Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Wildlife Preservation....a good thing???
Hello friends! I want to tell you about another animal that has come back to Golfito. It's a "bitter-sweet" return however. A caretaker for the property of a local ex-pat reported last week the loss of his dogs. One moment they were running and playing in the yard and the next they made a run straight into the jungle, obviously interested in a bit of adventure. Well they got it! At sunset, the dogs had not returned and worry set in. Morning arrived and he decided to go up the trail that leads to the water source on the property and YIKES!!!! At the top of the trail he came face to face with a jaguar! He started to move slowly back and when he turned to retreat, there was ANOTHER. He looked for his best option out and believe it or not- ONE MORE!!!! He decided to RUN!!!!! We have since learned that the dogs did not ever return and that mother jaguars more commonly have 2 cubs and they raise them until the cubs are fully mature. We can only speculate, but sadly enough, we think it's obvious the return of the animals to our wildlife corridor will come at some sad cost to our neighbors with pets who live on the fringe of the corridor.... and maybe even for those of us further into the urban zones. I say this because another friend, Mariana the local dentist, told us that she was driving back to Golfito (night time). She had to stop the car suddenly near the Hotel Ceibo at the Las Gaviota junction because there was a jaguar in the middle of the street! She said she told several people about this but nobody believed her.....well now I can say, MARIANA I BELIEVE YOU!!!! What do you all think we should do about this new exciting yet scarey development in our surrounds?!!
Monday, June 14, 2010
A view of Golfito from the Sky....
Hi everyone, my friend Adriana from Samoa del Sur gave me these nice pictures taken from an airplane. I love Golfito, this is why I'm sharing these pics with all of you to fall in love of Golfito together.This is "El Golfo" or Barrio Bellavista
This one goes from the "Kilometro 1" passing the "Muellecito" to Hotel Delfina.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Dollar Exchange On The Slide
After holding steady for more than a week, the US dollar exchange began sliding this week, falling more than ¢12 colones in the last couple of days.
Only a few days ago the buy was ¢553.09 and the sell ¢542.46.
The buy are this morning is ¢529.86 and the sell is ¢540.76, dropping almost ¢5 colones overnight.
Only a few days ago the buy was ¢553.09 and the sell ¢542.46.
Modernity on Osa’s Doorstep: For better or worse, remote Osa Peninsula is getting connected
PUERTO JIMENEZ – Catalina Arias sees the concrete slowly creeping.
Two Worlds: Doña Catalina, a resident of Puerto Jiménez on the Osa Peninsula, now has a foot in both worlds, with her wooden house behind her and a newly paved road in front.
The road that lopes past her house, where she once slogged through mud up to her knees to make the two-kilometer trek to the beach, is now paved.
For decades, she walked with her daughter and her neighbor's horse to the coast every week, often through heavy rainfall and muck, to collect 150 coconuts and carry them to her home in Barrio Agujas.
Sitting on a small, log stool outside her house, she scrapes the meat out of the coconut, dilutes it, filters it through a hand towel, and squeezes it into coconut oil for cooking and for skin creams. She funnels the liquid into half-liter plastic bottles and sells each one for ¢ 3,000 ($5.52). Alone, she can fill about 30 bottles per month.
Arias, who says she is somewhere around 74 years old, still makes the hike to the shore each week, but now her feet stay dry. She doesn't have to wait stranded on the beach for the rain to stop because the mire is too thick for the horse to tread through or the rivers are too high to cross.
Instead, she walks along the new blacktop highway that was finished less than a year ago. Instead of inhaling dust kicked up by passing cars, the glow of yellow reflectors warns her of traffic.
Broad-shouldered concrete spans now stand alongside the rickety, one-lane bridges, built from logs or steel beams sunk into the riverbanks and topped with planks or slender sheets of metal that were once used.
“It's changing,” Arias said as she chopped a coconut in half with her machete. “This little place, yes, it's definitely changing.”
The Osa Peninsula, along Costa Rica's southern Pacific coast, has always been one of the country's most remote and least developed locations, but it's quickly being connected.
Pavement is replacing gravel. Fields that have been owned and tended by Costa Rican families for generations are being sold to foreign developers.
Plans for more hotels are being sketched out, and talk of a marina has boat owners buzzing.
A proposed international airport in Sierpe, the gateway to Drake Bay, only lacks an environmental viability study before construction begins.
For the people living here, these signs of investment and infrastructure offer the promise of jobs, capital, and a more civilized future. Some wonder, though, at what cost this development will come.
“This place is going to explode,” said Mitch Zychowski, a U.S. citizen and part-owner of the recently opened Agua Dulce Lodge and Resort here. “When that airport is built, people are going to come like mad.”
