Mr. Numbers

I picture an accountant as hyper organized, all about details, perhaps with a shirt pocket full of pencils and a calculator in hand. I don’t picture someone who travels with a few folders in a plastic grocery bag, gives props when you see him, calls you “brudda”, listens to your business questions then asks to borrow a pen and scratch paper, writes a few notes, folds the scrap and adds it to the concerns of others in his wallet. The latter is who we, as well as just about everyone we know here, work with. He grew up in Limon, the biggest town on this afro caribbean coast, speaking English at home . This is crucial since you don’t want to have a language barrier between you and the ever confusing accounting principals of Costa Rica. He is an incredibly nice guy and from what we can tell he makes sure that you pay the right taxes at the right time. Other than that he’s more like a friend who stops by looking for a game of chess every now and then, hoping you have some tasty treat in the oven, rather than a trusty accountant.

The first time we talked he returned our call at 9:30pm. That actually seems to be the time that he sets aside to make business calls. He lives in San Jose but travels to Puerto Viejo about once every two weeks to meet with clients. He’ll often call on, say, Monday and leave a message that we should meet him, oh....around...... Tuesday at 9am at a restaurant in Puerto Viejo, which entails a twenty minute jaw crunchingly bumpy drive from Playa Chiquita. He knows that we serve breakfast here everyday making that pretty much the most difficult time to leave. That doesn’t stop him the same way that he’ll drop in unannounced at Jungle Love, the restaurant down the street, at 5:45pm knowing that they open at 5:30pm. All of his clients know the feeling of showing up to give him your receipts ready to tell him that if he doesn’t *&%$^%! call sooner next time you’re going to $%#%. But then he smiles, reaches out for that hand shake/hug, says “hey brudda, wha appenin” and you remember that this is part of what makes the Caribbean the Caribbean and one of the reasons you moved here.

A special moment was when he was helping us open a bank account. In Costa Rica they want letters of recommendation from your neighbors saying that you make a certain amount. They want an accountant to say that you make a certain amount and for you to have papers filled out from several hard to reach national agencies. We had tried various times on our own to get our ducks in a row, but we were always missing something. When we walked in with our numbers man we felt like there was no way we were walking out without an account. This is what he does. He knows all the tricks. He spends his time keeping up with the ins and outs of financial regulation. The interaction with the young female teller went something like this:

They greet each other. The accountant calls her by the wrong name. He’s always calling people by the wrong name. She corrects him. He compensates by commenting on her well put together uniform and then begins to cough uncontrollably. She gives him a home cold remedy. He asks if she’ll be his nurse. They start exchanging all the necessary papers for the new account. She’s naming them and he’s handing them over. It was great until she gets to the last one, a declaration of some sort from the ministry of finance. What? That’s new, they didn’t used to ask for that. He pleads. Just this once. She’s sorry but can’t set it up without it. We stand up, slightly amused and not surprised at all, but then the accountant seems to have a final card up his sleeve. Some pressure he can put on to get what he wants, maybe a little bribe. He leans back over to the window and whispers. “How about you give me your home number. I might forget that cold remedy.”

Tierra de Suenos just organized our first charity effort. The flooding in November ended up displacing approximately 4,000 people and destroyed one of the largest banana plantations in the country which means loss of many jobs and security for a lot of people. This area is already one of the poorest in the country so damage like this is incredibly difficult to bounce back from. A few months ago we joined a group called AHCR (Adventure Hotels of Costa Rica). The goal of the organization is to work together to create more business for everybody in the group by recommending other AHCR hotels to people traveling to other places in the country. We have received 2 different couples sent by another member hotel so the membership has already paid for itself. This is a fairly new association which is nice because we are all, well the hotels interested, participating in how it's going to work. Brendan and I signed up for the "charity committee" as each hotel was asked to join one of the 10 committees designed to help organize the members.

