Raising the bar in Costa Rica

I wish I could say I am standing shoulder-to-shoulder with my compatriots as they suffer water shortages in Joburg, brutal humidity in Durban and exorbitant rates and rentals in Cape Town, but I can't.

- BEN TROVATO

While I am with you in spirit, I am, in body, on a rickety wooden bar stool in the Rio Lindo hotel on the edge of the Baru river in the surf town of Dominical on Costa Rica's wild Pacific Coast.

I feel for you all, I really do. But I'm suffering too. It's viciously hot here. The sea is 2°C warmer than the stifling air temperature.

Drinking ice-cold Imperial beer and cooling down from the inside out is the only way to stave off almost certain brain damage from hypothermia.

Developing world problems, for sure. You guys have them too.

Except here, the problems don't seem like problems. Now and then a gringo might take a machete to the face, but nothing on the scale of, say, Mexico.

There were around 900 homicides in Costa Rica in 2024. In SA, that's called Christmas.

Here, a few hundred kilometres north of the equator, most murders are linked to the drug trade. And I don't mean, “Brah, I paid for a gram and you gave me, like, a half so I'm a gonna shoot you in the face.”