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.

Camera vs. Tile floor at the Soda del Rio

In the fight between camera & floor, the Sigma suffered a decisive loss.

There are travel days when nothing goes right. On Friday afternoon, we sat at a table under the eaves at a little soda (a modest restaurant or cafe) in La Fortuna, a muddy one-horse town that is also the tourist epicenter for all things Arenal-esque, from river rafting to volcano-spotting (it hasn’t shown its sloped face in days).

Rain came down in sheets, bouncing off the sidewalk and misting our ankles even as we sat a few feet under the overhang. We’d ordered jugos de mora (blackberry) and guanabana just to rent time at a table, and I was trying to navigate Lonely Planet Costa Rica on the Kindle to figure out a place to stay that night.

David swept his backpack off the table to accommodate the glasses of juice, and one of the straps pulled his camera off the tabletop and onto the hard tile floor.

Craaaak! It didn’t sound good, and as he scooped his Sigma off the floor, his face told me that it didn’t look good, either. He spent the next several minutes checking all the camera functions, and I watched as his face became cloudier and cloudier.

Volcan Arenal is usually shrouded in clouds.

We were 2 days into a 2-month trip whose primary purpose was to do research and take photos for the 3^rd edition of my guide, Living Abroad in Costa Rica. David was the trip photographer. I’d left my piddly little Nikon at home, relieved that I could concentrate on research and writing and leave the visuals to someone more inclined in that direction.

But now  it seemed that David’s camera had fallen and couldn’t get up.  The lens was the problem. It had been so traumatized it now wouldn’t venture out of its shell.

He had a small back-up camera, but the files wouldn’t be big enough to reproduce high-quality color photos.

Here was the trip’s first major snafu.

We’ve spent the last few days figuring out what to do next. On the emotional front, David was seriously bummed, and I had to let him be bummed until he wasn’t bummed anymore–a lesson in non-attachment.

On the practical front, David bought a set of tiny screwdrivers at the local ferreterria, took the back off the camera and poked around, but had no luck in getting the lens to work.

We asked everyone we knew if there was a good camera repairman in town. No, but someone knew a guy in San Jose who came highly recommended. He didn’t answer his cell phone and wasn’t getting back to us. Should we drive back to the capital (4-5 hours on bad roads) to see if we could find this guy?

How about if David bought another Sigma on eBay and had it shipped down here? One acquaintance had a mail service (Aero Casillas) that has stuff sent to Miami and then brings it down to Costa Rica. But it can take from 10 days to 2 weeks to get a package. Other friends said they had small packages sent directly to their address in a nearby small town, with the same time frame—1 or 2 weeks in transit. Some vendors would ship internationally, some wouldn’t. And if customs got ahold of the package, well, you’d have to go to Calderas and know who to bribe.

Stay tuned for more in the camera-meets-floor drama. This experience is reminding me that nothing is easy, or fast, in Costa Rica. The country looks at our agenda and our bag full of high-tech gadgets, and it laughs. A big, rumbling lava-burbling-out-of-a-volcano laugh. All you can do is stand clear, and smile ruefully at how little control you actually have.

Traveling with a Kindle: How to get free ebooks

I posted a few days ago about taking my Kindle on the road, lamenting that the device didn’t read epub files, the “free and open ebook standard.”

Well, as many Kindle users may already know, it’s not so hard to convert epub files into mobi files, which is what the Kindle wants.

I’m using caliber to do the conversion. It’s free, works on a Mac or a PC, and “seems to do a good job with epub but is slow & lame for PDF conversion,” according to my source, who prefers to rename mainless. That source also tried AutoKindle and Mobi Pocket Creator (both free), neither of which worked very well. He’s looking into Savory for PDF conversion.

How to get free epub books from Google books:

• Choose your subject or genre
• Choose ‘Public domain only’ from drop down menu at top left of screen
• Find the book you want
• On the screen showing that book, in upper right hand corner click on ‘download’—there are usually a few formats to choose from, including epub and pdf.
• Download the file, then use a program like caliber (which lives on your computer) to do the conversion to mobi (Kindle’s file format)
• Hook your Kindle up to your computer (with the usb cord included with your purchase) and pull the converted file from your computer to your kindle.

Even as I take advantage of these free digital books, I know that Google’s drive to get all the world’s books online is problematic for authors and publishers. For more about the class action lawsuit against Google books, go to the Practical Nomad, then scroll down to ‘Articles by Edward Hasbrouck on other topics.’