Zychowski, whose hotel offers sport fishing and a number of eco-tours and recreational activities, hopes that the airport and the new roads will bring enough tourists to fill the 84 beds in the 12 two-story cabins that he and his partners have built along the beach. In return, the lodge will put local residents to work.
Zychowski employs a team of Puerto Jiménez natives to make beds, clean, cook, and serve hungry visitors. More tourists, more employment, he reasons.
But flocks of tourists to the Osa Peninsula are precisely what some people fear.
So far, tourists have mainly been attracted by mother nature. The area's isolation and lack of construction has helped preserve one of the planet's most diverse stocks of flora and fauna. Small eco-lodges attract a modest number of tourists who come to marvel at the wildlife and forests of Osa's national parks and refuges.
Alejandra Monge, executive director of the Corcovado Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting the peninsula's Corcovado National Park, worries that the amount of people that an international airport would attract will threaten the natural beauty that has so far been conserved.
“The parks in the zone barely have the capacity to attend the amount of people that there are now,” Monge said. “When you build an international airport one thing comes right after another – first the airport, then the Marriott. There are not enough resources here to satisfy that kind of demand.”
Monge likens the proposed airport here to the international airport in Liberia, the capital of the northwestern province of Guanacaste, a project that facilitated floods of foreign investment and spurred a high-rise condominium and mega-resort craze. Some developments in Guanacaste have led to violent clashes over natural resources, especially water supplies.
“That's not the type of development model we need here,” she said. “We need small hotels. People love the rustic jungle lodges here. They preserve the nature and most of them are in the hands of locals, which gives people here the opportunity to learn the business too.”
The large-scale and often haphazard development schemes in Guanacaste have left a lasting impression on people's minds, and many fear that similar plans here will ruin Osa's unique tranquility and beauty, and threaten its natural wealth.
But Alberto Cole, the mayor of the Osa Municipality, says that the airport will not lead to rampant development.
Zoning Plans
A team of researchers at the University of Costa Rica in San José are drafting the final versions of the regulatory and zoning plans for the Osa Peninsula. Cole said the plans will be completed within three months.
While the final drafts must pass through a series of steps before the municipality adopts them, Cole said that once in place, the new guidelines will help maintain the small scale that has so far characterized the development of Costa Rica's ecological gem.
“We don't want development without limits,” Cole said. “We have a market, a brand here of sustainable development, not mega-projects, and that's the style we want to keep. What we are after is quality, not quantity.”
Among the plans are limits on hotel sizes – no more than eight meters in height. If a developer cuts down trees for a building, he or she must plant others nearby. In total, Cole said, only 20 percent of the Osa's territory will be developable.
Later this year, the National Training Institute (INA) will open a center here to offer free English classes to residents in order to prepare them for an influx of North American travelers. With a better grasp of the language, taxi drivers can become tour guides and local pulperías can supply goods to visitors, Cole believes.
But those who oppose having the Osa so closely linked to the global community claim that locals will see few benefits from international visitors.
Rosa Jiménez, 39, also sells coconut oil in Barrio Agujas. The 20-hectare farm that she lives next to has been in the hands of Costa Ricans for as long as she has been alive. She sells bottles of oil to her neighbors “every once in a while.”
But with the freshly paved roads that pass the farm, the property's value has risen sharply and the family has decided to sell. A North American man has visited the farm several times in the past two months.
Jiménez doesn't know what his intentions are, but she does know that foreigners have a tendency to buy products elsewhere.
“I hope there is work,” she said. “It would be nice if the people who come, come and buy from us. But I don't think they will. They have their own suppliers. They buy their supplies in large supermarkets or they bring their own. They don't buy from us.”
Even Cole admitted that few tourists stay and spend money in small towns such as Barrio Agujas and Sierpe. Rather, they arrive in Osa and go directly to hotels or to the beaches, such as those at Drake Bay.
For Cole, a possible solution is to build on the natural or cultural attractions of these towns. Palmar Norte, an economically depressed gateway town to the Osa, could benefit from museums and tours that showcase the area's historical sites and archeological treasures, such as the pre-Colombian stone spheres fashioned by the region's indigenous inhabitants.
Another option, he said, is for the residents of these pueblitos to travel or move to Drake Bay or Puerto Jiménez to work in new hotels or as tour guides.
But for Catalina Arias, traveling, other than her one trip per week to the beach to collect coconuts, doesn't seem appealing. She just hopes that buses that will fly past her house on the new blacktop road en route to their respective hotels will stop, once in a while, to say hello.
“They will build the airport and they will build the highways and that's fine,” she said. “The people will come. I'll still be here, God willing, making coconut oil. I just hope they don't forget about me.”
