John, the proprietor of La Colina Lodge, set me up with a guide named Ricard. "Muy tranquilo" John assured me. John said Ricardo was a descendant of the first Quakers who settled at Monteverde.
Ricardo was muy tranquilo. Posiblemente un poquito mas tranquilo que yo prefiere.
But he sure could spot the birds. Right by the hotel we spotted two male resplendent quetzals and a couple of females too. I got a quick glance of a three-wattled bell bird. It was funny: I read the section in The Lonely Planet guide about the bell birds, how the author thought the wattles were worms. Guess what my first comment was? "Are those worms in its mouth?" Duh.
Ricardo also spotted some toucanettes. I may have gotten a couple of shots. The flash wouldn’t work with the tele-extender, so that was limiting, and for some bloddy reason, I didn’t bring the tripod. That big old tripod is great, but sometimes, I long for one of the cheapies that I used to use. The cheapos are so easy to handle, and so damned light. That woman I took the lessons from at Bodie had made fun of me for using the cheapo, arguing that most of the time you’re shooting from your car. Which is true, but those times when you hike…
Anyway, the long and short of it is that I don’t have the equipment to do what I’m capable of. My lenses don’t allow in enough light. That’s the bottom line. But those low f-stop lenses are expensive, and they’ll just add more weight to my kit. Which means I push the film. Bloody hell.
So, back to Monteverde. I’m not sure the shots I took are going to turn out well. The shutter speeds were too slow, the camera too heavy with the flash. Hell with it.
Ricardo was an interesting bloke. He talked like a Yank, and while I’m sure he’s fluent in Spanish, his accent made him sound like a Yank. But he grew up there, was raised there. Spent some time in Indiana, yes; and had been out to the Grand Tetons, but… Here’s the thing: he was a Yank in my eyes, so therefore as an ex-pat he should be better off than a tico, yet he didn’t own a car even though the town stretched for miles, and was even more miles from anyplace else! How could he live without a car out in the sticks? I mean, he would be stuck there with his wife and three kids. No way to get out or move around!
Which is when it hit me. He’s not an ex-pat, he’s a tico, living in Costa Rica’s economy.
Sorta like Kim and John, the divorced co-owners of La Colina. John "fled" England in the 70s for LA, and had spent some years up in the Bay Area as well. Said how he was a working class Brit, university education, and because of the class structure, he couldn’t get much better of a job than construction. So he left. Found his cockney accent made him socially upper-middle class in the States (hell if we know–Michael Caine sounds distinguished to us). Kim was an Angeleno, but I believe they met in Australia on a biking trip. Anyway, I think they’d been together for twenty or so years, and had a three-year-old. They had managed a successful business together near Arenal for seven years, but Kim implied they were putting too much of themselves into the work and were in an even more isolated area than Monteverde. Hell, point is, Kim said it was very hard to make a living, and then I realized again, the ex-pats don’t make US wages and live like kings. They live in the same "developing" conditions ticos live in.