Out with the old, in with the new

Here in the northern hemisphere -on our small planet at least- spring is jumping into action and spring cleaning is in the air though be it mixed together with a sprinkling of free flowing Icelandic volcanic ash.
I have taken this opportunity to not only spring clean but also move house and from now on blog posts are to be found at the new address of http://themindblower.org/meaning-to-life leaving behind this old one of http://meaningtolife.wordpress.com

You are now all cordially invited to visit me at my new Meaning to Life home.

La mudanza es terminado. Estas invitado visitarme en mi nuevo lugar que se encuentra con un click a Meaning to Life

Hasta la (significativa de la) vida!!!

Mean spirited: Spirit Airlines or pampered passengers?

After travelling by very inexpensive bus for some months around Central America I now have had the pleasure of travelling by relatively inexpensive airplane too, following a decision to bring my Latin American travels to a close, at least, for the mean time.

I decided to pay a visit to the UK but before that, a little trek via my sister’s northern hemisphere winter hide-out in La Jolla, California, although I fully acknowledge the undoubted Hispanic connections mean that arriving in southern California could actually be deemed to be some kind of Latin American continuity.

I was in Guatemala and had long considered that I would always opt for bus over air travel until I focussed a little closer on the inexpensiveness characteristic which also tied in rather well with always knowing that I would get back to the Spiritual way sooner or later admittedly not least because I had a $110 credit so deservedly gained from Spirit Airlines for my “unplanned” journey back in October. Propelled then by a very prickly price sensitivity I discovered that a one-way flight from Guatemala City to Los Angeles, California once again via Fort Lauderdale, could be had for a mere $220 and by adding in the credit the entire journey would cost me just half that. This, in contrast to somewhere in excess of $250 to reach California by bus and, as somebody correctly pointed out, that is without counting the cost of all the meals and drinks along the way and finally the idea of being cooped up in a bus, however luxurious it might be, for several days on end meant that the decision was easy!

Only after I had made the internet booking for my ticket did I find myself on a web site containing nothing but complaints about Spirit Airlines including a number of customers stating that they would most certainly NEVER fly with them again. I was fascinated by an entire blog dedicated to the subject (very worryingly actually more than one) and this particular link address without even reading the contents shows how far the anti-Spirit Airlines sentiment can reach: http://spirit-airlines.pissedconsumer.com/never-fly-spirit-airline-again

I immediately and healthily put this right out of mind but perversely the very first thing I heard when I settled into my window seat in Guatemala City for the first leg of my flight was the passenger immediately behind me repeating that “never fly them again” mantra as she heaped all the blame -fairly or not I do not know- on Spirit Airlines for being two days behind in her travel plans.

Spirit is definitely offering a “no frills” service but the overriding objective is to get you and your bags from place A to place B safely and as on time as physically possible, right? There are no free meals or drinks or in-flight-entertainment and you do have to pay between $19-25 for each item of luggage you check into the hold but these departures from “normal” service are widely recognised to be easily offset by the genuinely inexpensive label the airline carries.

I wondered in our ever frillier world if the simple A to B objective is being clouded and if our increasingly pampered society takes almost schadenfreudish pleasure out of an invented suffering somewhere in an unrealistic orbit outside the perimeters of essentiality. However one practical thing did surprise me: that in spite of fairly extensive flying times approximately 3 hours and then 5 hours for my particular two legs there were no in-flight meals that you could buy other than a cup of hot noodles that the flight attendant in ever so old-worldly fashion had to take individually to the galley and fill with hot water each time there was such a purchase. I could not help thinking it was a profit opportunity lost by Spirit Airlines to have a few light meals available for purchase but considering that watching their profit line is their byword I surely must be wrong, mustn’t I?!

