Musings

This post is a sort of addendum to others I have already done: nothing new, but expansion of ideas I've already covered, while I try to square away things in my head. Humans use mental short-cuts called heuristics to apprehend the world and break it into managable chunks, if only so that they have time to do something useful with their lives, rather than spending it just sitting and thinking. When these shortcuts are discovered to be...insufficiently complex, then you either live with wrong answers, or walk around in confusion until you retool how you interpret what you're looking at.

Hence my less than clear conclusions of the past few days.

Today Geoff's friend Ed very generously drove us around a bit, and in doing so gave me a much wider picture of the area around Playa del Coco, and things that are going on here.He took us into the Four Seasons Resort near here - at least as far in as they would allow no-account people like us, which was the first part of the driveway - and we could see out and down onto Playa Panama, and the reason for the exclusive nature of the place was obvious. The view was stupendous, and were a big pile of money no object, I could easily stay here for that sight alone. The acre of grass beside the drive was as perfect as any golf green I have ever seen, and there was a curving wall of transplanted palm trees four deep and forty feet high by the gates. But the countryside around the resort was semi-open, semi-arid and agricultural. We had seen farms, fields of sugarcane, pastures with stringy, lop-eared brahmas, colourful, expensive houses set into the hills, and a long way to the east, rising up into the clouds, a blue-green mountain. The roads were good, if winding and hilly at times. Everywhere there were signs of construction, lots for sale, or ads for resorts existing or planned.There was even a huge billboard stating that the property around it was NOT for sale, with the unstated sub-text to stop bugging the owner.

(Picture herein is of new development up the hill from Geoff's place at Playa del Coco.)

All of these are heuristic altering things, or at least capable of affecting the small heuristic subset that I have been using to deal with this place. There is no regulation of real estate here. An owner can list his property for a price, and someone else can come along, list the same property for more, "sell" it and pay the owner his original price and pocket the difference. Or "sell" something to which he has no title. If the buyer is a gringo, so much the better, because it is well known that they have such deep pockets that they will never miss it; it's not theft as much as the aquisition of unwanted trifles. Perhaps the owner of the land and the sign was tired of people showing up thinking they owned his field.

There is so much going on here that people not working don't want a job, and the future seems to offer no end of things for locals to do to make money. It is evident that a lot of capital is being invested in Coco and Hermosa, in infrastructure as well as real estate. There are large towers going up, and talk of famous names and big money buying up worthless-looking lots, knocking everything down and building villas always somewhere nearby, even if no one knows for sure.

Today's drive seemed to remove the last impression I had that Costa Ricans are being swept along by forces beyond their control. At whatever level of capability they possess, they seem to doing just fine, and prospering. There is far less bureaucracy here, and economic niches are filled as fast as they appear, and happily abandoned when they no longer work.