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

A women’s orchid-growing cooperative in the Guanacaste hill country

Margarita Ponce Ortiz, member of the women's orchid-growing collective in Quebrada Grande

Through Curubanda Lodge’s ’social tourism’ program, I could have met up with the proprietors of many small, locally-owned businesses in the hill country of Guanacaste, including a bakery in Dos Rios and a small cheese producer in El Consuelo that makes everything by hand and recycles all that they can, including using the pig dung in biodigestors to make methane gas for cooking.

I visited a women’s cooperative in Quebrada Grande that raises orchids and ornamental plants for sales. The cooperative—the Asociacion de Mujeres Activas de Quebrada Grande (The Active Women’s Association of Quebrada Grande) and spoke with sisters Margarita Ponce Ortiz and Mayra Ponce Ortiz. They showed me around the small but impressive vivero (nursery), where they grow orchids (though they say it’s a little too warm there for that ‘crop’), flowering plants, and even reina de la noche (brugmansia) —with its long, fragrant bell-shaped flowers that supposedly have hallucinogenic properties.

A woman's cooperative nursery in Guanacaste

The cooperative began two and a half years ago when the amas de casa (housewives) of this poor town were looking for a way to make a little extra money and to feel util (useful). Quebrada Grande is on a sliver a land between two national parks, and there isn’t much work to be had here. The majority of the people don’t have much education, so their options are even slimmer.

The women took a course with INA (a government agency that provides job training), who came to Quebrada Grande to teach them how to grow and care for plants.

They started with 40 cooperative members, Margarita told me, but are down to 12, because people want fast money, and the nursery is a slow-growing business that requires patience and dedication.

“The men all say women can’t stick with anything, and we want to show them wrong,” said Margarita.

“But right now we’re having trouble because we don’t have a market for our plants. We take them to ferias (farmer’s markets), but we pay so much for transport that we hardly make any profit.” She looked out over the rows of plants. “We’re thinking of building a web page.”

Wilbirth told me on the way back from the visit to the nursery that Curubanda Lodge was also planning a major upgrade to its web site. I told him that most people I know planned trips by doing research on the web, so that was probably time and money well spent.  But the women’s nursery—I’m not sure how they would benefit from a web page.

Vamos a ver. We’ll see.

Curubanda: History and future of a working farm turned ecotourism lodge

Curubanda Lodge in the Guanacaste hill country

Curubanda Lodge is a small ecotourism lodge in the heart of a working farm—Finca Nueva Zealandia–in the Costa Rican highlands. Its four modest but comfortable guest rooms are within spitting distance of the farm’s dairy, chickens wind their way through the gardens, and on your way back to your room you might have to push through the cows waiting to be milked.

Curubanda Lodge in Guanacaste is also a working dairy.

The Nueva Zealandia farm and dairy has been in the Brizuela family since 1930. At that time, there were few roads, and the family would take milk and cheese by oxcart to Quebrada Grande (often shown as Garcia Flamenco), a small town 13 km away, to trade for staples like rice and beans.

The 100-hectare farm stayed pretty much the same, says Wilberth Brizuela Chavarria, 34, from 1930 to 1980, with successive generations working the dairy and in the fields. The area was high and green enough for dairy cattle, but they also kept chickens and pigs.

In 1980, the government was offering nearby land at a very good price if the buyers would agree to help reforest the area (which had been cleared for farms and pastures) so that there might be a biological corridor between the two volcanoes and the two national parks. The Brizuela family bought up land around the original farm and increased their holdings to 350 hectares.

Another big change for the family farm came in 2000, when Wilbirth finished his business degree at Universidad Latina in Santa Cruz (on the Nicoya Peninsula). The price of milk is notoriously volatile, and Wilbirth came home with big ideas about how the family could diversify and not rely solely on the dairy.

A non-paying guest at Curubanda Lodge

Soon after 2000, the farm began its transformation from working farm to working farm that welcomes guests. They built four guest rooms (the best is on the second floor, with a deck, an amazing view, and a bathtub big enough for two). They built a large restaurant, created trails for walking and for horseback riding, landscaped the grounds so that part of it looks more like a hotel than a farm, and are in the process of relocating the dairy barn so it’s not within smelling distance of the guest rooms. (Right now it’s quite close, but the smell isn’t unpleasant, just earthy.)