I also noticed that Barry Biffle, Spirit’s chief marketing officer, has been quoted as saying that more than 99% of its passengers are satisfied. I wonder if that is a casual unthinking riposte to criticism from the mass media who are arch panderers to the unthinking pampered masses or actually based on fact? However, he could certainly count me in his 99% and both flights of my most recent spiritual journey were full so there are clearly a lot of satisfied customers although the dear lady who was behind me will of course NEVER be seen on a Spirit Airlines flight ever again.

Mean spirited: Spirit Airlines or pampered passengers?

Shivering and quaking in Antigua, Guatemala

I was moved to post a blog regarding an earthquake experienced in Costa Rica a few months back in a partial attempt to try and keep a live feel to this blog. As I keep my ear close to the ground (probably the very best thing to do for the latest seismic feel on the subject) I now attempt to go one better and peek into the earthquake future.

The result of my findings is that a strong earthquake is due in Guatemala in the near future.

Considering all the extensive hype related to planet-ending Mayan predictions for 2012 I would hate to think this prediction is related but my source although perhaps having Mayan blood coursing through its veins is based on ground-zero experience…

I hadn’t been in Guatemala very long at all before I discovered that “earthquake” is a resonant word around the old city of Antigua at the very least. Raul had welcomed me graciously as he does every guest at his amicable and well run hostel in the centre of Antigua, Guatemala – Hotel Welcome to Stay (perhaps the most originally named place I have stayed at on this tour, though I then wondered if perhaps Antigua specialises in creative and/or surprising names for hotels having spotted another around the corner uninvintingly named “Hotel La Sin Ventura” (which can cheekily be translated as Hotel Without The Adventure).

On my first evening at the “Welcome to Stay”, there was a fresh wind blowing down through the surrounding mountains which in the night bordered on cold – not helped in my case by the fact that I did not discover the availability of blankets until the next morning when I tripped over an attractively and cosily stacked unused pile in the room next door. That morning I commented on my surprise at the cold to Raul and he offered me a destabilising backhanded reassurance in that it was a rare phenomenon. “Actually it was rarer than anything they had experienced since 1976”. Next followed the destabilising part of the reassurance. “Yes,” he said, “all the older people are saying that this resembles that time in 1976. That was the last time the temperature dipped this low and that was accompanied by one of largest earthquakes in living memory. They are also thinking about what has been happening on this continent in Haiti and Chile recently so the older people are sure that Guatemala is next.”

I do hope the older people are wrong and the Mayans even more so!

The old people have seen this

A very distant afterthought: older people in the UK say that 1976 was the hottest summer ever. I wonder, if Guatemala does indeed suffer from an unwelcome earthquake, does that mean that Great Britain would be headed for a very long overdue rainless hot summer? Maybe the Mayans have the answer to that one too!

Don’t mess about in Masaya or even tiptoe into Tipitapa!

In a perfectly uncorrupt, prison-free and selfless world (another reasonable Obama goal?) there would be no headline news items talking of man’s inhumanity to man just the occasional accident and natural disaster accompanied, of course, by stories of man’s humanity to man.

A similar picture would hold when people meet up travelling from country to country exchanging stories solely on their experiences of how well they had been treated in previously visited villages, towns and cities. It has to be noted that most of the unseemly stories that are chewed over on the subject of safety and security are what people have heard or felt with regard to a place, rather than necessarily a matter directly affecting them; thank goodness. Where there is a notable discrepancy between poverty and wealth the ugly matter of theft often raises its head. At this juncture please allow me one more deft knee to the groin of the British Members of Parliament recently charged with theft: they, too, surely couldn’t have believed they were being rewarded insufficiently in life and therefore had to carry out a little wealth distribution of their own?

Anyway, how safe is safe in Central America? If you never have anything stolen then it is as safe as anywhere else you haven’t had anything stolen. Conversely if you are held up and/or lose money and possessions then you just might think it is the worst place in the world. The very general consensus from what I have heard in my travels so far is that Costa Rica and Panama are some kind of step ahead of the others and the others namely: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras rank fairly equally in terms of security. There are measures you can take that will reduce the possibilities of problems but of course bar never leaving your accommodation nothing is foolproof. Touching a very large piece of wood, so far I have been untroubled by theft but have certainly picked up some tips as I move along that if I had not known could have got me into the kind of trouble certain other souls have had to endure.

