Costa Rica Moving Day
I am a professional photographer in Costa Rica. The experiences on my tours are many since I never know what my group and I will happen upon. Let me tell you about one of these surprising events.
During one of our Costa Rica Photo Tours, my group drove to a photography location in the beautiful and pristine Osa Peninsula which National Geographic has called "the most biologically diverse place" on earth. To get there we drove through the tiny village of Ojochal near where I live.
Let me tell you about a unique way to move that some rural Costa Ricans still use. One day, when my photography group was passing through the village, we noticed a most unusual way of moving. But, to help you better appreciate what we saw, let me provide you with some background on the man who was moving.
Our only neighbours when we moved to Costa Rica were Ticos (that is what the Costa Ricans call themselves) and one of them by the very Spanish name of Wilson came calling with a house warming gift of some flowering plants. It was very comical to see him standing at our driveway waiting to be invited in onto the property so that he could give us this gift. He was too polite to come to our door without an invitation.
After a sort of "conversation", he in Spanish and my wife and I mostly in English, I realized that he wanted to give us the plants. We were new in the community and this was a welcoming from the neighbours who live at least a hour walk up the mountain. Yep, walk. No car. Senor Wilson walked an hour just to deliver a gift. Now, that is neighborly!
With the passage of time, Senor Wilson has given me flowering plants many times. Often he stands there waiting to see where I will plant it. I would probably do the same thing if I lugged it down a mountain for an hour. However, there are so many things to do that planting this gift is never one of my priorities. Certainly, I never thought that I would be tested on my ability to choose a location and plant something when I moved to Costa Rica from Canada.
A couple of days after Senor Wilson gave me plants one time, he came to the house with still another plant and visited while his two boys swam in the river by the house. Of course, he asked me where I planted the others that he had brought the last time he came.
Well, they were still in the pots (these pots are not the plastic pots that we are familiar with but old aluminum kettles with drainage holes made by stabbing the bottom with a machete), would you believe it? Wilson saw this and decided that he not only would bring the plants but he would plant them in our little garden. That tells you all you need to know about this good man.
Back to moving day. As my photography tour group and I were driving a dusty Ojochal road, we saw a man walking his horse. It was Wilson. We stopped the van and I saw that the horse was carrying two huge white bags filled with what seemed to be clothes and household items. There was also a broom wedged between one of the bags with its blue bristle extending between the horse's ears. For the life of me, it looked as if the horse had a bristle blue tiara on! Poor horse, not very macho!
Wilson was holding the horse's bridle in one hand and a birdcage in the other. A sight to behold. A man, a horse, a crown, and a birdcage. Moving day!
We greeted each other with the usual "hola" and started to chat as the cameras were brought out and the clicking began. Just joking around, I asked Wilson if he were moving and to my surprise he said he was. Turns out the crowned steed was the moving van or shall we say Senor Wilson's "4 X 4."
Wilson explained that his family would be babysitting one of the Bed and Breakfasts while the owner was going back to Germany during the rainy season. This was ideal for him because it was much easier for his wife and 3 children to live in the pueblo close to the school rather than walk down about 2 miles from their mountain home every day.
I thought that it was rather interesting that he was carrying the birdcage. I would have thought that on one of the previous trips down to their new digs one of the children would have wanted to carry the cage.
I guess carrying flowering plants and birdcages come under the same heading. Wilson explained that the bird was young (parrot or parakeet, can't really tell) and that it was very talkative. As if to show off, the feathered pet suddenly started chattering. Unfortunately, I had not yet mastered Spanish well enough to understand bird Spanish so I could not figure out what he was saying. But, it did not matter to the bird.
Everybody's cameras were clicking away because this was certainly something not seen every day. A moving van of a horse wearing a blue tiara, a chattering bird showing off for company, and a family of five walking down a mountain, worldly possessions in hand, on moving day in Costa Rica. My photo tours are filled with surprises even for me.
Frank Scott lives in tropical Costa Rica where he is a professional Costa Rica Photographer offering unique photography tours. Some of his work can be seen in Costa Rica Vacations, a very popular travel guide to this unique country.
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