Location, Location And Peaceful Geographical Location

Costa Rica is in a
Panamanian-Nicaraguan Sandwich

Where am I (strictly as a physical entity that is)?

To try and put some kind of locational meaning to at least the start of this blog I have already offered the big San José hint. I have always liked maps and even used to prefer pouring over a world atlas rather than watch television sometimes, although it would be fair to say that the absence of television in the childhood family often gave the map quite a head start. However, Central America always looked just too intricate and imprecise not to mention just too far away to do much pouring over to be honest. No childhood store of information to draw on and zero preparation time before my arrival meant that my mental map reference still saw Central America as though some giant hand had grabbed the middle part of the Americas and squished pretty hard leaving Mexico and Colombia oozing out at either end and rather a crumpled mess in the middle.

I struck very lucky on the plane from Fort Lauderdale because my two co-sitters, Jim and also Jim, were like me arriving for the first time, but unlike me, had not only maps but several very useful and relevant guide books. Did you for example ever wonder why Costa Rica doesn’t send soldiers to help in Afghanistan? The simple answer is because they do not have an army! Sweet idea in itself isn’t it? I wonder if Mr Obama has considered that little option for his next party trick. Can the same man be awarded the same Nobel Prize two years in succession, I wonder? By the way, for the forseeable future and for the very same reason Costa Rica won’t be sending any sailors or airmen anywhere either.

As a kind of first step in a Central American geography for dummies guide I firmly noted that Costa Rica lies neatly sandwiched between Nicaragua (where I had thought I was going for the previous few weeks and perhaps is another story) to the north and Panama to the south. I did ponder over the idea that I had never heard of any association of military aggression with those two countries either and that in itself might be a big contributor to Costa Rica’s non-military stance. Funny old unheard of concept that would be wouldn’t it? You put your guns down and your neighbour considers doing the very same thing. What a wonderful idea it would be if we could get Panama and Nicaragua to copy Costa Rica and so on and so forth around the world with a welcome domino effect until Mr Obama’s peace prize is put in a museum to man’s past follies.

One further geographical observation was that this capital of San José is about as near plumb in the centre of the country as possible. That very definitely rings a well-tuned organizational and logic bell in my ear. The neat and tidy answer to the original question then is slap bang in the middle of Costa Rica.

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