In Costa Rica I was witness to a taxi driver being punched in the face -for what reason I have no idea- and also the theft of a bag (not mine!) from immediately above my head on a bus from La Fortuna to San José. I saw the bandage on the nose of a fellow hosteller who had been attacked and robbed immediately outside our hostel in downtown San José by some form of taxi connivance (legally registered taxis or not I do not know). Unfortunately this sequence of unnerving incidents took a much more serious turn for the worse when my hostel neighbour Steve from Davis, California tried to get to Masaya by bus one typically gorgeous day in Nicaragua from the much-vaunted and visited colonial town of Granada.

Over breakfast Steve and I had had one of those very enjoyable penetrative humanity-examining conversations before he skipped off to see some “events” in Masaya later that day. The next time I saw him was the same evening when I stretched out my hand to welcome him back “home” to the Hospedaje Cocibolca, our hostel in the centre of Granada, only for him to shockingly reveal that his day had largely been taken up with a very unenjoyable penetrative and humanity-examining phenomenon called kidnap. His ordeal was extremely unpleasant for what actually occurred but far worse for what his kidnappers led him to believe they were going to do to him. Thankfully one could sense Steve’s relief that at the end of the day because he was still in one piece and had “only” lost a camera, a couple of plastic cards and cash, perhaps as much as US$400, presumably together with as much adrenalin as the body can manufacture in a day.

Although being a very experienced traveller Steve’s mistake was overshooting Masaya on the bus and then trusting the apparently innocent woman who coincidentally descended from the bus at the same point as him while talking on her cell phone. The cell phone was the key because the seemingly friendly group (of kidnappers) turned up on cue in a car to “help” Steve, and the lady who Steve thought was another wayward traveler, back to Masaya. It all looked fairly innocent at this point and in usual foreign fashion Steve, not understanding too much Spanish, was liberated from thinking about any suspicious innuendoes they no doubt were making. However, when he began to suspect something, for example the car going back in the reverse direction and then not stopping at the gas station as they had explained was the motive for retracing their steps, and then actually tried to get out of the car, the five incumbents revealed their collective hand by immediately and forcibly restraining him on the back seat.

It is quite a few years since Nicaragua had a problem with roving bands of terrorists. In fact, ironically, Steve last travelled through these very parts back in 1978 when his travel plans were severely hampered by a major military incident on the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border at Peñas Blancas between the Sandinistas and Contras. Almost knee-jerk reaction-like he jumped to the assumption that they were terrorists. They took his spectacles and covered his face with his hat and began to punch him with the intention of intimidating him into not only handing over everything he had but revealing the pin numbers to his cards also. He was surprised that the women were worse and being the forgiving kind of fellow he is Steve defended their circumstances by not only recognizing that they were poor but that they might have been as scared as he was. They threatened to kill him especially if he did not give them those pin numbers: not sure if Steve’s forgiving nature ever came up with an altruistic excuse for that because surely at that point he had to be far more scared than they were! After a lengthy and very frightening ordeal, by which time he realized they were all just thugs and nothing to do with any kind of political terrorist group, they actually gave him back his spectacles, passport, antibiotic medicine and just enough money to get the bus back into Masaya the right way. Steve even mumbled to me something about them actually being quite nice after all, considering this parting sliver of a gesture of man’s humanity to man.

In Masaya police station he made a full and difficult report to the police with the help of a few local people who could speak some English but realism indicated that the perpetrators would not be caught for this crime because Steve recognized, again either realistically or excusingly, that the police just do not have the “resources”.

