Clark woke up early as usual and headed back to Playa Ocotal to check out the mini beach and water around the south bluff.
He returned home with this treat to eat with our breakfast sausages: tamale. He drove past a couple woman making and selling these fresh on the side of the road. Inside is a combination of chicken, carrots, and potato. It was delicious. I could eat this everyday for breakfast. It's a perfect balance of nutrients and I love a good savory breakfast.
We took our time getting up and around because we learned there were three meeting times for the church in Liberia. We decided to aim for the 11 am and made it. Liberia is in a place that is quite flat and is a sizeable town. As we were driving through, we saw a couple of cowboys on their high stepping horses trotting on the busy street. Liberia seemed to be laid out more like what we are used to in the USA, with wide square blocks. The meeting house was fairly large. A few people spoke with us before the meeting, but we decided to start our drive back after the first main meeting block ended.
We passed the airport on our way out of town. The mountains are kind of in the distance. I didn't get any pictures of Liberia because I didn't think the pictures could really represent the wide expanse of it. Once we were on the interstate it was so much like being in the USA with straight fast pavement, the first we have been on in two months. It was a nice break from the curvy, slow, potholed, narrow roads we experience everywhere else here.
When we dropped back into the mountains, the GPS took us a different way then we'd gone previously. We ended up winding through a quite a few small towns in the province of Alejuelah. Some of these were Espera, Jesus Maria, San Mateo, Atenas, and La Garita. I saw some places for sale behind gates that were reminiscent of the old southern plantations.
I would love to know if any had historic villas still intact. When I asked Andrea about this she said, sadly, preserving historic buildings isn't (or can't be) a priority here and many of them have been razed. Perhaps this is because of the expense of restoring and maintaining the old places. Like all countries, the government politicians choose what the priorities for public spending will be and here it seems to be in higher education and habitat preservation. I explained to her that in the USA, the government provides monetary incentives to preserve historic buildings as a record of the past and for people to enjoy and learn from. Different strokes for different folks.
Andrea also said there are often complications in how land and property is passed from generation to generation, many of the land holders are politicians and corrupt, AND some Ticos are selling off their land to foreigners to get money to live on, creating a different set of issues. Some family members take advantage of others who can't read the contracts.
Also, there are large farming productions such as Dole Foods (producing pineapple) that is taking over more and more land but not using due diligence with the waste produced from the farms or being prudent in how the soils are contaminated with chemicals which then run into the water system including rivers and drive locals away to other places because they are getting ill. The used fields basically become wasteland.
Many of these same issues reside in other places all around the world, including the USA and as many of know, right in Missouri.
That's a wrap for our Guanacaste beach tour! Up next weekend: Isla San Lucas
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