LA Weekly

Friday night I treated myself to a night at Si Como No, a "green hotel" that heats its water with solar energy and recycles all its water into the landscape. It's part of an association of "sustainable tourism" hotels across Costa Rica. The rooms are full of signs reminding you to turn off the lights and limit your water use.

I'm sure it's an improvement over other developments in the region, but it still seemed to me like an awful lot of concrete and asphalt had been spread over a perenially wet landscape, which can't be good. Why not dirt paths and bioswales? Even the balustrades are concrete sculpted to look like bamboo. It's odd, because there's bamboo everywhere here -- it's a renewable resource, and non-indigenous to this lanscape. Why not use it?

A lot of wildlife hangs out there, though. I nearly tripped over an iguana. And it sure is beautiful. I watched a wild thunderstorm from the bar. And I the morning, from my concrete balcony jutting out into the jungle, I watched the capuchin (cara blanca here, for their white faces) monkeys play for an hour. You can tell they're there by the way the trees are bouncing.

The hotel's owner is from Hollywood; I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to him before I go home.

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