While Steve was busy on the internet trying to recover his financial situation I became immersed in a conversation with the hostel management who had been contacted by the police earlier in the afternoon to alert the staff to the fact that the villains probably had Steve’s room key although there was no indication on the key as to which establishment in Granada it was. The conversation with the management put the blame immediately and exclusively on a band from Tipitapa. According to them this was a town near the capital Managua where there is a very high percentage of delinquents and malcontents. According to them this group came from there without any shadow of a doubt whatsoever.

What can one learn? With varying degrees of importance: don’t stop anywhere near Tipitapa, be very careful when you get into an unknown vehicle, don’t trust single women with cell phones who get off the bus in out of the way places with you, and proven -yet again unfortunately- there are just too many people in our world who want more than they have and will stop at nothing to get it.

Steve, to his excellent credit, recovered quickly and fully and continued happily with his travels after several laborious hours in communication with various financial institutions in the USA and the American Embassy, the latter making the customary almost entirely unhelpful token offer of a list of telephone numbers of “reliable” taxi services in Managua should he want to head back that way again.

Goodbye Masaya and Tipitapa as Steve takes the safer travel option.

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise

After intimating, last time around, there was some kind of parallel behavior pattern between human and monkey sessions when in meeting I thought I would try to present the monkey view. Just one view that is, of a capuchin monkey found deep inside the Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Can you not imagine in direct parallel Messrs. Morley, Chaytor, Devine and White (the four Members of the British Houses of Parliament recently charged with theft) as they sniffed around their expenses claims forms trying to extract as much as they could from the system?

Meaning to Life and Nolan’s Seven Principles

I inferred in my last blog post that corruption, more searchingly describable as abuse of power, is the most likely reason as to why there are next to no sign posts in the capital city of Costa Rica.

Across the water in the United Kingdom news has this morning surfaced that the Crown Prosecution Service has filed criminal charges against four individuals holding office in the highest positions of responsibility in the land: persons not only elected but also paid quite handsomely in order to represent and protect the common good. This would appear to be the culmination of an extraordinary sequence of revelations which first began last year in the columns of the London Daily Telegraph. It seems as though the Daily Telegraph’s investigation centred on a computer hard drive containing documented evidence of expense claims made between 2004 and 2009 by members of the British Houses of Parliament, the findings far from revealing very much maternal from a body often referred to as the Mother of Parliaments.

There are 646 members of the lower House of Commons and 392 have now been asked to pay back money that has been “falsely” claimed. So far just three, plus one member from the upper House of Lords, have been presented with criminal charges of… well, theft actually. The four, with boring predictably refute the charges and “robustly” too as if to make it sound like they are so far removed from guilt it is preposterous or a trumped up move by the Crown Prosecutors. It would be very interesting to know if they believe they are not guilty of a crime then would they admit to being guilty of anything: ignorance of the law, minor abuse of power or simply in the end to being an absolutely normal greedy human being which, I remind you, is exactly not what they were elected to be or paid for? Besides that what about the other 389? Would they now support a law that allowed thieves to go unpunished on handing back ill gotten gains – presumably with the proviso that only if they got caught in the first place, of course?

In 1995 the British Prime Minister must have suspected that there was trouble at’ mill because he requested the Nolan Committee examine precisely the matter of people in public life. The committee took six months to make its presentation based on the seven common fundaments of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Clearly the dictate of common sense was not enough and for a lot of members of parliament neither was the Nolan Committee’s highlighting report.

On the theme of corruption and a look at where it might be going in the future I jump right back across the pond to the United States of America where, as would befit their panache for style of grandeur, they seem to have made a decision recently of monumental proportions in their Supreme Court.

It has been pointed out to me this week in no uncertain terms by a couple of extremely learned American travellers that the Supreme Court made a decision which augurs very darkly for the future of the rights of the individual in that country. Quite simply there will be no limits on groups funding political parties. You could always argue that they are waving the flag for Nolan’s principles of honesty, openness and perhaps leadership, although I do not think the Nolan Committee was offering an à la carte menu but more intended it as a set meal.