Agro-Eco-Tourism, complete with mud wallows

Wilberth calls the new project agro-eco-tourism. “It’s a radical change for us,” he says, and indeed it seems as if they are working out some kinks. The guest rooms could use screens on the windows and the water pressure means that the impressive tub takes over an hour to fill up. Guests are fed extremely well but there are no choices—you eat what they’re cooking, and many meals have rice and French fries on the same plate. A friend who came up to watch the sunset drove into a huge swampy hole in the driveway that  was hard to see in the dark and the rain, and upon later inspection that was just one of many tire-swallowing holes. In the Costa Rican manner, Wilbirth smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Who’d be dumb enough to drive into those holes?

Curubanda Lodge: Slipping and sliding to the waterfall

Curubanda Lodge, near Quebrada Grande in the hills of Guanacaste

“Don’t be afraid,” our guide tells us. “It’s a little steep and slippery on the way to the waterfall, but the horses know the way.”

We’ve already come up a trail so muddy the horses sank in past their knees. There were stretches so steep I’d been hugging my horse’s neck to keep upright.

But I wasn’t complaining—yet. We were riding through a dramatic landscape that few would associate with Guanacaste or even Costa Rica. Swaths of dense forest alternated with green hills that might be called rolling if what they were doing wasn’t a lot more dramatic–let’s call them rock-and-rolling hills.  The air was fresco – cool and fresh.  Cacao Volcano lay before us, with Rincon de la Vieja Volcano at our back.

David and I and the guide had started out from Curubanda Lodge, four comfortable cabins on the Finca Nueva Zealandia (New Zealand farm, for the area’s resemblance to that country). We were just over an hour from the baking-hot town of Liberia (the hottest in all of Costa Rica), where there’s an international airport and more banks per square meter than anywhere else in Costa Rica, and two hours from the party beach town of Tamarindo.

If you’re not crazy about extreme heat or spring-break style revelry, then Curubanda is a breath of fresh and cool air. At well over 2000 feet, it lies in a perpetually green valley between two volcanoes, and is sandwiched between two national parks—Rincon de la Vieja and the Guanacaste Protected Area.

The path to the waterfall at Curubanda Lodge

We’re riding through what they call bosque seco (dry forest), though you wouldn’t know it from the rain squalls and the clouds scudding through. “The clouds here haul ass,” says a local expat rancher from California who’s been here a decade and says that the area’s microclimates are so very micro that it can be raining out his back door when the sun is shining on his front yard.

This morning we’re riding 3 of the farm’s 22 horses, trying to catch of glimpse of the volcanoes’ steeply sloping cones, and marveling at the view from the ridges—we can see over multiple ridges in myriad shades of green, all the way to the where the Pacific would be if the haze of the lowlands wasn’t obscuring it today.

We’re well-fortified with a farmhand’s breakfast—eggs, gallo pinto (rice and beans), toast, a plate of fresh pineapple, papaya, apple, and watermelon, and a dollop of delicious fresh cheese (the farm is primarily a dairy, with 80 Holstein, Jersey, and Pardo cows).

Still, I’m not feeling too good about the steep and slippery descent to the waterfall. I guess I could dismount and do it on foot, but one of the reasons they encourage exploring the area on horseback is that hay culebras (there are snakes, including terciopelos (fer-de-lances) and matahueyes (literally “ox-killers,” aka bushmasters). The lodge has loaned us tall rubber boots, but still, I guess I’ll take my chances on horseback.

Our guide is William (lots of people around here have anglicized names, though they may speak no English and have no English heritage). He’s from Nicaragua originally –we’re not far from the border here, and the clouds we see probably formed over Lake Nicaragua. He carries a machete to whack away some of the branches encroaching on the trail, and to have a weapon against culebras.

I take a deep breath and give my horse, Palomo, a gentle kick so he’ll follow the other two, which have begun to slip and slide down the narrow, root-encrusted trail. It’s not my first time on horseback but it’s the first time I’ve seen how horses can slide stiff-legged for yards and then right themselves. The horses nimbly pick their way over fallen trees, rocks, and through mud bogs.

We’re almost to the bottom of this steep stretch when the guide’s horse loses his footing. The rear feet slide out from under him and he goes down, sliding on his rump for several yards.