The damage done to our Talamancan neighbors deemed a perfect cause so we tried to inspire AHCR members to donate money, food, clothing and other supplies to the area. The awesome local association, ATEC (Talamanca Ecotourism and Conservation Association) was quite helpful in giving us a direct place to send these items. It took some teeth pulling but eventually we managed to raise quite a bit of money as well as food and clothing from the other member hotels. I spoke with Alaine, co-founder of ATEC, the other day and she says that the majority of the money donations send to her by AHCR members is being used to purchase school supplies that were lost in the flood. I can't imagine better spent money. Although this is just a start of the kind of work we would like to be doing, with and without the AHCR group, it's a good start and we are excited about all the possibilities for community building and service. I do encourage any of you interested in traveling to CR to check out the AHCR website, www.adventurehotelsofcostarica.com, and look into staying at one of the hotels listed. You get 10% off if you tell them we sent you!

On a side note, much to our disappointment and horror, our laptop was stolen recently which is a major setback for us. It really couldn't be worse timing since we have entered the busy season and are getting consistent reservation requests via email every day. Not to mention the fact that ALL my photos of our first year down here are gone. Anyway, lesson learned. On the up-side, we are super busy and everybody loves the place. This month will be our best by far.

Rare photo op at Tierra de Sueños

We spotted a rare Costa Rican tree frog in the door way to our bedroom the other day. While sleeping it tightens it's body into a thin sliver so that you can barely see the lines of it's limbs, eyes, or feet.



With a little poke it awakens and red eyes expose themselves as well as an orange toe or two.

Another poke and it jumps showing off its incredible speed, flexibility and colors.

One more scare with the lens of my camera and the little fellow makes the daring decision to jump from the second floor onto a huge hanging leaf but he misses the leaf and splats onto the ground.

He survives the landing and hops back into the jungle.

I think he's done this before.

Dark and Stormy

We just survived our first tropical storm.... barely! The storm was in fact the worst anybody can remember. The amount of rain that fell out of the sky over the period of 9 days was more than fell in 6 weeks of rain 13 years ago. Neither Brendan nor I had ever seen anything like it. Buckets, just buckets! Sheets of rain so thick you could not see across the street.

A few days before the rain started we were woken up from our jungle slumbers to a terrifyingly swaying bed. It took a moment to realize what was happening, earthquake! Being from Washington DC and Vermont this is not a sensation either of us are accustomed to and it is certainly shocking. What does one do when the earth is moving beneath them, threatening to take down your house with you in it? It was too late to make any decisions when the rumble stopped leaving us both too excited to fall back asleep. It turns out the earthquake was a 6.2 with it’s center in David, Panama which is a good distance away from us. So for us it was only the aftershock, poor David was pretty bad off.

A couple days later while serving breakfast to the southern invasion (an entertaining group from Atlanta filled up the bungalows for one night after making it to the finish line of an insane mountain bike race that ended near us) we heard a loud crash. We assumed it was the neighbors who had been cutting down some trees the other day. We forgot about it until I walked dawn the path towards our house and was completely shocked seeing one of the largest trees on our property had ripped out of the earth leaving a massive hole where the roots had once taken hold. Lucky for us there was no human or house near it. The day was strangely crisp and clear yet gusty and there was definitely something brewing. That evening was the last bit of sunshine we would see for 8 days.

The rain started that night and it was to create disasters this part of Costa Rica hasn’t seen in years. Tierra de Sueños faired very well. There were some moments we got nervous watching our gutters turn into rivers overflowing the paths and rushing under some of the bungalows an inch away from the floorboards. Thankfully the bungalows were built on stilts as was our house. We watched our gutters flow out into our neighbors property who were totally flooded. The road was flooded with rivers coming up over bridges preventing any crossing. The ocean rose faster than anybody could believe and soon took out trees, flooded houses and dragged out what once was vast stretches of sandy beaches. On the fourth day of rain, the news traveled to us that a major bridge entering Puerto Viejo connecting us to the rest of the world was flipped on it’s side. There was a mad rush to grocery stores to collect supplies, nobody new when we would get support down here. We were expecting friends that night and had no idea if they would be able to cross. They did eventually show up after sitting in a bus with water up to the wheel well and an indecisive driver. They crossed the sketchy bridge by foot and made it to us to celebrate their honeymoon in the worst torrential rainstorm in Costa Rica’s history.