President of the Washington-based government-watchdog group Democracy 21, Fred Wertheimer put it very succinctly, “With a stroke of the pen, five justices wiped out a century of American history devoted to preventing corporate corruption of our democracy.”

An awful lot of people in an awful lot of countries would be advised to re-read the Nolan Committee’s report on selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership but don’t they sound like useful guidelines for living your own life even if the august among us don’t want to use them?

I refer purely and simply to the status of the humble street sign in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Quite frankly it is abysmal. It is so abysmal that only the blind would fail to notice such a glaring hindrance to making your way around this city. I am talking specifically of signs for identifying the name of the street although it was fairly apparent in moving around on occasion by car that directional signs were none too common either.

To keep it simple there are four observable facts.
1. The norm is that there are none. Zip nada, absolute desert.
2. When they do appear they are nearly always attached to buildings on the corners at intersections.
3. The majority of the few that exist are difficult to read.
4. Some are impossible to read.

The paucity of these signs in a large city that obviously has sufficient resources and has failed to do anything about it for so long leaves the visitor with only one entertaining outlet on the subject which is to ponder as to why? There is, after all, ample time to do so as you trudge between unmarked street corners trying to work out where exactly you are.

If it is intentional, why so? Is it that it is just not important to San Joseans, is entrapment part of the picture or even exclusion, is it to confuse an unidentified enemy as the British tried by removing all street signs in case the German army should have made it across the channel during the second world war or is it trying to encourage people to tap more into a directional sixth sense?

If it is not intentional then what? Regrettably after consultation with locals it seems that the most likely reason is misappropriation of budgets; plain and simple CORRUPTION.

The story amusingly also encompasses the way in which they identify addresses which traditionally, thereby indicating that this has been going on a long time, do not necessarily use the names of the streets either but a commonly identifiable landmark. The hostel which has been my home for some time was 525 meters east of “La Biblica” (an admittedly well known hospital in the area) and for greater exactitude the address can include “the yellow house on the right”. The amusement value runs further when it is learned that sometimes they continue to use landmarks that no longer exist. I heard of one especially amusing locator, admittedly not in San José, as being: 200 meters west of where Juan’s cow gave birth last year.

This might help to support the theory that they just don’t need them but the inefficiency or corruption theory sounds more likely when you consider that some kind of attempt at signing of streets has happened at whatever low key level at some point in the past. Furthermore almost like a testament to logic from another world if you make your way to the junction of Avenida 14 and Calle 7 you will encounter a scene that is a sight for directionally challenged sore eyes:

Unique street corner sign post AND street plaques

Just makes you want to ask again why though?

The occasional helpful street sign in San Jose, Costa Rica	Much clearer now, eh?
Nicely painted corner building with helpful street name plaque	So much better - with a nice new paint over job that is!

Costa Rica’s Urban Conundrum

San José is a large capital city and is importantly the fulcrum of an even larger metropolitan area comprising also the separate cities of Alajuela, Heredia and Cartago, actually the capital of Costa Rica prior to 1823.

San José itself has the unremarkable reputation of being a rather tedious and ordinary urban city much like any other anywhere else in the world. However, in spite of the seemingly unspoken prerogative afforded to the motor car here in the downtown area, there are some redeeming features. For example there are some fairly sizable pedestrian thoroughfares, not an inconsiderable number of parks and various areas of other greenery scattered in and about. Considering Costa Rica’s very positive ecological stance it would be a travesty for the national agenda not to have some kind of an influence on its capital city.