Francesco Vicenzi
Tico Times
The road that lopes past her house, where she once slogged through mud up to her knees to make the two-kilometer trek to the beach, is now paved.
For decades, she walked with her daughter and her neighbor's horse to the coast every week, often through heavy rainfall and muck, to collect 150 coconuts and carry them to her home in Barrio Agujas.
Sitting on a small, log stool outside her house, she scrapes the meat out of the coconut, dilutes it, filters it through a hand towel, and squeezes it into coconut oil for cooking and for skin creams. She funnels the liquid into half-liter plastic bottles and sells each one for ¢ 3,000 ($5.52). Alone, she can fill about 30 bottles per month.
Arias, who says she is somewhere around 74 years old, still makes the hike to the shore each week, but now her feet stay dry. She doesn't have to wait stranded on the beach for the rain to stop because the mire is too thick for the horse to tread through or the rivers are too high to cross.
Instead, she walks along the new blacktop highway that was finished less than a year ago. Instead of inhaling dust kicked up by passing cars, the glow of yellow reflectors warns her of traffic.
Broad-shouldered concrete spans now stand alongside the rickety, one-lane bridges, built from logs or steel beams sunk into the riverbanks and topped with planks or slender sheets of metal that were once used.
“It's changing,” Arias said as she chopped a coconut in half with her machete. “This little place, yes, it's definitely changing.”
The Osa Peninsula, along Costa Rica's southern Pacific coast, has always been one of the country's most remote and least developed locations, but it's quickly being connected.
Pavement is replacing gravel. Fields that have been owned and tended by Costa Rican families for generations are being sold to foreign developers.
Plans for more hotels are being sketched out, and talk of a marina has boat owners buzzing.
A proposed international airport in Sierpe, the gateway to Drake Bay, only lacks an environmental viability study before construction begins.
For the people living here, these signs of investment and infrastructure offer the promise of jobs, capital, and a more civilized future. Some wonder, though, at what cost this development will come.
“This place is going to explode,” said Mitch Zychowski, a U.S. citizen and part-owner of the recently opened Agua Dulce Lodge and Resort here. “When that airport is built, people are going to come like mad.”
Zychowski, whose hotel offers sport fishing and a number of eco-tours and recreational activities, hopes that the airport and the new roads will bring enough tourists to fill the 84 beds in the 12 two-story cabins that he and his partners have built along the beach. In return, the lodge will put local residents to work.
Zychowski employs a team of Puerto Jiménez natives to make beds, clean, cook, and serve hungry visitors. More tourists, more employment, he reasons.
But flocks of tourists to the Osa Peninsula are precisely what some people fear.
So far, tourists have mainly been attracted by mother nature. The area's isolation and lack of construction has helped preserve one of the planet's most diverse stocks of flora and fauna. Small eco-lodges attract a modest number of tourists who come to marvel at the wildlife and forests of Osa's national parks and refuges.
Alejandra Monge, executive director of the Corcovado Foundation, a group dedicated to protecting the peninsula's Corcovado National Park, worries that the amount of people that an international airport would attract will threaten the natural beauty that has so far been conserved.
“The parks in the zone barely have the capacity to attend the amount of people that there are now,” Monge said. “When you build an international airport one thing comes right after another – first the airport, then the Marriott. There are not enough resources here to satisfy that kind of demand.”
Monge likens the proposed airport here to the international airport in Liberia, the capital of the northwestern province of Guanacaste, a project that facilitated floods of foreign investment and spurred a high-rise condominium and mega-resort craze. Some developments in Guanacaste have led to violent clashes over natural resources, especially water supplies.
“That's not the type of development model we need here,” she said. “We need small hotels. People love the rustic jungle lodges here. They preserve the nature and most of them are in the hands of locals, which gives people here the opportunity to learn the business too.”
The large-scale and often haphazard development schemes in Guanacaste have left a lasting impression on people's minds, and many fear that similar plans here will ruin Osa's unique tranquility and beauty, and threaten its natural wealth.
But Alberto Cole, the mayor of the Osa Municipality, says that the airport will not lead to rampant development.
Zoning Plans
A team of researchers at the University of Costa Rica in San José are drafting the final versions of the regulatory and zoning plans for the Osa Peninsula. Cole said the plans will be completed within three months.
While the final drafts must pass through a series of steps before the municipality adopts them, Cole said that once in place, the new guidelines will help maintain the small scale that has so far characterized the development of Costa Rica's ecological gem.
“We don't want development without limits,” Cole said. “We have a market, a brand here of sustainable development, not mega-projects, and that's the style we want to keep. What we are after is quality, not quantity.”
