A City Besieged

To celebrate New Year’s Eve, I convince Pecos that we should visit San Vito, a small community a half day’s drive south near the Panama border. I’d read that this scenic town of a few thousand people was founded in the 1850s by Italian immigrants and that its many restaurants offered the most authentic meals outside of Rome. On the way home we would take a distant side trip to unchartered territory in the heart of the mountains. We would search for the tiny Indian village of Boruco and its annual festival.
About 30 miles south of San Isidro de El General, the land widens for a few dozen miles as we pass sea-green oceans of pineapple plantations – a most fragrant drive. These spiky, knee-high plants went on for miles and were broken occasionally by rusty, lopsided shacks of corrugated tin, presumably housing for the agricultural workers. We pass two ultra modern Del Monte processing plants and I vow never to buy a can of pineapple again. We’ll have our own on our little finca and will eat in season.

We turn off the Pan-American Highway onto Highway 2, the southerly route to distant San Vito. We are in farming country – pastures and patches of forest, both tropical and hardwood – but a few mountains away from the highway the map shows huge areas of mangrove swamps and dense jungles running to both oceans. Caution signs warn of monkeys. There are no other highways, paved or even gravel, that run east and west in the southern third of this country. For the north-south routes there are only the Pan-Am, Highway 2 and a narrow partially-paved road winding here and there along each coast.

Highway 2 is an extremely rugged blacktop road, sometimes two-laned and most often not, twisting sharply up and down the crests of the mountains. The views are spectacular and my guidebook claims this is the most scenic route in all of Costa Rica. I think the vista from our village is just as beautiful. We take it slow due to the dozens or possibly hundreds of bread-box-deep potholes, a few four feet wide. Pecos drove as if it was a slow-paced game, dodging holes this way, then that, and missed most – until he hit one deep enough dead on that knocked my pierced earrings out.

San Vito was delightful. This place has a completely different feel than the Costa Rica we’d seen to date. Here the men strutted and wore pointy boots and cowboy hats. Women dressed differently, too, many wearing long dark skirts and carrying straw baskets. We heard Italian spoken on the steep busy streets and several shops had Italian names. Many of the residents were fair-haired with light eyes, reminding me of my Italian mother. Not one other tourist or gringo in sight. We bought baby clothes for a friend and army-green olive oil for us. We browsed a few boutiques and clerks spoke to us first in Italian, then Spanish.

We admired the life-sized friendship statue of two children with umbrella in the central park, dedicated to “La Fraternidad Italo-Costarricense.” We checked into the historic El Rino Hotel on the main street and walked up the street to dinner for the best cannelloni and lasagna a la Bolognese either of us had ever had.

The main church in the heart of town was having a New Year’s Eve service. The choir songs filled the downtown and attendees spilled out onto the lawn. From our hotel balcony we watched as groups of people walked down the streets afterwards. Girls were dressed in organdy dresses; boys wore bow ties.

Soon all was quiet except for an occasional dog barking. It was 8:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The streets were deserted; not even the taxis passed by any more. The few taverns that we’d seen were closed, steel garage doors pulled tight to the sidewalk.

We walked to the only store still open, a small grocery a few blocks away, and bought a dusty bottle of champagne and two glasses and returned to our balcony. Clearly, this heavily Catholic town was not the partying type. We later watched New Years being celebrated in Berlin and then an old episode of Bonanza voiced over in Spanish on the black-and-white TV in our room, and went to sleep.

Suddenly we were knocked awake by blasts that shook our hotel walls. Bombs were falling! Machine guns set off noisy series of pow-pow-pows! Blasts of fire lit up the sky! We ran to our hotel window and saw fireworks – massive fireworks, that is, with those shot from many houses alone being comparable to the full municipal show of any rural town in eastern Oregon on July 4th. These were set off at every few houses and every corner throughout the entire town of San Vito.

Colorful streamers of falling fire filled the sky. People were cheering, dozens of car alarms were screaming and dogs howled across the valley. The noise was deafening. Night turned to colorful bursts of day. The exteriors of entire houses were completely lit up as huge fireworks were torched, exploded upward and then fell in flames onto tiled roofs and canvas canopies – repeated simultaneously at house after house after house. Bottle rockets were shot off dangerously low at sharp angles, barely missing some roofs and sometimes streaking between buildings. Bonfires were set at a few street corners. This mind-blowing performance lasted a good twenty minutes and when it ended the entire valley was swathed in dense gunpowder smoke. It was all so surreal. Hours later we could still hear loud music and happy shouts coming from the many taverns that had re-opened.

The people of San Vito celebrate New Year’s Eve in colossal style! 