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Why Travelling in Costa Rica is Special – Costa Rican Friendliness

By George Ellard ⋅ April 11, 2009 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

One thing you will notice on your travels in Costa Rica is the fact that Costa Rican people offer assistance very willingly. Perhaps the following is a generalization but when I have traveled to poorer areas of the world (i.e. Panama, Morocco and some poorer areas in the south of Spain and Portugal) the people may have helped me, but this has always been accompanied by an expectation that you compensate them.

This may be understandable to some as those who live in these areas may feel that this is their only way to survive. My comment regarding Costa Ricans though (or perhaps generalization) is related to the rich, middle class and the less well to-do people of this country. In my travels the people of Costa Rica have been nothing but helpful, kind and genuine with me and I struggle to think of a time where someone may have offended me in any of my visits. It is my personal feeling that this may have something to do with the pious focus of society here which I will touch on in a future post on Christianity in Costa Rica.

What’s more is that the people of Costa Rica I have encountered on my travels genuinely enjoy helping tourists out. Some have even refused to be compensated as was the situation with a young man on his mo-ped who helped us out when our Toyota Prado broke down a couple of years ago (although Patrick forgot to mention the random act of kindness by the young lad during that particular portion of our trip to Costa Rica.

A third type of phenomenon you will thereby not encounter in Costa Rica is what I call the Parisian effect, aptly named for the feelings I got when… you guessed it… I traveled in Paris. A place where asking for help in a high tourist area provokes the same type of reaction you would expect to get from someone after you have just t-boned their parked vehicle. The “I cannot believe you have just gone and done that and ruined my whole day” look can be offensive to say the least when you need help in a foreign place.

In any case, I believe the difference in attitudes towards tourists in Costa Rica may also have a lot to do not only with religion, but also the focus on tourism by the government. Parisians generally don’t like tourists and you as an individual are not vital to them, nor even needed. Whereas in Costa Rica I believe you are taught to understand how important tourism is to the various local economies in the areas that you visit. Please feel free to post comments with relation to this or even similar encounters (or perhaps dissimilar experiences?) with the people of Costa Rica that you may have had.