I pull my horse up short as I watch the spectacle. But William doesn’t bat an eye, just pulls up on the reins until his horse regains all four feet.

I turn to David. “I thought you said these horses couldn’t lose their footing.”

David laughs. “I guess I must have meant mules.”

Soon we dismount, clamber on foot down an even steeper stretch (No hay muchas culebras aqui, says William—There aren’t so many snakes right here), cross a small river, and round a bend to see a small waterfall cascading into a round pool. The mist from the falls drifts over to us, and we breathe it in, watching a blue morpho butterfly ride the currents of air produced by the falling water.

All photos by David W. Smith

The trail to the waterfall was steep and muddy, but it was worth the trip.

Petroglyphs in Las Lilas, Guancaste

Sign near nearly-invisible petroglyphs in Las Lilas, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

In the tiny town of Las Lilas, near Quebrada Grande, there’s a rock with petroglyphs that they’ve put a little tin roof over to protect, and a sign that shows you what the faint carvings would look like if you could see them clearly.

River near Las Lilas; photo by David W. Smith

Petroglyphs in Guanacaste hill country

The Guanacaste highlands, with Rincon de la Vieja volcano in the background; photo by David W. Smith

Over the river and through the woods, then over another creek and up along a fence line, in view of Rincon de la Vieja volcano, we found a flattish rock at the top of a hill with what looked like very old carvings. The person who showed us the place brought chalk, and he outlined some of the designs so they’d be more visible.

There were/are many tribes in the Rincon de la Vieja area, including the Curubande and the Guatuso.

Chalk-enhanced petroglyphs near Quebrada Grande; photo by David W. Smith

Detail of chalk-enhanced petroglyph in the Guanacaste highlands; photo by David W. Smtih

La Ruta del Agua: tourism initiative to promote Nicaragua’s southern waterways

The boat is king on Nicaragua's Rio San Juan--even this one, with a 1-cylinder Lister engine

Navigating the Rio San Juan in Southern Nicaragua today, you won’t see much traffic. There are the local fisherman, a few sportfishermen, and the small boats that ferry local residents from very isolated towns to marginally less isolated ones.

But in centuries past, the river was a busy thoroughfare. Spanish conquistadors sailed upriver to Lake Nicaragua and settled the rich colonial city of Granada. Pirates made the same trip to plunder the wealth of what became the richest colonial territory in Central America. And in the mid-1800s, up to 10,000 people a year took the Nicaragua shortcut from the East Coast of the U.S. to the California Gold Rush, avoiding the long sail around the tip of South America. (Travelers also used Panama as a cut-off point, though the canal wasn’t yet built.)

Frank Ochomogo, local project director of the Ruta del Agua tourist initiative

Frank Ochomogo, local Project Director of a $14,720 million tourism initiative they’re calling “La Ruta del Agua,” would like to see the river regain some its former traffic, but this time from travelers who come for the nature, culture, sportfishing, and adventure rather than for the plunder or the quickest route to somewhere else.

I had breakfast with Frank in early December at Philippe Tisseaux’s Esquina del Lago lodge, and he explained that the initiative intends to develop tourism and infrastructure in the area of Southern Nicaragua defined by three bodies of water: The Caribbean Sea, the Rio San Juan, and Lake Nicaragua. The money for the project comes from a loan for the Interamerican Bank.

Although the project is on the books as a tourism development initiative, one of its major components—the improvement of infrastructure—will benefit local residents at least as much as tourists. Right now, the road from Managua to San Carlos—at 15,000 people, one of the bigger towns in the area—is only 300 km, but take up to 15 hours on the bus because the poor state of the road.

“We’re putting our house in order,” says Frank. “So that we can invite people in.”

Diving off the new San Carlos dock

The bulk of the money ($12 of the almost $15 million) is slated for infrastructure improvement. Besides road repairs, there are 11 new docks planned in communities throughout the Ruta del Agua area, and 8 new immigration posts to be built, each at the juncture of the San Juan and another river that feeds into it.

The entire waterfront area of San Carlos has already received a major face lift, with a new dock, a riverside promenade, a new immigration post under construction, and even a brand-new ATM machine that, marvels Tisseaux, “actually works and actually has money in it! That’s huge, you have no idea.”  There is also a bridge planned from Costa Rica to Nicaragua—from Santa Fe, they told me, though I couldn’t find that town on any map and couldn’t picture where a bridge connecting the two countries would go.

