The streets are paved with honey.

Down here in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, in this quaint little sunny beach town, the streets are paved with honey.  Well it’s not really honey, but sugar cane molasses that the local Ticos call honey.  During the busy season when it’s dry they spray it on the roads to keep the dust down.  I’ve been equal parts amused and amazed at the infrastructure down here and every day find myself asking the question: how the heck does it all work?  What makes this town tick?

Even twenty years ago the only way to get around here in Guanacaste Province was by horseback or walking everywhere you went.  A few main dirt roads developed, and now there are some really nice paved roads.  When the international airport came in Liberia, about 45 minutes east of Tamarindo, the infrastructure started to grow.  Improvements were made to the roads in Tamarindo, too, keeping up with the real estate boom of expensive $300k condos with ocean views.  The main road is paved but the other few streets snaking up the hills are still dirt.  During the rainy season they get washed out and pocked with two foot deep holes and channels, making them almost impassible by car.  The foreign real estate developers have offered to pave the roads for free using all private funding but the municipality turned them down.  They are holding out for big kickbacks to sweeten the pot.  I guess free roads aren’t good enough for them – they want to get paid for someone to pave their roads.  The municipality also collects public funds and private donations from local businesses which they promise will go towards paving the roads, but so far nothing has happened because of back-room anti-tourist resentment towards Tamarindo.  

  

So every Christmas season when thousands of partiers will tread all over town and kick up a dust storm that can be seen from miles away, the tanker truck makes the rounds and sprays sugar cane molasses all over the streets.  Once it dries it gets packed down pretty good and actually feels like an asphalt paved road, but it stinks to high heaven.  Everyone’s flip flops stick to it as they walk, but it actually works like a charm to keep the dust down.

Most streets have no sidewalks so when cars are coming people have to scoot over as far as possible.  Pedestrians getting hit by cars are a real problem down here, and fatalities are very frequent, especially when half the population is drunk and stumbling around the road and the other half driving drunk.  Just a few months ago the town’s favorite empanada vendor, and old lady with a perverted sense of humor who was drunk by 2pm every day, got hit and killed.  The tradition in Latin America is that when men and women are walking together on the street the woman always walk on the inside – furthest from the cars – for safety.  You’ll see pickup trucks with twenty kids in the back sliding around, motorcycles with the father driving, the mother on back, and a baby in his lap, and the father the only one with a helmet between them all.  Add a few ranchers on horseback, stray dogs barking at them, and a surfer bicycling with his surfboard in his arm and you have a picture of the average roadway.

Private security is paramount, and most banks, restaurants, malls, and nice apartment complexes have their own security guards.  However many of them are skinny kids with no guns that only work day shifts because of budget constraints, leaving the same venues completely unguarded at night.  Their wages are paltry so they often supplement their income by participating in inside robbery jobs.  At a certain point I start wondering why this even makes sense.

The police in Guanacaste Province are at best nonexistent, at worst a joke.  Until a few years ago there wasn’t even a real police force in Tamarindo or these other little beach towns that line the coast.  That evolved to a force of a couple officers, but their small one room station in a private home was moved from their central location in town to a remote building outside of town in Villarreal, about 15 minutes away.  The land was too valuable in town so real estate developers were the ones to actually kick the police force out.  So now they had a couple police officers with one minor problem – they didn’t have any vehicles.  When there was a problem and the police were needed in town they would literally have to hitchhike into town along the side of the road, hoping a passing car would pick them up.  How the hell would they transport a criminal back to the station?

As the town grew it became apparent that a real police force was needed to protect the tourism industry, even if it was just the perception of a policeman who didn’t have to hitchhike into town.  Between private donations and municipal funding they managed to put enough together to buy the police force its first police car.   What a proud moment indeed to have a shiny brand new vehicle for the police, but there was one unforeseen problem; cars need gas.  In this Third World country where gas is $6 a gallon and environmental regulations mandate that no stations exist within 20 kilometers of the shoreline, filling the tank is a huge financial commitment.  The cops started a fuel fund for their car by collecting donations from the patrons of a local restaurant.  When the tourists and local business owners kicked in enough scratch to buy them a tank of gas, the police force would be in mobile, agile, and hostile once again…at least until they got down to E again.

 Fast forward a few years and the town of Tamarindo has grown to be the second largest resort town behind Playa Jaco, with luxury condo developments, though have of them are vacant, and a paved main road through town.  The police force has grown as well and finally has funding to keep the seventeen or so officers on the payroll, though their main priority is always fundraising to extend their lease one more month and keep from getting evicted from the station.  You can see them congregate in the front parking lot as you drive out of town, leaning lazily on their motorcycles and sweating in bulletproof vests.  Every morning at 6am and then at 6pm they form ranks for a flag ceremony.  Between the fundraising and constant flag raisings they seem to me more Girl Scouts than policemen.  You might as well put them in little brown skirts.  Let me know if you see them selling cookies and put me down for twenty boxes of Samoas.  

The average policeman probably makes about $200 US a month.    Now that the municipality has increased the traffic fines their focus is busting motorists to collect bribes.  A drunk driving offense used to cost about $40, a speeding ticket about $15.  They never took anyone into the station, but just gave them a summons and a ticket.  Of course the tourists would just ignore it and never pay since they were leaving back to the states within a week.  Recently those fines were raised to an astronomic $300-$500 for the same offenses!  So the police can now collect a $100 bribe to let someone go and avoid the fine, and applications to join the police force have gone up 1,000%.  

