Costa Rica Retrospective: Travel and Ticos

Costa Rican Travel: One myth about traveling in Costa Rica is that the whole affair will be phenomenally cheap because it’s a third world tropical country. This is only partly true, as accommodations our certainly cheaper than the States, but food, beer, gas, and dining out prices have rapidly inflated over the past five years to basically U.S. levels. For any potential Costa Rica travelers, let me offer a quick guide to travel costs to give you an idea.

Accommodations: You will spend between $12 and $30 per night on your hotel room. At the $12 end are the hostels, where you are usually just offered a dorm style bed with a shared bathroom. However, some of these are really nice and also have large front porches, hammocks, internet rooms, common areas with pool tables and TVs, and a cooking area. You also get to meet and hang out with tons of other travelers, so they are great places for doing all those things that young people tend to do when congregated in mass. You also meet tons of foreigners who are there to surf and party. We have hung out and traveled with French, Dutch, Israeli, German, Italian, South African, and Kiwis along the way. It helps that the lingua franca of these hostels, even in Costa Rica, is English. For this my Spanish has certainly suffered.

Tranquilo backpackers hostel in Mal Pais where we stayed 9 nights.

The other accommodation option is a private room at one of the local hotels, or ‘cabinas’ as they are usually referred to. A two bed, double occupancy room will range from $30 to $60 depending on how close it is to the beach and whether it has AC, a refrigerator, hot water, or other ‘high end’ amenities. At the low end you will become accustomed to plywood beds, thin ‘camp stlye’ mattresses, and the visits of bed bugs, sand flies, and ants if you leave out any food. While these are the drawbacks, Laura and I were able to find some budget cabinas in the 30 dollar range which were tolerable and even had AC.

Cabinas Paulina in Playa Negra where Albero and Grady worked

Meals: My general rule of thumb is $7 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $15 for dinner, meaning that you spend more than 30 bucks per day if you eat all your meals out and are a huge eater like me. The typical local restaurant is called a ‘soda’ and consists of a little open air dining room with perhaps four tables and a colorful sign out front advertising the logo of local beer on top and the name of the ‘soda’ below. For instance in Matapalo we always ate at the soda Carolina.

Breakfast always consists of the typical two fried eggs with a delicious fried rice and bean side called gallo pinto. This will usually only run you three bucks, but add a banana smoothie and some coffee- which they charge for refills- and you quickly hit six bucks. There is also always a 10 percent service charge and a 10 percent tax on all meals. Lunch offers the staple Costa Rican meal known as ‘casada’ or married; implying its what you will be offered every day of your life by your wife once you get hitched. A casada comes with rice, beans, a salad, a banana, and either a small filet of chicken or fish. You can expect to pay between 5 and 7 bucks for this, but add in a couple $1.50 cokes, a $2 ice cream desert, or an extra $3 fruit plate and with tax your quickly at 10.

Dinner, with the staple and cheapest option again being the cosadas, usually costs between 7 and 10 bucks. Poorly prepared American favorites like burgers, pastas, and burritos usually are on the high end and are very mediocre. In general it is best to stay away from meat dishes- very gamey- in general and stick to the seafood which is usually really good. A ceviche appetizer usually will only cost you about 4 bucks and is well worth all the fresh mahi mahi you get. On the booze end it is generally cheaper to drink beers which always hover in the $1.50 to $2.50 range- a six pack of the local beer Imperial is 7.50 . The locals don’t really drink cocktails, so the prices are exclusively for tourists and you will pay up to $5 for mixed drinks. Thus totaled you are spending 30 bucks a day just feeding yourself, not including that all important night out of drinking.

The other option, when your place has a kitchen, is to cook for yourself and buy groceries at the little local stores called Mini-supers. They carry the basic staples, some fruits and local vegetables, and have a small refrigerated section with some ghetto meats, cheese, and milk. The groceries are expensive though when only cooking for only 1 or 2 and so we ended up using these markets primarily to buy delicious ice cream cookie sandwiches called Trits which cost a dollar. Anyway, unless you are staying for an extended time at one cabin, there is no excess time or energy to cook between surfing sessions and traveling.

A ritual daily Trit

Cost summary:If you could average 20 per night for your room and 30 per day for your dining out you would be traveling efficiently and still dropping 50 per day, or 350 per week, or $1,400 per month before any in country travel costs. Again the bus is cheap and is goes most places, but the car certainly makes it nicer if you can swing it. So Costa Rica, while not Europe expensive, is certainly not Southeast Asia cheap either.

Tico 101: So the anthropologists among you may be wondering where the actual local population fits into this traveling business. Is there any interaction with actual Costa Rican’s (Ticos), or is it just a bunch of foreigners hanging out in a tropical surfing playland ?

