Santa Elena and Monteverde are two towns that are now connected to the international community by tourism. Hotels are numerous and “American” food is easy to find here. Theft is low because there are only two unpaved roads off the mountain community. Once there was a mugging but the local tour guides set up road blocks and the thieves were caught on their way out. They were taught a tough lesson by the locals.

This is your quintessential tourist town. Anyone you need to talk to speaks your language(mostly English or French), little artisan shop sell you hand crafted items and there are bars and restaurants. In fact we visited an artisan co-op in Monteverde that was run by local women. Money going directly to the women meant that families were more likely to be fed well and have decent standards of living. Next door was a coffee shop. Coffee is a big deal in Costa Rica, and this coffee was special, so I’m told.

The old Quaker factory produces wonderful ice cream. I tried fig and one other exotic fruit that I cannot remember. The production led to problems however. Cheese production has by-products such as whey. This was originally dumped into the watershed, which led to drops in aquatic organism populations. The solution was to feed this whey to a newly established pig farm which had its own problems. First was a smell that would blow into town, the second was mosquitoes growing from pig pens and waste treatment ponds. Mauricio was hired as an insect pest expert. He ventured out everyday to sample mosquito populations for two days until the community representative said to him, “We know their populations are exploding. they are investing the town, you need to stop them not survey them!”
Mauricio recommended a biological control agent, a commercial bacteria that attacks mosquito larvae. This has been their solution ever since.

Culture here has also been affected by tourism. Money flowing into a town that originally was so disconnected from its own country brings its own influences. They have a hospital with a helipad to transport emergency patients to larger hospitals. There is talk of building a real road into town yet qualities of a town are still bare such as a central government building, a quality library. A football field is on the edge of town and property is sold in “tourist prices” due to the desire for foreigners to settle in such a beautiful location.
Two different important topics of tourist towns in Costa Rica are sex and drugs. There is a bit of white worship going in these towns and the young hip tourists are well dresses, travel globally and smoke herb. The local kids look up to these ideals and try to emulate them. There is no problem finding marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, and other narcotics in these towns, and all of them are criminal offenses under Costa Rican law.
These towns have bars and locals and tourist towns have tourists. Local men go out and pick up young, international women for a night and then often happen to pick up STDs, which they often spread to their wives.
These things happen everywhere of course, but for a small tourist town like Santa Elena, news travels fast and these things simply were not as prevalent twenty years ago.

And yet being aware of this issues never feels like being on the path to solving them. Perhaps for us, being aware is enough. Perhaps a change in the tourist’s behavior is necessary, for example, appreciation for local cultures and incorporating it into the ecotourism. Even local culture is complicated.
Mauricio gave us a story of a taxi driver who would run over snakes whenever he encountered them on the road. Since Santa Elena has become a tourist town, this driver received large tips for pulling over and petting the snakes he sees.
So I am happy that ecotourism has affected the old culture. People here used to not appreciate their forests and now it brings them an economy. And I am disappointed that hard drugs find their way to party towns and I am disappointed that people still do not insist on condoms for one-night-stands. The good and the bad of the world are mixed together in these communities, and the forests are protected and money flows.