Among the plans are limits on hotel sizes – no more than eight meters in height. If a developer cuts down trees for a building, he or she must plant others nearby. In total, Cole said, only 20 percent of the Osa's territory will be developable.
Later this year, the National Training Institute (INA) will open a center here to offer free English classes to residents in order to prepare them for an influx of North American travelers. With a better grasp of the language, taxi drivers can become tour guides and local pulperías can supply goods to visitors, Cole believes.
But those who oppose having the Osa so closely linked to the global community claim that locals will see few benefits from international visitors.
Rosa Jiménez, 39, also sells coconut oil in Barrio Agujas. The 20-hectare farm that she lives next to has been in the hands of Costa Ricans for as long as she has been alive. She sells bottles of oil to her neighbors “every once in a while.”
But with the freshly paved roads that pass the farm, the property's value has risen sharply and the family has decided to sell. A North American man has visited the farm several times in the past two months.
Jiménez doesn't know what his intentions are, but she does know that foreigners have a tendency to buy products elsewhere.
“I hope there is work,” she said. “It would be nice if the people who come, come and buy from us. But I don't think they will. They have their own suppliers. They buy their supplies in large supermarkets or they bring their own. They don't buy from us.”
Even Cole admitted that few tourists stay and spend money in small towns such as Barrio Agujas and Sierpe. Rather, they arrive in Osa and go directly to hotels or to the beaches, such as those at Drake Bay.
For Cole, a possible solution is to build on the natural or cultural attractions of these towns. Palmar Norte, an economically depressed gateway town to the Osa, could benefit from museums and tours that showcase the area's historical sites and archeological treasures, such as the pre-Colombian stone spheres fashioned by the region's indigenous inhabitants.
Another option, he said, is for the residents of these pueblitos to travel or move to Drake Bay or Puerto Jiménez to work in new hotels or as tour guides.
But for Catalina Arias, traveling, other than her one trip per week to the beach to collect coconuts, doesn't seem appealing. She just hopes that buses that will fly past her house on the new blacktop road en route to their respective hotels will stop, once in a while, to say hello.
“They will build the airport and they will build the highways and that's fine,” she said. “The people will come. I'll still be here, God willing, making coconut oil. I just hope they don't forget about me.”
Francesco Vicenzi
Tico Times
Friday, June 4, 2010
Will The San José - Caldera Be Shut Down? Deadline Fast Approaching
The 48 hour deadline is quickly approaching, as officials of the Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes (MOPT) anxiously await the report by Autopistas del Sol, the concessionaire of the San José - Caldera highway, on its plan of action to make the road safe.Although the MOPT issued a 48 hour ultimatum this week, it is more likely that no report or decision or action will be for at least a week, as Autopistas prepares its report.
The highway and the concessionaire which opened on January 27, 2010, has been under heavy fire for problems with falling rocks and mudslides, primarily on the section of the road between Orotina and Atenas.
The week earlier a woman died while being a passenger of a motorcycle that ran into a gigantic rock that came loos from the rock wall and landed on the highway, in the middle of the night, in an area with no illumination.
Dozens of other drivers have filed claims against Autopista and the MOPT for damages to their vehicles, and more have complained that the road is unsafe.
A Colegio Federado de Ingenieros y de Arquitectos report indicates that the road is unsafe in at least 15 points along its route.
The MOPT has threatened to shut down the highway completely is Autopistas does not provide a plan of action satisfying all the concerns.
Guess who have returned to Golfito? ARA MACAO
I'm super happy to tell you that the beautiful Macaws have returned to Golfito. Have been
observed all around the Community in groups and in
pairs, from the Duty Free to Kilometro 3.
These photos were taken at the local cemetery where they were feeding in the treetops. We have achieved 5 beautiful Macaws and hopefully more return to Golfito expanding its territory and species.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Storm Alerts are on Throughout Country
Costa Rica's National Emergency Commission (CNE) declared a yellow alert on Wednesday for the Central Pacific and the Southern Zone as two distinct storm systems pounded the regions.The yellow alert is the second of the country's three alert levels.
The National Meteorological Institute (IMN) is forecasting heavy rainfall and strong winds for both areas through Thursday.
The first of the two systems struck the Pacific Coast on Tuesday night and, as of Wednesday afternoon, had flooded 60 houses and downed large tree branches near the Central Pacific coast towns of Jacó and Quepos.
The Red Cross reported that a fallen tree along the highway in Quepos destroyed one home and damaged the roof of a hotel.
In total, 1,000 people have been affected by the storm systems. The CNE has sent supplies such as blankets and plastic tarps to communities where homes have lost roofs.
The Central Valley, the Northern Zone and the Caribbean are currently under green alert, the lowest of the country's three alert levels.
By Mike McDonald
Tico Times Staff
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