Christmas is always wonderful but it wasn’t the same this year – our traditional festive events, including the grant Tope (horse-riding) and float procession through town were cancelled, as a public health measure against the flue pandemic.

Funny though, they went ahead in San Jose! – so we’re left wondering if our municipality is more cautious, or just decided to save money on street cleaning – 600+ horses sure make a mess!

Bang went plan one for my December column so I set out to photograph typical Tico celebrations, including beautiful nativity scenes, but the Nikon memory card packed in!

C’est la vie and all that – but happy to say we had a wonderful festive season and rounded off 2009 in style with a Hogmanay party, complete with fireworks at midnight, and Auld Lang Syne – nice that Tico friends recognize the tune, known the world over!

We’ve started 2010 on a happy note, welcoming back fellow countryman Malcolm Wright, featured in last June’s column, who has clinched his deal on a small farm away up a wonderful valley an hour south of us (another triumph and satisfied customer for WeLoveCostaRica.com’s Recommended Realtors).

Now here to assess future building/management plans, he and John had a day up there talking agriculture and techie stuff. Malcolm was keen to visit a nearby trout farm where owner Alex generates his own electricity… road sign says 300m but John reckons that’s the vertical distance!

NEVER believe a distance sign here… they trudged up a mountain face and were staggered to find Alex had also built a small wooden restaurant where he cooks the trout – carting all the materials up on horseback! Tico’s really are amazing, but also born optimists – there won’t be many hiking up there for dinner in the dark!

After a rush to get garden jobs done before the rains ended, things got a big neglected over the festive season. My new garden is lovely but still immature, so there’s plenty of room for the rampant weeds – ‘mala hierba’ – ‘bad herbs’ in Spanish, bang on!

I’ve spent hours roaming river-sides collecting dead bark and breaking it up to mulch the bromeliad and agave bed – I think the ‘woodland’ theme suits them well; amazing how they’ve grown in five months.

We took UK visitor friends to the trout farm/restaurant up our own valley, where the owner is also a plantsman – couldn’t resist indulging in some cacti and succulents… just babies but several are good ground cover and they’re ideal for another empty and very sunny spot; this plant collecting is such fun. Several orchids are coming into flower too, here’s a pretty one below.

As I write, we’re looking forward to Cornell University wind ensemble coming to do a concert with our music school – more on that next time. For now, Happy New Year and best wishes to my readers, and special thanks for many kind words of friendship and encouragement in 2009.

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