Expat residents must now enroll in Costa Rica’s medical system: So how is it? Four views

A public hospital in San José, Costa Rica

With the new immigration reforms that go into effect in Costa Rica next week, it looks like expats who are legal residents in Costa Rica must enroll in the national healthcare system,  the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social. Known  as the Caja, the system gives its members low-cost access to neighborhood clinics, pharmacies, and public hospitals.

Some Costa Rica expats are satisfied with Caja (public) care; others are most definitely not.

Visit Miss Move Abroad to read one whole-hearted and one half-hearted endorsement of the Caja, and two accounts of what can only be termed ordeals at public hospitals.

Quien is mas treehouse? Life in the Costa Rican trees

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Quien es mas macho?’ The contestants included Jack Lord from Hawaii-5-0 and Ricardo Montalban, who consistently came out on top.

Here we have a variation on that theme, with all the Costa Rican treehouses I’ve visited vying for the honor of being treehouser than thou.

One thing Ive noticed in my treehouse travels is that everyone has a different idea of what a treehouse should be.  Even the highest-ranking contestants–Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community on the Southern Pacific coast, and Michael Cranford’s multi-level masterpiece on the Osa Peninsula–have philosophical differences about what constitutes a treehouse.

Cranford didn’t want to drill into the enormous Guanacaste tree that is now his home, so has his treetop home supported with wooden supports that go from the ground to the platforms that make up their home. Erica and Matt of Finca Bella Vista didn’t want support from ground so brought in experts from the States to rig their treehouses without support from below.

Here’s a sampler of the treehouses I’ve seen on this trip, starting with the whimsical and working towards the amazing feats of engineering and imagination.

1. The Treehouse Hotel in Arenal is fun but they’re not strictly treehouses—they’re cute little houselets up on stilts.

2. In Uvita, Tra McPeak from Memphis runs the Tucan Hotel, 100 meters east of the Costanera (the coast highway), a hostel with a restaurant, a pen full of rabbits, and high-speed wireless internet. They have a small wooden treehouse out front you can rent for $6/per person. The price includes hammocks but it’s extra for mattresses and bedding. Tra, who arrived in Costa Rica in 2006, says he built the treehouse for his kids but all the backpackers coming through wanted to sleep up there, so he now makes it available to guests.

Casa Arbol treehouse, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

3. Humbert deSilva from France and Lisa Brouillard from Quebec have been in Costa Rica for almost 20 years. They run a small bed and breakfast, Casa Arbol, not far from Chacarita, where you turnoff to go to the Osa Peninsula. Their entire house is a work of art—Hugh makes the cupboards and the bed stands and the baths that look like something out of ancient Rome, not to mention the small treehouse that guests can stay in if they like. He never knows how a project will turn out when he begins it. He kept showing me carvings and rooms and tilework and saying, ‘When I finished, I saw that it was a”….swan, or frog, or a meditation on humanity.

4. Finca Bella Vista : a treehouse community in the jungle

Eric and Matt Hogan of Finca Bella Vista

A few short years ago Erica and Matt Hogan were camped in the mud by the Bella Vista River, up a rocky road to a spread of gorgeous but undeveloped land in Costa Rica’s Zona Sur. They weren’t sure what exactly was going to get them out of the mud, but dreamed of building a kind of Ewok village where they’d live in the trees and get to their neighbors’ houses via zipline.

Most people would have let that rather whimsical dream sputter and die, but Erica and Matt nailed it down and created Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community with 82 lots available for people who want to live off the grid and in the trees. They’ve strung 18 ziplines, which they use fir both transportation and fun, but eventually there will be 45.

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

We stayed in the first treehouse they built, and once I was 50 feet up in a structure cradled by three trees, listening to the roar of a nearby waterfall (visible from the top floor), I sighed and thought, This is it. This is the real thing.

5. At home in the trees: Michael Cranford’s treehouse on the Osa Peninsula

Michael Cranford and Rebecca Amelia were drinking margaritas in Boquete, Panama, talking about how as kids they’d retreat to the trees when they needed to get away. A few hours and numerous drinks later, they were sketching designs for a treehouse on napkins.

