A Green Christmas
By Peter Worthington, The Toronto Sun

The first time I visited Costa Rica in the early 1990s, I got to see more of their two-tier medical system than I did of the country.

The second time was this Christmas, and medical matters were not on the agenda. Rain and cloud forests were, and beaches -- not awfully Christmassy, but a hell of a lot better than street gangs shooting Boxing Day shoppers.

On my first visit, I was in the midst of a heart attack that stretched from Cuba, through Mexico City, to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, driving over ghastly roads that culminated in being airlifted to a hospital in San Jose.

Costa Rica has socialized medicine -- free hospital care, but also private hospitals, which became my choice.

A week in hospital, being treated by doctors who'd been trained in Toronto's Wellesley Hospital, cost $1,000. A bargain that provoked questions about why a system that works well in CR couldn't work in Canada.

Queries on my recent trip drew complaints that while Costa Ricans pay taxes for free medical care, immigrants from neighbouring Nicaragua (especially) come to the country for care that, by law, hospitals can't refuse. Hospital waiting lists are now six to eight months long.

CR has long been a favoured holiday and retirement destination for Americans and Canadians.

For years it was the most "civilized" of Central American countries -- free, safe (protected by the U.S.), stable, comparatively inexpensive.

After a brief civil war in 1948, a revered political leader, Figueres Ferrer, introduced lasting reforms in civil rights, the vote for women and blacks, banning the communist party, nationalizing banks, and introducing the innovative policy of one-term presidents -- which in theory discourages the corruption that is inevitable with political longevity (as in Canada?).

Interestingly, Cost Rica has no military -- which saves a lot of money and works so long as the U.S. offers protection.

It's a policy Canada seems to adopt, while pretending otherwise.

This isn't to say CR doesn't have problems. Unemployment is rising, yet it's hard for entrepreneurs to start businesses. Being socialist, the bureaucracy can be stifling.

And CR is no longer the only democracy in the region; El Salvador is now a rival for tourism and trade.

What impresses most visitors to CR, apart from the diversity of plant, bird and animal life, is that the people seem friendly and co-operative by nature.

There is poverty and rising crime, but an innate courtesy seems to prevail.

In the "cloud forest," a couple of hours drive into the mountains from San José, there are a whole set of different trees and bird life -- including the endangered Resplendent Quetzal, which is a green-and-red parrot-like bird with a metre-long tail. And hummingbirds the size of starlings.

The rainforest in the southwest corner of CR, where we spent a couple of days, is considered one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth. Some 750 species of trees (the whole of North America has 800 species), 350 species of birds and 117 species of reptiles and 10,000 kinds of insects are crowded into the 100,000 acres of Corcovado National Park. Jaguars, monkeys, anteaters, too.

On the Osa peninsula we (me, wife, three grandkids and their parents) rented the home of Adrian Forsyth, a Toronto biologist with an international reputation for saving -- or trying to save -- the world's diminishing forests.

One irritation of flying direct Toronto to San José was mechanical problems with the plane which delayed the five-hour trip to around 13 hours. Still, it was better than my daughter's flight from Washington, which was delayed in Miami, during which the family went to the beach and witnessed a seaplane bound for the Bahamas crash in the water, killing all 20 passengers.

All things considered, an Air Canada delay was preferable.