way back towards the airport. We’d found a place in a condominium in San Rafael de Alajuela which was very affordable. Our recent stint of moving around had stretched our budget – some of the accommodation had been more than our budget allowed plus we had travelled around a lot between stays and been on a lot more days out and activities than we would ordinarily. All of this plus the cost of flights to Colombia meant that we needed to try and gain back a little lost ground. I don’t think that I’ve written much about this side of our journey but budgeting is a constant background activity. We have a finite budget saved up over the past few years and a trickle of income while we’re away. I have made a spreadsheet in which we track all of our spending – every day, every purchase is recorded so that we can see where we are against our budget and adjust as necessary. Our journey would not be possible without this process. Travelling as a family we have a responsibility to make sure that the resource we have will last for the time that we are away. As a result, our journey has been an ongoing process of sometimes overspending (often intentionally because we want to treat the girls to something special) and then finding ways to bring things back into balance.

We had 5 nights booked up at our next stay and a simple plan. There was a shared pool in the middle of the block where we were staying and we imagined that we would be able to easily pass the time with cooking, eating and trips to the pool. One obstacle to this was that there were still covid restrictions in place which meant that we had to book sessions for the pool. This was a bit of a shame because the bookings were for 2 hours which was really too long to spend in the pool. Moreover, most of the time the pool seemed to be unused which made it more frustrating for the girls that they couldn’t just pop in for a quick dip as and when they wanted to.

The apartment was ok but sadly lacked a lot of things that would have been useful. Once again we had an oven and no trays to use in it. A greater difficulty was that the kitchen was so minimally stocked – we had 4 plates, 2 bowls and only enough cutlery for 4 people! We’d experienced this before. The only positive to draw from this scenario is that you have to keep a tidy kitchen as any dirty dishes leaves you unable to progress to the next meal. However, it was a little too little and made the stay there hard work.

The condominium itself was little like the experience we’d had in Rio Oro. Firstly, the layout was all single-storey. Each house had a parking space out the front and the whole site was a network of roads. What really struck me during our stay here was how design dictates lifestyle. The design of this particular condominium was centred around car ownership. Just outside of the main gates there was a small cluster of shops and restaurants which I can only assume were part of the design as there would be no need for them before the condominium was built and it all looked about the same age. I don’t suppose it’s too much of a stretch to imagine someone whose job it is to design these kind of living scenarios and to plot out the likely movements of people once they are put into residence. Naturally, the majority of people will flow towards the closest shop, restaurant, cafe, etc. Now the interesting thing for me is how can we tweak the design of existing infrastructure to transition cultures towards something healthier? For example, looking at the parking space in front of each house I imagined each one being a small productive food space. If this had been part of the original design then it would create a very different cultural practice. I suppose that these kinds of thoughts emerged during this stay because the design of the whole location had been so liberal with the use of space. Everything on one floor obviously means half as many people inhabiting the space as if you had 2 floors to each house. There were huge areas of grass which were being maintained simply for the sake of having grass. Now to some people there might not seem to be anything odd about that but I would look at those patches of grass and see a cultural challenge. At least once a week there would be someone going around and trimming all of the grass, burning fuel of one kind or another in the process. The output from this exercise is just grass that needs to be trimmed again the following week and a weekly demand for fuel to enable that process. Now imagine if there were animals put on that grass. For me at least this is a better scenario. The animals graze the grass and so in effect the grass is now fuelling it’s own cultivation rather than requiring petrol or electricity. The animals provide food either in the form of milk or meat. In climates where appropriate this could be sheep thus also providing textiles. The tweak here is in essence changing a space from one whose cultural practices consume resources into one that provides resources. The same applies to those parking spaces. One small irony here is that whilst our culture has an unhealthy obsession with productivity (of a particular kind) we frequently encounter these situations where we have consumption rather than production of resources.

It was also interesting to note other ways in which the design of place related to behaviour. Once again we had landed somewhere that had dog parks. I’m interested to know which way round this design process works – I can’t imagine that lots of people moved in who had dogs and then the dog park was built in as a result of high demand. Therefore, it must have been something which was part of the initial design and if that’s the case then it leaves me wondering whether it’s part of the design because they know that lots of people who move in will have dogs or if it encourages people who live there to get a dog? Which way around is that particular supply and demand relationship working? I’m aware that it could seem a far stretch to some people to think of this kind of design relationship; that it perhaps sounds almost like a conspiracy theory but we encountered an example of exactly this back in England. There was a large project near to us where they built a huge shopping complex. Nobody lived in the area because it was in the middle of nowhere and there weren’t any houses. The second phase of the project was to build houses in the area. So this was an inversion of the typical supply and demand relationship: in the past a shop (or other supply/service) would arise as a result of the needs of the community. In this case the shops were built first and then space created for consumers to follow!

We are at a crucial point in time right now with climate change, resource scarcity and a whole host of complex interlinked problems emerging together. For me many of these problems have come about as a result of cultural practices. Many of these cultural practices are designed in the same way that a supermarket is carefully designed to guide your purchasing behaviour. There’s nothing conspiratorial about that either, it’s just a natural response to working in a system where your business is supposed to maximise profits. So if you have all of this information about human behaviour and can leverage it to increase profitability then the rules of the game dictate that’s what will come to pass. Hopefully, we are at a point in time where we can recognise this process and can choose to exercise design choices upon our own lives. Hopefully we can see the challenges that lie ahead of us and apply this same understanding of how we behave in a given environment to design cultural practices that will help to solve these issues rather than further entrench us in problematic behaviours.

I should bring this story back to the condominium. I’m well aware that the solutions that I would propose might not appeal to everyone. I’m aware of the fact that through spending so much time working in and studying food and different systems of production that it has become something of an obsession. I am also aware that how we produce food is fundamental in terms of global land use. Holding all of this in mind I do not really know how other people would feel about the changes that I would choose. I don’t know if other people would want to have food production instead of a driveway. I don’t know if they would want grazing animals instead of well-kept lawns and dog parks. Doubtless there would be differences of opinion and over and above any specifics of how we solve these challenges we are going to face is how we manage to communicate and gain consent for how we manage our common resources.

One final thing that I haven’t mentioned about this particular stay was something which I only discovered the night before we were due to check-in. I’d started to look at the area on maps so that I could locate the shops. What I found was that we were staying in a condominium which was in the centre of around 4 prisons! I was a little concerned about this. I didn’t think we were going to be invaded by inmates but it did make me wonder about the area and perhaps why the apartment had been so cheap. On reflection, looking back at these thoughts about design elements and how they influence behaviour it makes me wonder if the same people who designed the prisons mightn’t have had a hand in the design of the condominium?!