Michael Cranford's treehouse in Costa Rica; photo by Michael Cranford

Years later, the scrawled blueprints became reality when they hauled a few platforms built on the ground up into an enormous Guanacaste tree on their land on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

That was about a year ago, and Michael and Rebecca now live full-time in the trees, with Siete, a miniature husky, and Reina, an aging brindle boxer.

Breakfast nook in the treehouse;l photo by Michael Cranford

The treehouse is a true home, with a spacious, fully-equipped kitchen, guest bedrooms, an office for each of them, and a master  bedroom. Eighty percent of the wood used for the treehouse is downed hardwood from the jungle that is their backyard. They have internet and cable, flush toilets, and plenty of hot water in the shower.

They’ve seen a sloth right outside the kitchen, 3 kinds of monkeys—howlers, white face, and squirrel—come through regularly, and scarlet macaws hang out in the nearby branches.

They rent the place out occasionally—check their web site.

“I learned more about myself working with this tree,” says Michael, “than I have through any other life experience.”

Michael is a painter as well as an architect and visionary. “I moved down [to Costa Rica in 1998] to become an artist,” he says. He sold his painting contracting business in Colorado Springs, and gave himself “a window of 3-4 years to paint.” He painted 6 days a week.

That’s his goal this year, too—to do nothing but paint.  He created the painting below before he created his actual treehouse.

Ping pong death match in Playas del Coco, Costa Rica

The Costa Rica government recently razed all the structures in the Maritime Zone on Playas del Coco; photo by David W. Smith

Expat life at La Vida Loca in Coco Beach: gringo men, local girls, beer and some serious ping pong

We park where the street dead-ends at the beach. The local crackheads are lounging under a nearby palm tree. One shambles across the sand towards us; over his skinny bare torso he wears a shredded Day-Glo orange vest—the kind Costa Rican parking attendants wear. “I’ll watch your car,” he croaks. We give him mock salutes to match his quasi-official garb. Of course we’ve taken everything out of the car so as not to tempt even the most desperate thief.

The beach looks different since they tore down all the ramshackle structures encroaching on the maritime zone, which is 50 meters up from the high tide mark. Building on this publicly-owned strip has always been illegal, but only in the past few years has the Costa Rica government made good on its threat to bulldoze any structures in the zone. Coco Beach looks better now without all the helter-skelter buildup; they’ve even built part of a running/biking trail along the beach’s north end.

La Vida Loca bar is accessible only from the beach. It’s an open-air complex with thatch and tin roofs and a squat cement mermaid out front that looks like a cross between the Hottentot Venus and a toad. But we’re heading for the back of the bar, where, amid hockey banners and hub caps and fish tanks lies what we’re after: the ping pong table.

Jimbo from Oregon runs the bar. He’s a Ducks fan, has gone through most of the local girls, and is by all accounts rarely sober. His kid from one of the women working the bar bangs a stick on the cement floor.

“There’s more fish now,” says Jim from California, surveying a tank with colorful fish and a pre-Columbian-style statue of a grimacing man with a huge erect phallus. “I remember when that gar was in a little tank, didn’t have enough room to turn around. Look at him now!” The long, skinny fish with a toothy grin has a tank all to himself.

Jim from California should not to be confused with Jimbo from Oregon. Jim married a local girl (she worked at the hotel where he first landed, fortyish and flush with U.S. cash) and now has two daughters that he’s putting through private school.  About his wife, he says, “It was between her and the head maid.” He and his wife aren’t together anymore but they aren’t exactly apart either. When she ran over a drunk in the road (in the Mercedes Jim shipped down in a container), he helped her pay restitution to the dead man’s family. (Interestingly, speed bumps here are called muertos, or dead men.)

And unlike Jimbo, Jim rarely drinks before 5 pm. He’s chugged only one or two tonight, mostly to counteract the strong coffee he drank to prepare for the match.

Ping pong is serious business at La Vida Loca on Playas del Coco in Costa Rica

The ping pong death match.

Jim and Dave have been here before. When they lived and worked together on a ranch in the Guanacaste highlands, the trip down to Coco for ping pong was one of the highlights of their week. They take the game seriously. Last year they even brought wood to repair the table, and they always bring their own paddles and balls.

Dave hasn’t played for a while; Jim plays often and has never been beaten on this, his home table. Jimbo the bar owner once offered free beer for life to anyone who could beat him. Jim beat Jimbo, but the life’s supply of beer somehow ran out after the first night.

