The Village i am going to try and find a house in

Here is a couple of pictures of the Village called Palme Sur where my wife and I have visited several times and commented how beautiful it is and how nice and quiet and peaceful and relaxed, as you can see the remnants of the United Fruit Company are still here to be seen and the houses they left behind are what we may buy,

we are going to rent to start with and find the best place and the best prices , I even had a thought of buying all the houses and starting an Eco village for like minded expats from around the world, you would of course need an external income, no jobs to be had here unless you want to nanny for me and cultivate bananas for me also, the houses are in a typical condo style around a park area and with huge gardens and well away from any main road, but walking distance from the airport, that is funny isnt it, the main highway to San Jose is maybe 5 Km away and the road is very good and 3 hours into downtown or the main Airport, so very nicely situated, the school is in the park and shops also, but very limited but Golfito the main city is 1 hour south and the beaches are only 15 minutes away up the Pacific coast.

Sadomasochism, Perversion and Airline Seating

I want to know what sort of perverted sadomasochistic midget works for the airplane seat manufacturers. He must have some sick sort of mind to create suck unbelievably uncomfortable seats. He has to have no spine and be shorter than 4 foot tall and possibly no legs even. I don’t think I am the only person to wonder why the seats of so f*^king horrible. There is a total lack of lumbar support so within 20 minutes my back is aching, the seat cushion I checked today is less than 2 inches thick so my ass goes numb as I feel the metal supports, which ever way I try and sit my ass goes numb and my back aches, if I sit totally upright my shoulders hit the head supports my ass hits the metal support at the bottom of the seat and I am leaning back in a very awkward position. How can they come up with a design that tortures the paying customer so badly. I think there is a tryst of sexual deviants working for the seat manufacturers and the plane makers. It has to be as bad as a medieval mutual ass thrashing competition, and all trying to outdo each other for the most painful design. Perhaps we should try suing the makers for permanent damage to the back. Who gives a damn about whether the seat reclines 10 degrees, it only makes the seat more uncomfortable. I just want a seat that is comfortable in the upright position. I don’t need an individual ashtray, we cannot smoke anyway. I want a cushion that is soft and deep, so my ass doesn’t go numb after 10 minutes if I sit upright. I want a headrest that is for the average 6 foot tall guy, not a 4 foot midget, I want to be able to have an armrest that is wider than 2 inch and has padding so if I go to sleep my arms are not numb when I awake, or that I have to wrestle with the old fart sat next to me to secure a spot for my elbow, why do they do this, come on, we have put men on the moon for Gawds sake, it cannot be that difficult. Jeez they just don’t listen, I have complained on every airline about the shitty seating for the last 6 years and I haven’t had so much as a kiss my ass reply, only when everyone who fly’s regularly complains every time they fly will they do something about it, I think an airline who says they have put leather armchairs for everyone in the planes will take the business of every other airline in town. They would get my business for sure. So if anyone knows that midget who works for the seat manufacturers kick his ass as hard as you can and tell that it was sent from Swedish Chef Dave.

