Many of you are asking “Why are you in Costa Rica, Jeff? What business are you involved in?” Well, I promise to reveal these to you all in time, but at this moment the details are being ironed out between us, the Canadian gov’t people as well as the Costa Rican gov’t people, and we are still in the process of recruiting some bilingual assistants and what not, and the details are changing at times. I won’t reveal anything but the fact that the business plan is developing quite well, and also that I am very much enjoying my fabulous trip to Costa Rica.

July 4th was a photo-less day. We had a meeting with the Minister of Labour, Sr. Morales, at his office in San Jose, Costa Rica. He as well as his directers and aides attended the meeting, and we were a party of 4 ourselves. I wasn’t going to snap photos at such a spot, obviously.

July 5th - Friday was the beginning of our days off, and we took off to a resort owned by my client’s old family friends, in the San Carlos region. It’s called the Tilajari Resort. It is a 2.5 hour drive, but we sent our driver off with our luggage, and we took a helicoptor in the morning.

I’m not supposed to do that but I managed to climb on while the airfield staff were not around. It was a private airfield.

There’s the rest of my group onboard before take-off.

View of the city right after taking off.

Foggy countryside of Costa Rica

More fields, ranches, pastures, trees and all that stuff.

These gorges are incredibly deep, although you cannot see how deep it is. The gorges are all covered with thick forrests like this.

A mill that my client used to own/run. Well, she still owns it but nothing goes on other than land value increase.

Fields after fields of crop.

We arrived at the resort within 30 minutes of take-off, even after circling and zig-zagging a bit trying to find that mill that my client used to run! We landed on their soccer field.

The first thing I noticed was the wealth of wild animals in the resort. Here are some gigantic iguanas!!!

An array of tropical plants.

This is the trail/driveway that runs through it.

Unfortunately I was having too much fun that I forgot to take photos of the pool and jacuzzi… sorry. But apparanlty I’m being treated to that place again before I leave so I’ll see what I can do!

We had a fabulous dinner with the owners of the resort:

Notice the orange canister of “Off” bug spray? Yeah, most place in Costa Rica has a lot of mosquitos, and you need to diligently keep that stuff on you to avoid itchy spots.

The downside of this resort was the fact that they had no wireless internet whatsoever, but instead, 1 computer with a small CRT monitor, which was hooked up to a 12kb/s dial-up type modem (a Motorola Brand) which was basically hell for me. Considering that Cable internet is rated at 100Mbps (although you never get the full speed), this internet speed was 1/8333 of the usual speed I am used to!!! One of the reasons why it’s tough to get internet into rural places in Costa Rica is that the telecommunications industry is under a monopoly through a government agency, and that is simply destined to bring inefficiency, lack of speed and service to the industry.

We came back to San Jose today by car. The drive would have been beautiful had it not been for the fog on the way - no pictures of the white misty landscape.

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