At the west end of the city is the extensive La Sabana Park which was in fact the main aerodrome until international flight got very serious in our modern world and they created Juan Santamaria International Airport further to the west in Alajuela. The park is an ideal size for not being able to lose yourself but large enough to feel you have escaped from metropolitan life. At the weekend it is littered with various football (soccer) matches taking place: a clear reflection of the importance of football as the national sport. This however is not to the exclusion of baseball that also has a standing but based on numbers I saw in La Sabana Park football would win; actually “hands down”.

Of the other smaller parks dotted around, one morning I was fortunate enough to stumble across Parque Espana where a school group were practicing for a musical performance. Parque Espana lies a little to the north of the central area in Barrio Amon where the greenery of the park blends very nicely with some distinctively designed housing and hotel structures in the area.

I have also heard directly from the horse’s mouth (a member of a certain management project team here) that the city has some grand plans to make the city more “liveable”. The project focuses on a huge transportation renewal plan and the development of a modern urban transport system in the heart of the metropolitan area. Unfortunately this will take a lot of time and a lot of money and even more unfortunately it is at the dictate of the hands of an imminently changing government.

Meanwhile you can enjoy a current very liveable scene directly from Parque Espana.

Wabi-Sabi and a Japanese Meaning to Life

A missed opportunity by the Greek philosophers and a lost bet of olives

If you stumbled upon this article by chance then you are about to fulfill the most important underlying rule associated with serendipity: that there is no such thing as isolated serendipity and once started you are always on a serendipitous path and possibly even on the edge of the great serendipity vortex.

You certainly weren’t thinking of etymology at this point were you? Therefore the serendipitous rule of continuous serendipity is proved because etymology is exactly where we are going right now.

Doesn’t serendipity sound so Greek based that you would bet your last pound of olives on it? Doesn’t it sound so ideal for those ancient Greek philosophical get-togethers that you would take out a mortgage on a wagon-load of olives to add to your wager?

Well wrong, and you would have lost every last olive!

Firstly the word is derived from Sanskrit and was “invented” in the 1700s by an Englishman called Horace Walpole (actually known to his friends as the 4th Earl of Orford because Horace was such an old fashioned name even in the 18th century) who was, by the way, also responsible for a development known as Strawberry Hill thereby also nicely tidying up a doubt I long had as to where that name came from for a location in the London Borough of Richmond that doesn’t have strawberries or a hill.

However what intrigued me most, as a one-time translator myself in fact, as chance would incredibly have it, in the London Borough of Richmond, was that it has received the intriguing accolade of one of the top ten most difficult words to translate in the English language according to a survey of people who ply their trade that way!

Even though it has to be said that serendipity is clearly the most impressive on the list you do want to know of the full list don’t you?
1 plenipotentiary
2 gobbledegook
3 serendipity
4 poppycock
5 googly
6 spam (I presume they don’t mean the canned meat variety)
7 whimsy
8 bumf
9 chuffed
10 kitsch

Placing the tongue on the other side of the mouth as it were. I sifted out three particularly good examples of words deemed difficult to translate back into English.

Scottish:
Tartle – a verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name.

Japanese (nicely striking serendipitously at the very heart of “Meaning to Life”):
Wabi-Sabi – this is a compound word with a long history, and carries a lot of meaning. Put succinctly, it’s a way of living that emphasizes finding beauty in imperfection, and accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay.
For more extensive background on this sorter of the wheat from the chaff at Japanese parties please take a look at Wabi-Sabi

Pascuense (Not a language spoken just at Easter time but that of the Easter Islanders and if anybody ever reads this who speaks Pascuense would they kindly get in touch) -
Tingo – is the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.

Could tingo even be the alter-ego of wabi-sabi – by jingo?!

I will force myself to stop there before I get accused of serentripinfomy (sometimes spelled serentripinfamy).
Serentripinfomy: following a serendipitous path by tracing a sequence of interesting information endlessly.

I am sure that even my mother is now probably verging on turning her back on my blog but perhaps the hidden inference that Scottish is justifiably a language may just keep her on board!

HAPPY HOGMANAY!