By day 6, Brendan’s family had arrived to Costa Rica to celebrate Thanksgiving with us and ended up sitting at a road stop half way between here and San Jose trying to figure out if they could get to us. The flooding was growing worse by the minute and landslides were preventing cars from passing on the main highway between San Jose and Puerto Viejo. They managed to find a rustic lodge whose owner, Cheeto, enjoyed wrestling a massive crocodile in his spare time and waited out the rain there until the morning when it was declared safe to cross.

The worse seems to be over and although we stayed relatively high and dry, many people in this area did not. Indigenous communities in the Sixiola valley experienced severe damage. We read that 4,000 people lost their homes last week and some areas are still completely flooded. If anybody is interested in helping these communities you can go to greencoast.org for information. We have been donating canned goods but I know they are accepting donations as well.

Amazingly, the coast is on its way to a speedy recovery. Yesterday the sun was shining and the water had retreated significantly. There is a temporary bridge allowing people in and out of the area and now more than ever we need tourism to return and help restore the flow of life in this little piece of paradise.

Nature showed us her strength and power yet again. We have a lot to be thankful for this thanksgiving.

Playa Chiquita's clutch man

On Monday we published the Pedro blog. Now it is Wednesday and two comments that were made are even more relevant:


"If Pedro tells you you’re getting a shipment of wood in September only he knows when you’ll actually get it."

Yesterday Pedro brought the wood that we've been waiting for since June. Actually, he brought half of it, but it seems the other half should arrive soon.



"If you decide not to listen to Pedro as much because you can’t be sure what he really knows you will find that Pedro is usually right and you should just listen to him."

Pedro told us in April that the new sign post we put on the road hangs out too far, that someone with a truck will surely smash into it while trying to avoid one of the monster pot holes. We didn't listen to him, but we should have. Yesterday someone, surely with a big truck, smashed into our sign post breaking it and the sign in two. Luckily Pedro was here and the damage was repairable. The sign post is back up, this time not so far into the road. It has a crack in it and a rope anchoring it so it's more Tico-style than it was, but it's up. Today we will hopefully get the sign back together as well.

Also, please note a comment on Monday's blog by a faithful blog viewer: "If Pedro and Chuck Norris meet on a hot summer day,THAT will definitely be the battle of the century :P"

Right you are, Enieda. Right you are.

Pedraso

While these pictures of Pedro may be worth a thousand words, that would only help to break the surface on what he means to Tierra de Sueños. He’s primarily our gardner, also our general fix-it man, the first person we call when we’re in a jam, a fountain of ideas on how to improve our place, occasionally our mechanic or butcher and the source of a few headaches. We met him when we came to look at Tierra de Sueños for the first time. He showed us around pointing out all the different fruit trees, admiring the handywork and quality wood of the bungalows and showing us the property lines. Without his enthusiasm we may not have embarked on this project and there’s no telling where we’d be now without his help along the way.

It’s hard to sum Pedro up, so here are some thoughts, accomplishments.


At first glance we admired and respected his outfit- a mesh tank top, shorts, rubber boots and a baseball hat. It turns out that this is his uniform and it’s unique to him.

Pedro knows a bit about everything and if he doesn’t know he will just give you an answer anyways.

If you decide not to listen to Pedro as much because you can’t be sure what he really knows you will find that Pedro is usually right and you should just listen to him.

It took Pedro 20 minutes to dig up our old sign post that was cemented into the ground after Larry, Jack (Angie’s dad and brother) and I had spent a good hour and a half at it with no luck.

If Pedro tells you he’s going to bring you half of his pig in a wheelberrow on a Tuesday, you’re getting half of a pig in a wheelberrow on Tuesday.

If Pedro tells you you’re getting a shipment of wood in September only he knows when you’ll actually get it.