The Tico population is only about 4 million, less then the population of greater Houston, with over half residing in the central valley in and around San Jose, where the climate is more temperate and amenable to farming as opposed to tropical and forested. San Jose has a handful of large modern buildings, mostly hotel/casinos, surrounded by sprawling neighborhoods linked together by unmarked roads that wind themselves through a maze of tin buildings, small shops, and one story residences. You find some areas of concentrated shanty type dwellings but nicer neighborhoods also exist in the nearby suburbs, with stone multi story houses and even pools.

San Jose from the air

With half the population living around San Jose, there is simply not a large enough population for any major urban centers elsewhere in the country. The largest of the coastal towns have populations of less then 10,000 and most beach/surf towns probably support only a few hundred Ticos. These towns typically have a soccer field, a church, a Mini-super grocery, and two or three little ‘sodas’ that serve food and become bars where locals meet to drink at night. Families live in tin and wood houses, that usually have two rooms, and a yard where laundry is hung and kids peddle around on bikes. Most do not have electricity but do have running water from a local system and use gas stoves for cooking.

Prior to the phenomenal tourist boom of the past 15 years, the Tico’s living along Pacific Coast would have been fishermen, ranchers, farmers, or crop workers in large palm oil, banana, or sugarcane plantations. Town growth was limited by basically the amount of jobs needed by the local agricultural operations. With the rise of tourism a number of larger coastal town have emerged, such as Jaco and Tamarindo. While you may have heard about these as famous surf destinations and imagined them to be major towns (as I did), they are actually only slightly ‘gringoized’ and enlarged versions of the coastal villages. For instance while Tamarindo has a Subway restaurant, several luxury hotels, and a small airport, it does not have a pump gasoline station and you have to buy it in jugs from the back of a hardware store.

The other change is that rather than working in agricultural related occupations, most of the Ticos work in something related to tourism. Boat captains, hotel cleaners, restaurant employees, souvenir craftsmen, and even security guards who watch the parked cars at surf beaches are all coveted jobs that Ticos have adapted to. Beneath these more conventional occupations is another layer cashing in on the tourism boom comprised of scammers acting as ‘independent tour guides’ and dealers peddling drugs or prostitutes.

Beneath this broad framework of tourist/service related jobs, it is often difficult to figure out exactly what, if any, specific job or employment some of the Ticos have. At every ‘cabinas’, restaurant, or local business there is at least one Tico, usually older, who seems to just be hanging around, not as a real employee, but usually as relative of someone actually working. They kind of sit around, perform an odd task now and again, and then sleep there way through the rest of the day in shady chairs. I interpret this as something like the Tico version of retirement.

The poster boy for this form of Tico retirement was a man named Albero who was a permanent fixture at the Cabinas Paulina where we were staying in Playa Negra. Jovial, paunch bellied, and never wearing a shirt, this 48 year old nephew of the proprietress Paullina spent 90 percent of his day sitting on the porch outside the dining area of the cabinas. He always greeted us with a hug smile and a genuine spiel on how he was there to help us with whatever we needed. Unfortunately however, whenever we asked him for a beer or something we were out of luck, as the key to Paulin’s beer cooler was apparently not a responsibility with which Albero was entrusted. When she was around he could go back and grab beers for us, but chiefly he just dosed in his chair or watched us play pool. He did have his great moment though. When the wall tiles of our shower collapsed and shattered all over our bathroom floor, I appealed to Albero to take care of the resulting pile of ceramic fragments. Two days later our bathroom was clean, so some proof does exist that he may have had an occupational function other than observing from his chair.

Beneath and behind all the tourist related businesses and services, however, much of Tico life in these coastal town goes on as it did before the boom. I was surprised to find that often, while despite making friendly efforts to be helpful, locals sometimes did not know the answer when asked where the nearest surf shop, gas station, or even road to a nearby town was. It seems many Ticos know their niche of the gringo world and don’t involve themselves with the rest, even if it exists right under their nose. What use has an old lady without a car for a gasoline station or a surfshop. There lives remain focused on family, the community, and making their living and they don’t bother with the gringo stuff. There are certainly many exceptions, among the young especially, some who have taken up surfing and have a firm grasp of American lingo and culture.

Finally, as always there are shades of grey, there are certainly Ticos who have much broader awareness of the world around them but continue to work within their local communities. For every Albero, loveable but provincial and hapless, there is someone like his nephew Grady who worked at the same family cabinas. Grady spoke English, worked cooking and managing guests at the hotel, and was also going to school three days a week for automobile maintenance. He is an example of an upwardly mobile and aware class of young Tico’s that exists in the provincial ‘surfing’ villages that is not dependent on American or tourist culture for identity.