Bars, Beaches and Borders closed but we're still here! Coronavirus in Costa Rica.
Hey there! And thank you to everyone who has been in touch checking in on us. Covid-19 has changed everything so much over the past couple of months for just about everyone... no longer are we alone in our family isolation, you all have joined us, though for a better reason than "the car is still at the mechanic and the only bus out of "town" is at 5.30am!". We are absolutely fine, in the scheme of things, and hope that all you guys are as well.
On Friday 6th March at 8.40pm we were all laying on our big bed at Finca Fruition - the place we stayed for 6 weeks. Iris was asleep and all of a sudden everything began to shake, the ground moved and it felt like a great big giant was rattling the house. It stopped, and then it started again. I was scared because I didn't know what to do. We were living in a clapboard house halfway down a very steep hill. I had a deadweight child on me and it was pitch black outside in the jungle. Then it was over. Tom thought it was funny. I did not!
It turned out there had been a 5.4 magnitude earthquake about an hour away from where we were near a town called Buenas Aires. Our friend Sarah in San Francisco said they "tend to celebrate little ones" there. Another new normal. The informations said that there are quakes all the time, but you just don't feel them. The news is that advice is no longer that you stand in a doorway. You're supposed to get outside and clear, or under something sturdy like a bed or a sturdy table. In truth I was probably more scared about getting under the bed - it was a great high bed, but I didn't want to hang out with whatever was under there.
When we searched the news we found out the other headline from that day was that CR had had its first confirmed case of Covid-19. Not surprisingly, from an American tourist as there are so many tourists here. We'd been following things pretty closely as we'd a lot of time to read the newspaper (= the Guardian App!) and maybe because we were looking at the international edition we'd seen quite a lot of stories about it.
Costa Rica has about 5 million residents, millions of tourists every year, including 220 cruise ship visits, and lots of people like us - people on tourist visas who renew their visas every 90 days by going in and out of Panama or Nicaragua. About 8% of the official economy is based on tourism, but this number is much higher than this. There is a national health service for residents and hospitals in the central plateau north/west region are thought well of. In the rural areas there is less of everything and the standards aren't as high. (This is a "third world" country after all - a country where the majority of people live below the poverty line).
So from a positive point of view, this is a stable country with good telecommunications, a strong central government, a national health service and a progressive leader. Also, outside the million plus people who live in the central plateau, most people live quite rurally.
A week later, the first thing to affect us directly was when Panama shut its borders, as that's where we were due to re-up our tourist visas. This happened about the same time as we got a slew of Airbnb cancellations - we'd been doing progressively well and our April bookings had been our highest by far. This was whilst we were stuck on the coast for two days after a "quick trip to the beach because we've got our car back after 3 weeks at the mechanic's" turned into a flat tyre, an overheating engine, closed garages, a new mechanic, no way to hire a car, a mercy call to a lovely couple we'd met in a phone shop and missing both a planned overnight in the mountains and checking out of our Airbnb on time/the right day.
24 hours after all that we're on Monday night and having manically cleaned and packed, but not shopped (despite a rumour the supermarkets were going to shut*) we limped into Quizarrá - where we were due to house-sit for 3 months - in a tow truck, because the accelerator had stopped working on the main road halfway there, to find out that the borders in CR were being shut at midnight two days later (on the Weds night). Lis and Warren, the couple we were house-sitting for, had a flight at 10pm and weren't sure if they were going to get out of the country. Everything suddenly seemed not much fun and too hard work and should we leave? and what would happen if...
* * * *
*This isn't as bonkers as it sounds - lots of locals we've met in this region don't really shop - they grow a lot of their own food and trade locally.
I am bound to say that, this being Costa Rica, the place we got a flat tyre had a random beautiful waterfall at the side of the road (it was in the mountains in the middle of nowhere) where Iris and I went for a dip whilst the people who were randomly there and who randomly had the same car as us, lent us a spare tyre and put it on, whilst Tom watched! The new friends, Rachel & Steve, (from Brum/Darlington with a gorgeous 18 month old called Hector) turned out to own a stupendous luxury villa honeymoon estate, which they had bought after being on the TV show "Place in the Sun" and came and picked us up and took us there, after giving us the number of a mechanic who came by with his wife on the way back from their day out and organised a tow-truck no problem. The car hire guy stayed an hour after his work was supposed to finish trying to help us out and held a car for us even though we didn't take it. The place we were stranded - Uvita - is genuinely the most beautiful place I've ever been and the second night we stayed in a very basic cabin 100 metres from the marine park/beach where there were monkeys in the trees and we got to watch the sunset on the beach. Oh, and our Airbnb guy said if we needed to stay an extra couple of days that was fine and he wouldn't charge us so... yes, mitigated stress!