Hasbrouck also has a good post on Amazon’s new Kindle for the PC.

Free books from Gutenburg

Gutenburg has a smaller selection than Google books (how could it compete with the “don’t be evil” empire?) but all the books you find there are free.

Example:

• I search by Nicaragua in the title field.
• I get one result: Thomas Belt’s The Naturalist in Nicaragua, which just so happens to be one of the books I was looking for, ever since I read about it in William Allen’s Green Phoenix: restoring the Tropical Forest of Guanacaste, Costa Rica (wonderful book that makes natural history and political shenanigans read like a high-quality potboiler; I’d get it on the Kindle but it costs a whopping $28 just for the mobi file).
• The Naturalist in Nicaragua (originally published in 1874), is available for download in a variety of formats, including epub, Mobi, and html.

Download it, covert it, and Success! Now I have a classic of Nicaraguan travel and nature writing on my Kindle, perhaps to be hauled out on the 12-hour boat ride across Lake Cocibolco, from Isla Solentiname to Isla Ometepe.

Going MOBI: Traveling with a Kindle eReader

Photo: termie (Creative Commons)

I’m a writer and a fan of the physical book, but I just bought a second-hand Kindle 2 and will soon take it on the road.

What pushed me in that direction was stacking up all the books—guidebooks, reference, and pleasure reading—I wanted to take with me. It was one tall stack, and would have needed its own suitcase. I’ll be traveling by bus, car, boat, and maybe light plane, so I need to pack pretty light.

I thought of getting a non-Kindle e-reader (like a Sony, or the Barnes & Noble Nook) because I really wanted to be able to download and read all the books available in epub format (check out Gutenburg.org or books.google.com) that are free once their copyright lapses—you can download Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe and old scholarly works to your heart’s content.  Kindle can’t read epub files–it reads MOBI files.

The Rio San Juan, Nicaragua

The problem was finding up-to-date guidebooks or new fiction—I could find that only in the Kindle store. And even there, Lonely Planet has the monopoly (what’s new?). Let’s take Nicaragua guidebooks on Kindle as an example. I get to choose between Nicaragua Adventure Guide and Lonely Planet. That’s it. What about Moon, Footprint, the Rough Guide to Central America? But I bit the digital bullet and downloaded the Lonely Planet chapter on San Carlos, Islas Solentiname, and the Rio San Juan. It is cool that I can choose just part of the book. Of course now you can get just parts of a book in print, too, or you can do what I like to do—rip the chapters you need out of larger (real) book and then carry them in a zip-lock bag. You’ll never hear that satisying riiiip! coming from an ebook.

So my first Kindle download was a guidebook. My second? Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book in his compulsively readable trilogy. Yes, I have succumbed, along with the rest of the world. (He sold 3.5 million copies just in his native Sweden, which has a population around 9 million.)

But back to the Kindle–the navigation is driving me crazy. Next page. Previous page. Those are my choices. Oh, I can go to the Table of Contents, but when I do it often jumps back to another page. I didn’t realize ‘till now what a wonderful technology flipping through a book is. It works perfectly for a guidebook reader’s needs.

And trying to see maps on Kindle 2 is a losing battle. The Kindle has one order of magnification, not enough to read LP’s doll-sized maps.

I know there are programs to convert epub, pdf, and other file formats into something the Kindle can read. I’m looking into them right now. But wouldn’t it be nice if all the e-readers read all the ebook formats without having to make us jump through hoops?

Everyone’s taking the Kindle on the road—or blogging about it.

On Tuesday, guidebook writer Rick Steves published a short piece on Worldhum.com about guidebooks and ereaders. He said a reader wrote to say that Steves’ book on a Kindle was driving them nuts and did he know any place in Venice that carried non-digital copies of his guide?

And today, Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, posted about the new Kindle for Windows

“Amazon.com has released a beta version of Kindle for PC software that you can download for free, and use to read e-books you buy from the Kindle store or, with some awkward conversion, other e-books….It’s functional and has all the features of — albeit no more than — the standalone Kindle e-book readers. You can now read any books you’ve already bought for your Kindle on your Windows PC, and vice versa, but you do not need a Kindle to buy and read “Kindle Editions” on your Windows PC. That means you can now use any device that runs Windows as a reader for Kindle format e-books.”