Serendipitously travelling – a notch below the spiritual journey

I was happily minding my own business tucked away in this little corner of San José, actually very near the Vizquez Gonzalez Park on Avenida 14 and Calle 11 if you should be familiar with this city, when I had a serendipitous Skype chat with Peter “The Swede” that threw off numerous serendipitous by-products in a kind of serendipitous chain reaction. I was actually calling back to base camp in Boca Chica and discovered that Peter had turned up for his annual Dominican rest and recuperation. In good Viking tradition Peter does not hang about and upon learning where I was he immediately offered to run roughshod over (another of those Viking traditions) the formalities of a few hundred miles distance and a whole sea to make the same generous offer he made every year when we met up, “Dinner on me!”

A few days later there he was at the airport (Juan Santamaria International Airport, not actually in San José but in Alajuela one of the component parts of this extensive metropolitan area). I had no idea what, other than dinner, he had up his sleeve, although Vikings are indeed usually pictured without sleeves: I simply imagine it must have got terribly in the way of all the killing. I considered -in the knowledge of one of his other Viking traits (he liked messing about on boats)- it rare that he would be interested in San José (which with the gathering momentum of my geography for dummies has well established that we are most certainly not on any maritime coast here and don’t even have a small lake for a dinghy).

Fortunately for everyone, presumably including himself, Peter has given up the oldest Viking tradition of visiting foreign lands and simply taking, proven by the fact he immediately chalked up another free dinner for me as a payment for meeting him at the airport. On the journey to the airport I reflected on that fascinating world (that we can all enjoy at times) of the person with a little knowledge being way on top of the person without any knowledge; the stark simplicity of a world we can sometimes share with computers where there is an enormous difference between zero and one. From Peter’s viewpoint this was my town and my bus route. Though he did soon begin to see the error of that view when 40 minutes into the bus ride we were still seemingly some way off our target of downtown San José for what I had told him was a 25-minute journey.

Later that evening as I heartily consumed the first of my free dinner tickets (in deference to expediency I refrained from taking them both because it is just not possible to consume heartily twice at the same sitting) we talked of our relative situations and came up with an excellent travel plan of taking a journey together up to Costa Rica’s famously most active volcano Arenal and staying at La Fortuna about a three hour bus journey to the north west of San José.

A couple of days later with bags well and truly packed, and as we admittedly made rather a meal out of toast and coffee in our efforts to wake up before trotting off to the bus stop, we serendipitously learned that one of the other hostelers was just about to set off to the very same town of La Fortuna in his rental car to also visit the volcano.

Richard, the would-be doctor and temporarily resident artist, was at that moment waiting for his car to be delivered. Richard, without any Viking roots whatsoever, was unhesitating in offering us space in his Suzuki Alto, not usually one of their chief selling points but we really couldn’t ask him to upgrade just for our sakes and especially at such short notice, and we promptly sped off in the direction of La Fortuna. Speeding because that is what the San José traffic always does and with the aid of the absolutely indispensable GPS tracking device we could not only speed but keep on the right course that otherwise might have been perilous considering all the speeding that was going on.

In the great natural world of balanced energy (although how is it that the forces of destruction and construction are just so perversely asymmetrical?) for every serendipity I suppose there has to be an anti-serendipity and that came in the form of rainfall coinciding with our timed visit to La Fortuna. We had been warned that the non-appearance of the volcano was a common occurrence and we waited three days through a lot of rain and mist and the volcano barely even revealed its ankles.

As we careened around in our poncho protective gear we had our first experience of the world-renowned Costa Rican rain forest and were delighted to distinctly hear the volcano on one occasion as it belched out a deep rolling gaseous sound mixing perfectly into the swirling atmospheric mist. It was either the volcano or the as yet unseen Costa Rican Yeti but as far as we were concerned whichever it was it steadfastly remained completely and utterly out of sight!

Serendipitously travelling – a notch below the spiritual journey