What happened next was that we woke up refreshed in the beautiful countryside/rainforest, surrounded by the most amazing birdlife - we're in the Alexander Skutch biological corridor, Alexander Skutch was the guy who co-wrote the original amazing bird bible here, and everything looked not that bad. It was AMAZING to be away from the constant drone of cicadas, it is very peaceful. (Maybe what I thought were cicadas before I came here were just crickets or something - that noise is pleasant. Cicadas, when they are in popping out of their skin mode, are *unbelievably* loud, like you can't hear each other speak loud - but this is for another blog-post).
And Lis and Warren got their flight and a family trapped in Sheffield have rented our house for a month, for not as much as we were banking on, but a lot more than a big fat zero, everyone's visas got extended through to the middle of May, and where we are is BEAUTIFUL. It's an old farm, now largely rewilded. About 125 acres; the same sort of size as Brockwell Park. We don't have a lido, but we do have a beautiful river running through the land, various ages of rainforest, including some which is the last of its kind in Costa Rica, pasture, fruit trees, ornamental gardens, a veg garden and some lovely neighbours who manage the farm land. Our job is to look after the house and gardens and the three doggies - Charco, Pinto & Fiera - and to keep an eye on two wild horses - Tormenta and Centella. And so this is our life until June.
Meanwhile, the restrictions here are getting stricter, but there still isn't lock-down. We've put ourselves in lock-down anyway - our neighbour/farm manager has leukaemia and is on chemo - quite aside from our own concerns about ending up with respiratory problems 4 hours from the Covid treatment centre. The curve here is not steep, which could be explained by the sun, or the lack of air pollution, or the lack of old men, or overweight people (definitely not this one!!!) or black and Asian people, or more realistically that it is super rural here and the markets have all been shut. Even though people aren't great at social distancing they are trying, and people aren't socialising, but realistically there are not 3 cases in our local area (this is same as it has been for a couple of weeks) or 1/2/3 cases in a whole load of other rural places, it's more likely that those are the ones that got up north and got tested. For the first few weeks the capacity was 150 tests a day, now it's 600 a day or something. We'll see.
Probably the two biggest risks for Costa Rica and Covid-19 are firstly, the massive pressure the government will be under to reopen the borders from an economic point of view as financial pressures tighten and they can't support people centrally as time goes on (the current bail out package is for the 350k most needy). They don't have the BoE resources of the UK and some people will already be feeling the financial pressure (for many in rural communities like this, life probably isn't really that different though). There will be a lot of pressure from the right I imagine.
The second big risk is from Nicaragua. As I said already, Panama to the South shut their borders before CR did, CR shut borders within a week of that (this is to all non-residents) and then went even further and said if non-native national residents/anyone going through the visa process left the country over Easter they would not be allowed back in. But on the northern border it's a WHOLE other ball game. There are already hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans in CR who've come here over the past couple of years running away from the civil war/Daniel Ortega's regime. Nicaragua has not only NOT shut its border but it has come down hard on anyone who has suggested that Covid-19 is worse than seasonal flu and has insisted all the population get out and party for Easter. The border is porous as hell of course, so...I'm betting they're wishing here that they *were* an Island!! (Loads of people think CR is an island).
Meanwhile, what flights there were last time I looked, were about £3k each (one way) or took 4 days, so yeah. We're going to stay here for now. We'll see what happens. We're just trying to be fit and healthy to be able to weather it when we get it, as most of us probably will at some point.
Sorry we haven't posted much. We're hoping to remedy that now we're more settled and have been making loads of notes and taking gazillions of photographs, so get ready to be bombarded by nature (mostly). We miss everyone loads of course and it's so lovely to hear from people. We're 7 hours behind the UK if you're wanting to invite either of us to a house party :) Stay strong, stay safe, lots of love, Sarah and Tom & Iris of course xxx
On Friday 6th March at 8.40pm we were all laying on our big bed at Finca Fruition - the place we stayed for 6 weeks. Iris was asleep and all of a sudden everything began to shake, the ground moved and it felt like a great big giant was rattling the house. It stopped, and then it started again. I was scared because I didn't know what to do. We were living in a clapboard house halfway down a very steep hill. I had a deadweight child on me and it was pitch black outside in the jungle. Then it was over. Tom thought it was funny. I did not!