I am Going to Live on the Beach and Then Folks Will Come

I have had a complete change of attitude to living in the south of the country since I last wrote about living in the country, one main reason was the fact that I could buy a house for $14,000 and it was a house built for the American fruit company so the houses are designed like an American house of the 60’s , huge and very high quality and right next door to the Airport. The American fruit company set up in the south of Costa Rica during the late 40’s, the built a huge banana plantation and with it the whole infrastructure, steam railways to the nearest big port and that was Golfito, also all the housing for the American managers and schools and clubhouses and gold courses, this was all very nice for about 40 years until the unionisation of the workers, they thought they could force the company to pay lots of money for wages and other things, so they did what any self respecting company would do, they just shut shop and closed everything down putting thousands of folks out of work and the banana plantations to this day are abandoned and nothing at all is functioning and the housing has not had much in the way of attention but the quality is fantastic and the houses are in a really nice condo style with an old clubhouse that is empty, it is only 20 minutes from some fantastic beaches, and 5 minutes from the local Airport which I can use to get to the Capitol, San Jose. We have a local school only 400 yards away and a small town about 15 minutes away where my sister in law lives. Why am I really wanting to move, well basically it means I can just start living a more outdoor life and near the beach and start riding my bike more, here in San Jose it is easy to get killed by a truck and they even have bike jacking, yes I did say that bike jacking. You can be riding along and suddenly a jeep can pull along side and an armed man tells you to get off and then steals your bike, sometimes shooting you for fun, so I tend not to ride here as it is so goddam busy on the roads. So I can ride my bike to the beaches, learn to surf and build an outdoor barbecue area and spend more time outside rather than inside, here it is just like being in the UK, it rains a lot and I drive everywhere, this is not what I wanted, so I am going to see if I can sleep in the tropical areas and if necessary I will get A/C for the bedroom. Jenny has a university colleague who lives in one of the America condo houses and says he pays $120 a month rent, and there are many of the houses for sale as there are basically no jobs anymore there. So I can pick up a house for next to nothing and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Pictures From the Mad Trip Along the Remote Coast

