Greetings from San Jose Costa Rica,

I remember staying in a remote hotel called the "white house" in Spanish: Casa Blanca... or something close to that. As I had two broken arms there wasn't much I could do than read and make simple notes for something to write later on. The hotel being so remote did not make it easy to walk into town, but the owner occasionally drove guest into town. The hotel had it's own security, an a guy who walked around the perimeter with a loaded pistol; that didn't really make me feel very safe. The hotel sat at the edge of several coffee plantations and one day during my walks I ran into a worker leading a donkey loaded down with big bags of coffee and immediately thought of the television ad popular at the time of "Juan Valdez."

One of the other guests invited me to join him and a friend who "had" to drive over to Limon on the east coast of the country. On the way these two guys stopped to buy a kilo of marijuana, which freaked me out. We then visited a native friend living in a hut in the jungle and learned about life on the edge of subsistence... and all the snakes in the area...

During one of my bus rides I suddenly felt the vehicle lurch and sway slowly as if we had been in a collision even though we were driving down a straight and level highway. As I puzzled over the strange sensations several of the other passengers began murmuring and I heard the Spanish word, terremoto pronounce in hushed tones. At the time I had no idea what the word meant in English. As I sat pondering the strange sensations I noticed the distant land moving in enormous waves like we were looking at a stormy sea from the deck of a massive ship. I couldn't believe my eyes, but there it was, waves of earth rolling towards us. The earthquake lasted less than a minute, but the bizarre feelings stayed with me until we got back to the city where damage to many high rise buildings could be seen.

Peace

Fred L Bellomy