Even the rally for serve is serious business. I go over to the fish tank several yards behind Jim to get a closer look at the gar. Jim stops, paddle in one hand and ball in the other, and looks over his shoulder at me.

“I might hurt you back there,” he tells me, his face serious, his body twitching with squirrelly energy.

And it’s on. The Jim Nabors twaing of ball on table belies the heavyweight spin and torque the players put into the game.

The first two games go to Jim.

The third goes to Dave. “I’m getting him up here,” Dave tells me, tapping his temple. “It’s all mental.” Dave reaches for his Pilsen and takes a long pull before heading back to the table.

Old surfboards are stuck pellmell in the rafters. There’s a foosball game over in the corner and a mannequin rocking some FlashDance garb. Oldies but goodies play on the sound system: Blinded by the Light. Hey There Little Red Riding Hood.

Someone comes over to watch for a while. I learn that when the fish in the heavily populated tank aren’t looking too good, Jimbo feeds them to the gar.

Rallies don’t last long. Serves are not often returned. One return hits the edge of the table and shoots under the fish tank.

Someone else tells me, “Jimbo’s doing pretty good here since all the other bars were torn down. This is the only beachfront bar left.”

Over closer to the bar, a pretty dark-haired woman sits in front of a laptop computer. Middle-aged men from the U.S. chat up lovely local girls a third their age. Skanky dudes hover around the periphery, ready to supply what allows the men to keep on drinking and still be able to extract their wallets from their back pockets to pay for another round.

There’s one North American woman sitting at the bar. Like me, she’s forty-something, and like me, she looks out of place here where there are really only two categories of clientele: older foreign men and younger local women. The men are here to live out certain kinds of fantasies that don’t quite fly back home, many of which include underage girls.

Even working class stiffs from up north are big fish down here where jobs are scarce and many women have 3 kids (and no husband) before they’re 20. A single man with some disposable income looks mighty good to them. And a sexy young thing whose Northern equivalent wouldn’t give these dudes the time of day looks mighty good to the men, who often profess to be fed up with the feminists up north.

One guy told me that you could tell American society was being feminized by the sitcom characters. All the women are competent and intelligent, he said, and all the men are doofs.

Jim's mantra: ping pong ping pong ping pong!

Back at the ping pong table, the match is going fast and furious. When Jim loses a point, he recites his mantra: ping pong ping pong ping pong. He jumps up and down, rolling his neck like a boxer between rounds.

At this point I lose track of the game. I’m nursing my Coca Light, watching the drama of first world men and third world girls. That I am neither gives me an odd feeling of dislocation, especially when I see the girls eyeing my man. More than one guy arriving in Costa Rica has dumped his age-appropriate sweetheart to frolic unfettered in the fields of nubility.

“You only live once,” is a common mantra down here, ironic because this is precisely where people come to  live out second and third and even fourth lives.

Ping pong photos by Erin Van Rheenen

Longtime expat writes memoir of Costa Rica

Sandy Shaw's house, overlooking Lake Arenal; photo by David W. Smith

Sandra Shaw Homer, who has lived in Costa Rica for over 20 years, did something a little over a year ago that all writers will applaud and probably envy. She pared away from her life all but the essential, so that she might, for a year, concentrate on writing the book she knew she was meant to write.

And dammit of she didn’t write that book! In a year.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Lake Arenal, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

Click here for more on Evelio’s Garden and the read an excerpt.

Costa Rica Blog

You’ll find the latest on Costa Rica right here, whether I’m posting from the (muddy & pot-holed) road or from my (marginally less muddy) desk back home. Check back often for news on politics (Costa Rica has its first female president!), real estate, immigration, health care (medical tourism is on the rise), and expat life, not to mention the fun stuff like art, music, surfing, yoga, treehouses, hot springs, wildlife, volcanoes, national parks, hotels, and food.

I lived in San Jose, Costa Rica in 2000-2001, researching my book, Living Abroad in Costa Rica. I’ve been back twice a year since then, often for months at a stretch. I recently returned from a whirlwind road trip in Costa Rica, my 9th such trip. I also explored Nicaragua and Panama–you know a place better if you also know its neighbors.

Photo of a frog clinging to a bathroom mirror by David W. Smith.