Cow Wrestling and Beach Hunting

Holidays in Costa Rica are nothing but an adventure in the true sense. As in all our holidays we try and go to places that we haven’t seen before and this time we went to what we thought was a very busy part of the country. The northern pacific coastal region called Guanacaste. It is about 5 hours from the capital but close to the charter airport of Liberia. We travelled over a brand new bridge built by the Taiwanese government, imaginatively called the Taiwanese bridge. We then travelled over to the coast and to a little town called samara and expected it to be busy and with plenty of hotels but we found a muddy street of about 3 bars and 2 hotels that were all but empty. There were the obligatory American students but it was basically a ghost town. We found a great little hotel with fantastic gardens and a pool all for $55 a night including a light breakfast. It was so nicely constructed that I took many pictures. We travelled south along the coast and were trying to make our way to the southern beaches that were shown on our tourist map, we found our roads blocked by flooded fords and washed away roads and we had to travel on mountain dirt roads that resembled farm tracks. Huge washed away sections of road and landslides got us very worried and with the compass we had we were driving in the wrong direction, after 3 hours we couldn’t see the coast and felt lost. We stopped a passing motorist and he told us we had missed our turn off 5 miles back and we should follow him to the town, it was horrible driving over these broken dirt roads but we felt like adventurers. We arrived at our town of destination and found 1 grocery store and 1 house, this was getting very remote , we pressed ahead to the beach areas and the roads felt a little better and we got to the beach area and found nothing what so ever other than a few poor houses, no shops or hotels or even cabins for rent, this was turning into a nightmare as we had 50 miles to drive back to our nearest town, but thought there must be a hotel for us, so we continued, we asked for directions and the locals looked at us like deranged aliens, “WHAT” was the reply, “No you cannot drive there at this time of year, all the rivers are full and the fords unpassable, so we took directions to the nearest hotel and after 10 miles of very broken roads we ended up at a river ford that was 30 meters across and looked 2 meters deep, this was insane and the day was getting on, we had to back up and go back to where we started and ask again. We tried a different route and finally got to the beach area and found a single hotel that had a name tag ‘the boutique hotel’, now that frightened me to start with as it spells expensive in my head. We went inside and it looked very nice in the lounge and dining room area, we asked to have a look in the rooms and the bedrooms were miniscule with only just enough room to get around the bed, I was shocked and when I asked the price, the receptionist replied ‘that is $100 plus taxes’, basically $125 for one night, I laughed out loud and didn’t even bother trying to bargain, we were the only people there in low season and they were asking a stupid price, screw them I thought and walked away as the day was drawing to a close. We had another 50 miles to drive mostly in the dark and over horrible broken roads and the car was starting to make a nasty clanking noise as it hit any bump, we drove through fords that splashed over the bonnet and I was getting a little worried as we didn’t have much gas left either and the roads were as bad as anything I have ever driven over. We travelled on and on and the road finally started getting wider and not as broken and we managed to get into 3rd gear, woohoo, even a few houses and 4 street lights as we got within 10 miles of the town we were heading for. It was hard nerve wracking driving and not for the faint hearted and we were utterly disappointed with the place being so undeveloped and remote. We got to town and found the only gas station within 50 miles and a place to eat. We asked for the local hotels and were told there were only 2 and 20 miles away. We arrived at the hotel at 10 pm and it was deserted amongst abandoned shops and businesses. We were welcomed by the receptionist and given a room, totally deserted. It felt like a ghost town. We walked around the next morning and found the whole area in a total economic downward spiral. We saw a condominium with a for sale sign and I went to have look around. There was 1 house only built and it looked old and run down and the house was occupied by a nice old Italian with a very young Costa Rican wife. The house was very nicely built but so exposed and he was complaining the local thieves were busy all the time and I got the impression that he had been the victim many times. The garage was occupied by some small bats that were as interested in me as I was in them. We caught the local ferry back from the peninsular to the main port town on the west coast. Punta Areans is a nasty port town with lots of abandoned buildings, again looking very run down. We travelled out of town to a tiny beach village and asked in the bar for any rooms and were pointed to a French guys house where he rented rooms and for $30 a night he gave us a huge room with on-suite bathroom and all very nicely constructed in tropical hard woods including the floors. The gardens were so very tropical with coconuts and palms and many tropical flowers and fruits. While we walked around we found bats hiding under the coconut palm leaves and many night herons in the trees behind the house that sounded like ducks quacking. The French guy was crazy about cooking food and convinced us to have all his food, we gave in and he cooked Paella the first night and the huge mountain of seafood he used was beyond belief, it was the finest food I have eaten in a long time and the next night he cooked Chicken Chasseur and again in a huge quantity leaving me stuffed to the brim. The last day we had decided to go for a walk over the hill to the side of the house across a small river and through some fields as I wanted to see what birds were in the fields. We tried to find a path and after climbing over barbed wire and wading through mud and cow shit several inches deep we found ourselves on the wrong side of a muddy creek and after going back over the wire and through more mud and shit we encountered a huge herd of mangy looking cattle. They didn’t move as we approached and just stood and looked, Jenny wasn’t happy at all and asked me to leave them as they looked mean, I wasn’t afraid as I am a lunatic, and as I got closer 1 very mean looking steer with a small calf started scraping the ground like a torro in a bullring, this had Jenny running the other way shouting warnings, I was laughing at her and again kept going forward, I glanced back and saw Jenny was vaulting the fence very fast and as I turned round the cow charged and I had no chance to run, so I stood my ground and as the cow lowered its head to drive some imaginary horns into my belly I punched it hard on the nose and held it as hard as I could at a distance. The punch did the trick it spun away back to its calf, this of course also had the desired effect on me, I was feeling scared as there was about 200 of them and I cannot run as fast as I used to, so I backed away and realised that it was futile to try and carry on with this walk, I walked back through the shite and mud and tried to walk on water by jumping through the water but my feet got wet anyway. My heart was still pounding 5 minutes later as we were walking along the river back to the hotel and I was laughing about my cow wrestling adventure but it was a crazy thing to have attempted. As we walked along the river I saw a flock of pink birds feeding in the field we had just left and I used my binoculars to see they were Roseate spoonbills and some White Ibises and one huge wood stork, so all was not lost, three new species for me and a lesson in bull wrestling. The hotel was a fantastic place and so perfectly quiet and so close to nature and even the display of Fireflies at night were enchanting to me. So one more crazy adventure in Costa Rica and one more close shave with disaster.

