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

Boom time greed and condo ghost towns in Playas del Coco

Rick Vogel, the genial host at Rancho Armadillo in Playas del Coco, is a good natured guy. But he pulls no punches when describing what’s going on in his adopted town and country.

“Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,” he says, speaking of boom time greed in Coco.

Boom time became bust time a few years ago. Bruce Hammond of Better Homes Realty in Playas del Coco said that as far as he could see, the downturn here started in July of 2008 but by October of that year it was like “someone hit the ‘off’ switch.” Almost $3 billion of planned development was put on hold.

But back in the days of sky’s-the-limit condo flipping there were realtors, says Rick, who pulled some pretty hoggish stunts. Like selling a piece of property they knew didn’t have access to water and never would, not once but multiple times, as each new buyer discovered that he could build his dream home but his dream faucets would always be dry.

“We’re in a desert here,” said Rick. “The problem is water.” I’ve been hearing that sentiment everywhere I go in Costa Rica, from the ‘cielo roto’ (broken sky) valleys where it rains almost all the time, to the dry Guanacaste coast, even hotter and drier since swaths of the coastal dry forests have been cut down.

Another trick he saw was that a realtor would sell a local property for, say, $200,000, get a $50,000 deposit, use that $50,000 to buy the property from the Tico owners, then pocket the remaining $150,000.

These are not local Tico realtors, but foreigners with the imprimatur of multinational realty companies on their business cards. (I learned that you pay maybe $25,000 for a franchise and that you get pretty much nothing but the name).

Many condo projects in Costa Rica ground to a halt when the world economy took a nosedive

Playas del Coco has dozens of condo projects that started up years ago and now languish half-completed, rebar ladders rusting and cement foundations crumbling before they’re even built on. One huge construction crane visible in a development up the hill hasn’t moved, say the locals, for at least a year.

Many condos were sold in pre-construction, and some of those condos still haven’t been built. I met an African-American man from Louisiana (I comment on his race because most U.S. expats I meet are white) in line at the ATM.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“For better or worse,” he said, “I guess I do. Or I’m trying.”

He’d bought a pre-construction condo from Mapache and, four years later, it still wasn’t built. I don’t think Mapache is the only developer not delivering. The building of these mammoth complexes goes in phases, with continued construction funded by condo sales. When the world economic downturn put a huge dent in sales, much construction ground to a halt.

We talked to a Tica who ran a bar in Paraiso (near Playa Negra) who said many of the locals are out of work because all the developments that were employing them as builders or watchmen or cooks for the workers are ‘parado’ – stopped.

Like they say, when the United States sneezes, Costa Rica gets pneumonia.

If you want to look for a silver lining, it might be that in this climate it’s a buyer’s market. But as always, buyer beware.

Photos by David Webster Smith

Crash landing at Playas del Coco, Costa Rica

Rancho Armadillo, Playas del Coco, Costa Rica

“The Earth is moving at 285,000 miles an hour,” says Rick Vogel of Rancho Armadillo in Playas del Coco. “And the skies shift even faster here, down near the equator.”

We’re lounging poolside, sometime between dusk and moonrise. Rick has a 5-inch diameter telescope trained on Jupiter and its moons. You can see three of the moons clear as day. The stars, brilliant on this clear night, are reflected in the dark water of the pool. Full-size copies of pre-Columbian statues loom in the dim light, and night-blooming flowers broadcast their scent.

Although we haven’t been moving at quite the clip as the Earth, we’ve been on the road for weeks and have been traveling as fast as the Costa Rica roads will allow. And with the roads and bridges so much improved since my last grand tour, that’s pretty damned fast.

From the pool at Rancho Armadillo you can see the ocean; photos by David W. Smith.

It feels good to land for a few days at Rancho Armadillo, up the hill and out of earshot from Playas del Coco. In 2004 the Tico Times wrote that visiting the Rancho was “like visiting a friend with a really cool house.” I agree, but would add, a friend with a really cool house and 25 landscaped acres and fragrant ylang ylang trees and visiting monkeys and wireless internet and comfortable king sized beds and rainforest showers and breakfasts that include homemade waffles and huge platters of fruit. After he’d served us one morning’s feast Rick had to take some friends to the bus stations. “If the coatamundi comes around,” he told us. “Throw him a piece of raisin bread. Otherwise he’ll drag the whole bread basket away.”

Rick and his wife Debbie, originally from Detroit, bought the hotel in 1999. They didn’t expand—the place sleeps just 20 at full capacity–but they did refine. They planted more trees and flowers, and made sure that every detail was right—the good reading lights on each side of the bed, the small army of sunscreen and insect repellent bottles you’ll find poolside for your use, the field guides to local flora and fauna, and the star charts to help you orient in skies that are catawampus compared to what stargazers see up north.

Most of all, though, I appreciate the feeling that Rick gives you—that you have the run of the place. That you can swim at midnight and raid the honor bar whenever the mood strikes. “There are two rules here,” he tells us. “For each work email you answer, you have to do a shot. And you have to wake up at least once a day.”