Medicine-ball Watermelon; plastic bags of ice cold water, cannon-ball Cantaloupe, mango ‘pipas frias’, giant mandarinas, granadillas, face towels, windfall Zapotes, one un-identified fruit and two promotional mugs for the incongruously named ‘Wilson Hotel’.
And that’s just the haul of physical goodies gifted to us whilst on the Costa Rican road.
Naturally, each has a story.
New county, new terms and conditions. Trader stands are arranged along the verge of the four-lane PanAm highway and, as is customary, all will be selling exactly the same range of five fruits; you can tell because there will always be a hand-scribed list of offerings a short distance previously. I can recognise all the names with the exception of one: ‘pipas frias’… something cold and probably associated with the un-powered ice chest that is prominently placed on every stand.
An articulated lorry seems to be having some mechanical problem. It’s stopped up ahead close to one of those stands, it pulls away before we pull up behind, then stops again , this time in the middle of that dual carriageway. We come up to it and the driver and his wife jump out and hold up two plastic bags of frozen mango slush. Nectar. He’s a weekend cycling road warrior and now we know what a ‘pipa fria’ is.
Thankfully, the gargantuan watermelon that would easily destabilise my bike if it wasn’t for the counterbalancing cantaloupe, materialised at the end of the day and we were able to reduce its weight somewhat before having to haul it over a mountain. Fortunately, this one’s seedless, but it’s also a diuretic. No scatter-gun spitting, just a mildly disturbed night. A balanced sum; fortunately we have a cabin room with private facilities. This largesse was a gift from a neighbour who keeps a fruit stall, a retired fruit-seller who once flew a crop-duster plane in the ‘el Norto’.
Another day, another apposite story. The weekly 21km Sunday road run. We pass them, we stop to slurp coffee, they pass us. So it goes on; we’re all heading the same way. A long hill climb, they all pass us so effortlessly and then stop at the top…. to present us with bags of ice cold water, when it’s they that need it more. What I find interesting, and it’s symptomatic of Costa Rica; not just the generosity, but that it’s a simple plastic bag and not a single use plastic bottle to be discarded further along the route. Secondly, the waste is collected up and packed away. Country wide, verge litter is a rare sighting.
As for the delicately flavoured grenadilla, it is but a maraca filled with frog spawn, which gives the the nickname: globby fruit. And that leaves the anonymous tropical specimen. We were reassured that it was normal for our lips to be affected, that the effect would wear off, which, in truth, isn’t all that reassuring. Again it’s a subtle soft taste, not unpleasant, and there is an ‘effect’. A coating of light latex that, subconsciously has you using your teeth to scrape at your lips. It does wear off through time, but I would suggest sharing only one at a sitting, unlike the giant pineapple which was way too easy to gorge on.
It’s these memories rather than the more marketable ‘#VisitCosta Rica’ images gleaned from every brochure, that linger. True, the nature spotting is abundant, even if the really close encounters were more likely to be roadkills. The humidades werean exuberance of enthusiastic flora and the coastline a cliché for a palm fringed paradise.
As for the face towels, those we stowed, but the mugs regretfully were left behind.