Life in Costa Rica

Everybody I know thinks I live on the coast, sunbathing and drinking beer, now as nice a thought that is it isn’t very practical as it is very hot and humid on both coasts and life is too primitive without most facilities of a civilisation. I actually live in the capitol of Costa Rica, San Jose along with 2 million others. Here we have everything a normal city of this size would hold and it is much more practical also. It sits at an altitude of about 4000 feet so is much fresher and cooler than the coasts and as everyone who reads my Blog, sleep is something I treasure as I suffer very badly with sleep deprivations if I don’t have the right circumstances. So I live in the suburbs of San Jose up one of the mountains of the central valley and it has a climate similar to England on a summer’s day.
We have 2 seasons here, the rainy season and the less rainy season as it’s the tropics and a very green country and the rain is what keeps it green. San Jose has a terrible rush hour problem and that was caused by the traffic explosion over the last 20 years and most of the roads are small and houses dotted along the side of all of them and it’s like driving through small villages all along all the major routes into the central region. They still have the old railroad system intact with rails running along the roads and even the old railway station complete with rusting steam engines. The tried restoring part of it as a mass transport system in the late 80’s and the costs killed it plus the traffic on the roads was probably too heavy by then also, trains don’t stop that quick if something gets in its way. So I can go to the British Consulate and all the other consulates very easily 15 minutes tops and airport is only 45 minutes and Pacific coast id 2 hours and Caribbean is 3 hours and along nice and quiet roads very well paved and quite dangerous. All the drivers think God is looking after them and they drive like loonies and die when they fly off one of the huge ravines as you drive through the mountain ranges to get to either coast, they go up to 10,000 feet and are cold and cloudy and foggy and its nice to get some fresh air sometimes. I will tell all of you that the Caribbean coast is much more attractive for holidays and very quiet and maybe what the Mediterranean was like about 100 years ago. Small bars and small places to eat and very uncommercial. You can walk along the beach front and find no people and little cabins for $30 a night , no glass in the windows only wooden shutters, and an outdoor kitchen to cook in the glorious fresh hot humid air of the tropics. Around the cabins you will find sloths resting from their nightly forays into the local forest and huge Iguanas and small monkeys and deer if your lucky and other mammals like racoons and Agoutis (a long legged rodent), a huge amount of interesting birds and butterflies and moths and giant spiders. You can spend a whole week eating and drinking and living in a cabin and spend no more than $300, other than it would take most folks $1500 to get to Costa Rica in the first place for 2 people and then it is cheap, I once went white water rafting along a mighty river in the mountains on the way back from the beach and it was very nice and very spectacular and at $60 each I thought it was quite expensive but it did last 3 hours. Costa Rica has lots of benefits and is very cheap to live, I have no heating bills and local taxes for the house are about $50 a year. Fruit and vegetables are very cheap and so amazingly varied that there is too much choice, I only drink fresh fruit juices in the house as it is easier and cheaper to make than carton nasty juice. There are drawbacks to living here some things are very expensive like imported electronic goods and cars, as they are all heavily taxed. Overall this place is very nice and very relaxing and can be perfect if you find the perfect place to live.

Life in a Rush

Life started back in normal land with both feet running as soon as a landed, the car battery fell off and needed bolting back into place. The garden is in need of some machete work in the back. computers need updating and i have a horrible toothache that is going to be a nightmare to fix. lots of paperwork for expenses and timesheets, how is life meant to be, full of things to do or just tilling the fields to make a living as a poor land farmer, not sure who get the best deal out of that one, maybe going to the beach next week but wil let you know when all is settled with teeth and car and paperwork

Landing in Lima for 1 Night

Lima is a surprisingly large city and again today it took 45 minutes to drive across the city from the airport, it is the second biggest city built in a desert in the world, even though i had an argument with a peruvian that it was a desert as she said they grow everything, well you can if you give it water, but when you fly in there sint a blade of grass to be seen outside of a cultivated field.
but it is a very nice direct city centre, i have been told there are lots of very nice brothels to see, not likely, probably get mugged walking about at night.
1 thing i forgot to mention that i had rescued my first bat from the screens around the heat exchangers, it was luckily on the cool side so it didnt roast but i suspected it might die of hypothermia as it is mighty windy around those huge 10 foot fans. but as soon as i lifted it away from the screens it was desperate to escape and fly away but i wanted to release it away from the fans and not near the hawks as they would have eaten it for breakast.
I flew out on time and landed to a newer taxi than last time and shared a taxi with my new found Argentinian friend to the Damiel Hotel that has a jacuzzi in the living room and i found that a little strange
ah well life is such that i am just happy to have a beer with my lunch and watch some decent TV, they have cable and CNN and Discovery, woohoo life is good again