Smaller pieces of the funding pie will go to promotion and low-interest loans to local tourism-related businesses so that they can expand their capacity.

A tributary of the Rio San Juan near the Costa Rica / Nicaragua border

The Ruta del Agua area is rife with nature reserves–Guatuso, Vida Silvestre San Juan, and Indo Maiz—and cultural and historical treasures like the Solentiname Archipeligo, known for its painters and artisans, and El Castillo, a Spanish fort built in 1675 to guard against pirates.

Tisseaux, French-born and now a Nicaraguan resident, helps sportfishermen chase town the river’s mammoth tarpon. He also does a lot of reading about the history of his adopted country. “About 100,000 people came up the Rio San Juan on their way from the eastern United States to the Gold Rush in California,” he says.  “That means that a good portion of people descended from the 49ers had a relative that passed through the area.”

One of the travelers who made the trip was Mark Twain, who described the area as consisting of “dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine work.”

All photos by David W. Smith.

A gay Border’s Café in the Nicaraguan jungle?

El Castillo, an old Spanish fort above the Rio San Juan, Nicaragua

We took a boat up the Rio San Juan to El Castillo, which is both an old Spanish fort and an appealing small town with many of its houses built out over the river. The first thing we saw when we disembarked was a sign that said “Borders Coffee” with an arrow pointing up a wooden staircase to an open-air space with tables and chairs and rows of potted plants.

The café belongs to Jamil, featured in the last Lonely Planet Nicaragua under the heading, “El Castillo’s Shame.” Jamil is openly gay, and he has been harassed by the townspeople, the police, and the army, but has stood his ground and now has a thriving business with an enviable location and the only espresso machine in town.

Born in El Castillo, Jamil went away to school in San Jose, Costa Rica, but came home because this is where his family is. “Nicaraguans says,” Jamil told me, “that all Ticos are faggots (‘maricones’). But it’s just that they’re more open about it.”

Borders Coffee in El Castillo, Nicaragua

Jamil is very well-spoken, self-possessed, and I can only imagine the reserves of strength he has had to draw on being the only out gay man in a small remote riverside town in a part of the world not known for its enlightened views towards gays.

Jamil, at his Border's Cafe in El Castillo, Nicaragua

Another long-term resident of the area put a slightly different spin on Jamil’s saga. “It sounds like his biggest crime was that he was a good businessman,” this person speculated. “He was probably affecting other people’s businesses, so they used the excuse of his sexuality to harass him.”

Whatever the explanation, I enjoyed talking to Jamil and hope that he and his cafe continue to thrive.

All photos by David W. Smith.

My new agouti: woodcarving in the Solentiname Islands

A wooden agouti, carved by Concepcion Garcia of Isla La Venada, one for the Solentiname islands

At the artisan cooperative on San Fernando Island, I fell in love with a pint-sized agouti. An oversized rodent that also goes by the names tepesquintle and guardatinaja, the agouti is cuter than its heritage implies.

I liked the paintings, was intrigued by the painted birds and turtles, but the unpainted agouti, of cedar (not like the Pacific Northwest cedar) instead of the usual balsa, was the only item that convinced me it’d be worth carting around for the rest of my trip.

The creator of the agouti is a 39-yar-old woman named Concepcion Garcia. She lives on a modest farm on Isla La Venada (Deer Island), which, unlike San Fernando and Mancarron Islands, doesn’t have a town. She married a Mosquito Indian man, has 3 children, and says she chose to work with wood instead of paint because paint is too expensive. She carves with a machete-like knife and has been at it for less than 5 years. I bought her agouti from the artist’s cooperative, and asked there where I could find the artist.

House of woodcarver Concepcion Garcia, Isla La Venada, Solintename Archipeligo, Nicaragua

We took our boat to Isla La Venada, calling to people on the shore, asking where we could find Concepcion Garcia.

When we found her, up a narrow path from the lakeshore, she was very gracious, and brought out a bag of birds and other carved animals. None of them approached the agouti in charm, but I bought a few anyway, because we had disturbed her at home and because she obviously needed the money. She told us she didn’t get that much of the money when the artist’s cooperative sold her work.

Woodcarver Concepcion Garcia, in her home on Isla La Venada in the Solentiname Islands

All photos by David W. Smith.