When we searched the news we found out the other headline from that day was that CR had had its first confirmed case of Covid-19. Not surprisingly, from an American tourist as there are so many tourists here. We'd been following things pretty closely as we'd a lot of time to read the newspaper (= the Guardian App!) and maybe because we were looking at the international edition we'd seen quite a lot of stories about it.
Costa Rica has about 5 million residents, millions of tourists every year, including 220 cruise ship visits, and lots of people like us - people on tourist visas who renew their visas every 90 days by going in and out of Panama or Nicaragua. About 8% of the official economy is based on tourism, but this number is much higher than this. There is a national health service for residents and hospitals in the central plateau north/west region are thought well of. In the rural areas there is less of everything and the standards aren't as high. (This is a "third world" country after all - a country where the majority of people live below the poverty line).
So from a positive point of view, this is a stable country with good telecommunications, a strong central government, a national health service and a progressive leader. Also, outside the million plus people who live in the central plateau, most people live quite rurally.
A week later, the first thing to affect us directly was when Panama shut its borders, as that's where we were due to re-up our tourist visas. This happened about the same time as we got a slew of Airbnb cancellations - we'd been doing progressively well and our April bookings had been our highest by far. This was whilst we were stuck on the coast for two days after a "quick trip to the beach because we've got our car back after 3 weeks at the mechanic's" turned into a flat tyre, an overheating engine, closed garages, a new mechanic, no way to hire a car, a mercy call to a lovely couple we'd met in a phone shop and missing both a planned overnight in the mountains and checking out of our Airbnb on time/the right day.
* * * *
*This isn't as bonkers as it sounds - lots of locals we've met in this region don't really shop - they grow a lot of their own food and trade locally.
What happened next was that we woke up refreshed in the beautiful countryside/rainforest, surrounded by the most amazing birdlife - we're in the Alexander Skutch biological corridor, Alexander Skutch was the guy who co-wrote the original amazing bird bible here, and everything looked not that bad. It was AMAZING to be away from the constant drone of cicadas, it is very peaceful. (Maybe what I thought were cicadas before I came here were just crickets or something - that noise is pleasant. Cicadas, when they are in popping out of their skin mode, are *unbelievably* loud, like you can't hear each other speak loud - but this is for another blog-post).
And Lis and Warren got their flight and a family trapped in Sheffield have rented our house for a month, for not as much as we were banking on, but a lot more than a big fat zero, everyone's visas got extended through to the middle of May, and where we are is BEAUTIFUL. It's an old farm, now largely rewilded. About 125 acres; the same sort of size as Brockwell Park. We don't have a lido, but we do have a beautiful river running through the land, various ages of rainforest, including some which is the last of its kind in Costa Rica, pasture, fruit trees, ornamental gardens, a veg garden and some lovely neighbours who manage the farm land. Our job is to look after the house and gardens and the three doggies - Charco, Pinto & Fiera - and to keep an eye on two wild horses - Tormenta and Centella. And so this is our life until June.
Probably the two biggest risks for Costa Rica and Covid-19 are firstly, the massive pressure the government will be under to reopen the borders from an economic point of view as financial pressures tighten and they can't support people centrally as time goes on (the current bail out package is for the 350k most needy). They don't have the BoE resources of the UK and some people will already be feeling the financial pressure (for many in rural communities like this, life probably isn't really that different though). There will be a lot of pressure from the right I imagine.
The second big risk is from Nicaragua. As I said already, Panama to the South shut their borders before CR did, CR shut borders within a week of that (this is to all non-residents) and then went even further and said if non-native national residents/anyone going through the visa process left the country over Easter they would not be allowed back in. But on the northern border it's a WHOLE other ball game. There are already hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans in CR who've come here over the past couple of years running away from the civil war/Daniel Ortega's regime. Nicaragua has not only NOT shut its border but it has come down hard on anyone who has suggested that Covid-19 is worse than seasonal flu and has insisted all the population get out and party for Easter. The border is porous as hell of course, so...I'm betting they're wishing here that they *were* an Island!! (Loads of people think CR is an island).
Meanwhile, what flights there were last time I looked, were about £3k each (one way) or took 4 days, so yeah. We're going to stay here for now. We'll see what happens. We're just trying to be fit and healthy to be able to weather it when we get it, as most of us probably will at some point.
Sorry we haven't posted much. We're hoping to remedy that now we're more settled and have been making loads of notes and taking gazillions of photographs, so get ready to be bombarded by nature (mostly). We miss everyone loads of course and it's so lovely to hear from people. We're 7 hours behind the UK if you're wanting to invite either of us to a house party :) Stay strong, stay safe, lots of love, Sarah and Tom & Iris of course xxx
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