Quest for more LESBIAN AND GAY readership

Does the title offend you, I certainly hope not, I was introduced to a friend of a friend via e-mail and we move in the same oil industry circles and he had the most amazing idea straight off the top of his head about increasing readership. The phrase remains a little hazy but something to the effect if you had gay or lesbian in the title then you would be overrun with people checking out your site. Now this must have been going round my head all last night and today, how can I incorporate that into my Blogs without being gay or lesbian. So I did some checking how the main search engines work. I went to Technorati and typed into the search bar, GAY and LESBIAN and hey presto up popped Blogs with those words either in the title or in the body of the Blog, so I can actually get people to go to my site even if the are looking for porn or gay or lesbian sites if I put in the header GAY and LESBIAN haphazardly. So every Blog I do from now on will have as an attractant to my Blog the words GAY and LESBIAN liberally distributed about the Blog. So it isn’t important if you sometimes notice the word LESBIAN just lying about in a sentence for no reason, cluttering up the place and making it look and sound pretty silly. I don’t care as I want my Blog to be read by all genders. GAY, LESBIAN, Straight and transsexual even. Those words will be my motto from now on in my quest to achieve notoriety for the man who scatters his Blog with miscellaneous references to peoples sexual orientation. Does this make any sense, only if you have read the previous Blog about wanting more readership. I think I have the words GAY and LESBIAN dotted about enough in this short essay that should be entitled, my GAY and LESBIAN readership quest to be known by the GAY and LESBIAN community as a friend to the GAY and LESBIANS worldwide. How many times have I got the words GAY and LESBIAN written down, too many times to make any sense. I will let you know how it got on with increasing the readership.

Normal Service will resume in Costa RRRRRRRRIca

I am going to pack my stuff and head to the airport and get ready to go home to the wonderful (Rainy season though) Costa Rica
I will be posting from there as often as possible, but not daily, with some shots of the garden and any holidays i may take
Hasta Luego Mis Amiogos

Quote of the Day

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

Buddha

He knew all about Turbine installations

Quote of the Day

Up in the mornings the game

My Dad, every Morning for 23 years while I lived at home

Antipathy and Desire

Well I will be packing tonight and not worrying about the turbines one bit as tomorrow I am leaving, in fact I cannot concentrate on anything at all, I just want the next 24 hours to disappear, I am keeping my moth collection going nicely, I released a giant of a moth, it must have had a wingspan of at least 10 inches, for all you metric people that is 25.4 cms

But I am lost in thought about getting home and not thinking about or listening to the sound of my turbines humming in the background. I need to chill out and take a few beers for lunch and have a nice walk on the beach and eat some plain food for a while,
I have been trying very hard not to over eat to much here, it is very easy, the angle of repose for boiled rice is large and some of the locals like to see if they can defy nature by stacking it higher than the laws of physics will allow. Why they eat so much I don’t know, they may be hard working but they only get fat very quickly, it is probably a poor background that forces them to eat so much, I was watching one guy and he was hovering over his food like a hawk , just in case someone was going to steal a handful of food from his plate, as if, he was a sad reminder of the poor place in which I am working. I have been told by so many people how poor and hard it is to make a living in Peru. Taxes are so high and salaries are low. But life goes on and I am going to be eating on the beach and having my housekeeper and nanny looking after the kids while I am lording it about with Jenny in a nice hotel somewhere exotic. Lifes a bitch ain't it.

Quote of the Day

Love may not make the world go round, but I must admit that it makes the ride worthwhile.