Pedro loves most plants and animals. He is often stunned by the beauty of a flower and has to stop, stare and make baby noises at it. Women of all generations, shapes and colors have the same effect on him.

Pedro’s idea of a compliment is telling women they’re fat, which he tells Angie whenever she stays around long enough to hear it.

If Pedro challenges you on your tree climbing ability it’s not because he’s talking trash, it’s because he can climb better than you.

Pedro can always find a sloth in the trees.

Pedro’s favorite dish is pollo en salsa (chicken in sauce) with patacones (fried plaintain chips), which is convenient because in Costa Rica, that’s what’s for dinner.

If your car battery’s low Pedro will be happy to tow you behind him while you pop into gear. If this doesn’t work he’ll switch his battery with yours, start the car, take his battery out while your car is running and put yours back in. When you get back from wherever you were going you may have to tow him while he pops into gear because you drained his battery getting your car started and then drove off.

If you have a flat tire Pedro will drive into town and fix it long after work is over.

Pedro's son, Dennis, has not yet earned the right to a mesh tank top, but he's got the boots and he doesn't have to wear pants.

6 Month Recap

Well folks, we just passed the 6 month mark of our time here at Tierra de Suenos! Wow! Half a year come and gone and what a whirlwind it has been! We survived Samana Santa (the busiest week in Latin America), May (the most painfully slow month), a broken water pump and washing machine, termites, mold, stained sheets, broken bikes (8 of them), dysfunctional neighbors, wonderful neighbors, and most importantly, each other!

We have entertained, and more often been entertained by, an impressive number of friends and family. The entire Boymer crew showed up just in time to help us butcher half a pig we bought from our gardener. Cheri, from Seattle, has yet to recover. My brother jack was here on termite duty for 6 weeks. Carol and Marty came from Vermont to shed some light on composting and frog catching, Laura DiCicco came and her brother, Peter, shortly followed with Erin Hurley. We spent most evenings keeping the neighborhood awake with loud renditions of Mr. Big’s “I’m the one who wants to be with you." Katie and Nona came all the way from London, and Chuck Esteves helped design a grill that is still sitting unfinished on our patio. Pete Mesavage came to celebrate the arrival of John Hurley, our partner, who stayed to hold down the fort while we went to a wedding back in the States. Jonny Johnston and his new wife Natalie came to visit us from Oklahoma, we hadn’t seen him since our Sophmore year in college. Ethan and Ashley stayed for a while, Brendan hadn’t seen him since his abroad year in Spain. Drew Gardiner taught me and his girlfriend, Cris, how to play Bridge, I'm still trying to figure that one out. Owen McCreight got really sunburned trying to surf, and John Heltman is here right now hiking in Cahuita with some new friends, Ursula, Kathy and Sachen. Tonight Sachen is cooking us a Hindu feast!

If I missed anybody, please forgive me. Each one of our friends and family members has helped shape this last 6 months, bringing encouragement, support and great fun. It appears we chose a good spot for getting visitors! The line-up is already looking good for September and October.

We initially began thinking about running a guesthouse because we wanted find a way to settle down yet continue to have an international experience, spending time with people from all over the world. We can honestly say that in the last 6 months this was accomplished. We have hosted guests from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, States from east, south, north and west, Canada, Scandinavia, England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, China, Philippines, Israel, the list goes on! It is an incredible experience to have a place where people from all different backgrounds and cultures can unite and celebrate our differences and similarities. Our lively mornings are a time of conversation and most often laughter. After all, everybody is on vacation!

So, I’d say the first 6 months of our attempt to run an international B&B have been a success. We finally met with an accountant, Marco Hamm, the only one available in the area, who carefully wrote all our important information on a scrap piece of paper and gently placed it in his wallet. Needless to say we are still getting used to the way it works down here and although at times frustrating, all it takes is some good Caribbean food, a pina colada and dancing to a local calypso band to remind us why we’re here. We are still trying to figure out how to eat all the various fruits on our property and the best marketing scheme to get people to come, but that, after all, is the fun of it.