Everyone drives drunk around here – what about it?  Life is short and hard and happy, but survival is a daily reality, and there’s not much else to say.  You’d have to be in an alcoholic coma to even get the police’s attention on the road, unless they see a missing license plate or another reason to pull you over and garner a bribe. Most traffic accidents turn into fatalities because it takes so long for the ambulance to come and the hospital is so far away.  They are seen as a huge inconvenience to other drivers, causing huge traffic jams on the one lane road and knocking out electricity or internet for the day when they hit the pole.  People either need to wait a few hours to get through, peel off and go on back dirt farm roads to try and get around, or turn around and go back to Tamarindo.  Pistol Pete sometimes gets frustrated when the cops drive slowly, and rushes past them in the wrong lane against oncoming traffic.  If they were too pull him over he’d let them know that with a few phone calls to the right people they’d be out of a job by manyana.  

The other duties of their job includes writing reports on petty burglaries that will never be looked into, break-ins when a Critter climbs onto a second story balcony and lifts everything not bolted down, a tourist gets a knife pulled on them by a Nicaraguan hood outside Pacifco, and showing up when a tourist refuses to pay a hooker.  It’s not in the law books, but a precedent was set recently that even if it’s a transvestite hooker that fooled you you’re still required to pay.  Locals have the back of locals.  

Did I mention that the cops are expected to single handedly regulate immigration and shut down the drug cartels?  Oh yeah, small detail.  Costa Rica has become a haven to drug traffickers from Columbia and Nicaragua, who run all sorts of smuggling rings, fishing boats, and helicopter drops to get tons of cocaine into this country, where it can be exported all over the world to more profitable markets.  The streets (and bars) are filled with rough Columbianos, Nicas, and Dominicanos, who pull them out of the water and supplying them to the Ticos to transport them to San Jose, or the Critters (local surfers) to step on them a few times and sell them to the tourists.  Drug cartels have billions of dollars behind them.  They have a lot of guns – really big machine guns.  Costa Rica has no military.  The few cops that exist make $200 a month.  You do the math.  It’s the Wild West out here, and the only justice is street justice.  So if a hooker that was smuggling for the Columbians ends up not handing over the product then she might find herself dead by the river, her stomach cut open so they can extract the coke-packed condoms she swallowed, her hands cut off as a message for other mules not to have sticky fingers.      

It gets so bad that a while ago the cops actually got robbed at gunpoint by banditos.  The cops had no money so the robbers took their guns and sped off.  

The one and only main road in Tamarindo ends with a roundabout next to the beach, where palm trees sway in the breeze and bonfires light the night.  It’s lined with the bar and club Pacifico, Fo Fo’s store Urban Eclectic, a ceramic store, Caracollas (their fish tacos are the best meal in Tamarindo) and several other tourists and surf shops.  The roundabout gets crazy during the holiday season when rich Tico tourists and pale Gringo travelers swell the town’s 1,000 local population to 6,000 or so.  It seems like they are all congregated either in Witch’s Rock surf camp on the north end of town, or the roundabout.  Cars are parked two and three deep with their hatchbacks open and college aged kids blasting music and drinking out of coolers.  Delivery trucks fight to get through.  Jugglers, gypsy performers, and fire eaters put on shows and try to collect tips from the people passing, further crowding the street.  Drunks stumble out of Pacifico, laughing and holding each other up, and buy $1 shishkabobs cooked right there on a charcoal grill fanned with cardboard.  Pickpockets and Critters selling weed jockey for position around them.  Everyone wants a parking spot and every inch of dirt in the rotunda, especially on the center island that is shaded by palm trees, is invaluable.  

This whole fray is refereed by street parking attendants.  No one knows where they came from, who hired them, or even if they are official.  Most likely they are just drunks who threw on fluorescent green mesh vests and started assisting people pull into narrow spots without whacking their bumpers.  Supposedly you are paying for them to guard your car against thieves as well, but a while back when Pistol Pete went into the store for 5 minutes the sport rack was stolen off the top of his car.  How the hell is a security guard not going to see someone unscrew a whole rack from the top of a SUV in 5 minutes?  He’s paid to look the other way, and that’s how it goes in Third World countries.  

My favorite parking attendant is the skinny old man with rotted teeth.  He’s armed with a rolled up newspaper that he uses to point, poke, tap the back of cars, and swat at people who don’t pay him enough.  The other night Pistol Pete and I had to get out really quickly and we didn’t have enough coins on us, so he was giving us a hard time in English and Spanish, telling us we were “chicos malos” and “bullshit”.  Pete told him to F off and his tip of the day was not to eat yellow snow.  The next day he whistled when our car came up but we were his best friends again.  The ongoing relationship with a parking attendant is easily as sophisticated and fickle as any Middle East peace treaty.  

During the high season the banks run out of US dollars, and then run out of money all together.  They usually get more money around 1pm the next day as frustrated tourists line up at the ATM.  Bars run out of booze - Que Tuanis ran out of Flor De Cana rum by the 24^th, though to be fair I think it had more to do with Pistol Pete and me than the lack of infrastructure.  Restaurants run out of food – Bar One had to stay closed on Monday because they didn’t have any more sushi to serve.  So it goes in my favorite beach town in the world, Tamarindo, Costa Rica, where there is honey in the streets but all else is broken.  How does the town function?  Because they always have beer.  Somehow the Imperial trucks always find a way to get through.