Sean Connery

Thoughts of Home, Wife, Beer, Beach

I am planning my return home in 3 days time, relaxation is the main thing, to try and catch up on life in the real world and maybe go to the beach and do some proper relaxing with a few beers
** Tongue hanging out with a dehydrated look on face **

It is a dry camp here. I have been away from home for so long over the last 4 months that it will feel slightly strange getting back into the routine. As you can imagine everything continues without me being there so I will have to slide back into everyone’s else’s routine, I am wondering if the housekeeper will start shouting at me like a mother-in-law and telling me to clean up after myself and put my clothes away, that will be funny.
One enormous piece of goodness that has come out of the last two projects I have worked on, in fact since I have been working with gas turbines I have hardly ever had to drive and it has had such an enormous impact on my disposition when driving. I work on camp so no need for a car or I used to work offshore and again no cars, I did have a car in the USA and I did enjoy the driving, it is so relaxing there isn’t the rush you get in the UK, but I did see some heavy traffic in and around Los Angeles but it still felt different, that could have been the turning point. No longer do I shout “Get out of the way you Assh*le, move it, move it, move your piece of crap out of the way”, I was one of the terrors of the road, thinking that it all belonged to me. That was back in the days when I would wheelie my motorcycle at 90mph along narrow lanes in my village, very dangerous stuff and when I got my car I was as bad and had several crashes due to my stupidity and ignorance of the dangers of driving fast. I will still not get a motorcycle for fear of going as fast as I did plus Costa Rica I would die within 20 minutes as the roads are pot holed and full of people driving like I used to. So when I drive nowadays I drive like an old fart, just tootling along looking out of the window and watching the world go by, relatively slowly, I don’t race about I don’t rant and rave at loonies doing crazy stunts in Costa Rica, sometimes I get into a race but not very often,

Lies, Half Truths and Feng Sui

Just seen a Blog by the title , Feng Sui – wind and water, think they mean all wind and piss, its full of silly statements about north being ice and positve side & negative side, in other words black and white, what crap. Get a life Feng Sui.
I have to hold up my hands and tell you I have lied in my Blog and it willnot happen again I promise, I thought I had seen a black necked stilt, but I was delerious with the heat and it was actually a Pied Lapwing, not a lot different but a totally different bird. So here is the pied Lapwing and all these pictures are the work of Arthur Grosset he is an ardent Birder and travels to Brazil and Cuba to see birds, that is what he says, Great pictures anyway.

If you have been following the latest travel saga of mine from Malabo to the UK and Florence and back to malabo and quickstep to Peru, you must appreciate that I have been busy and for some reason my new project manager has decided to request my appearance to a meeting in Florence. Now most people would jump up and down singing halleluya if they got the offer of flight tickets to Florence and to be fair Florence is a fantastic place to go visiting as a tourist, but I am just about done with flying for a good while and I actually turned down quite politely the offer for at least 2 more months on the grounds that my wife would probably get very angry and shout at everyone concerned, especially after my manager rang my house last time I was at home at 3.30 am and woke everyone in the house and then didn’t apologise all over the silly expenses woman quitting, I am still amazed about his ringing me over that. So I still do not know what my new manager thinks of my refusal but I did do it very gently and as a contractor they know better than to demand my appearance. I don’t even know what the meeting is about I was given no clue to the intent of the meeting, very silly sort of expecting me to fly half way round the world for a meeting I know nothing about the nature of. Last time I did the meeting in florence it was nothing more than a chat over coffee and nothig else, I wasn’t questioned or anything just basically a chat over coffee outside in the sunshine with a couple of guys who I had worked with before on previous jobs and basically we chatted about old jobs, nothing more, and then I left to spend the weekend in Florence with my wife who had never been to Europe before so for her it was heaven, for me just another pain in the ass trip. So this time I think it was more of the same, this project I am on is big and important and there is an expansion project coming off soon and my company is in the running for the work again so it could be something along that line of thinking.
My spanish is coming along in falls and flops, I know a few words and tend to try and use them all in the same sentence but I end up laughing at the crappy attempts I make. I understand more of what people speak to me but me trying to speak is another game altogether. It is the stringing the words together that is the hard part,