During November 0f 1992 I took my first solo holiday to Costa Rica in Central America. This travelogue contains many photos scanned to respectable size but still requiring some patience to download.
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Travel Tales - Bill O'Brien
Excursions
Costa Rica was not my first adventure, other destinations have included most
of the United States and Canada, Mexico, Hawaii, several Caribean Islands,
Britain and Spain, all in varying degrees of comfort and always with someone else. Pondering on that past has made me aware...I really did enjoy travelling alone.
This is not to say I was comfortable with my own company all the time. In fact there were moments at remote country lodgings or in viewing the expanse of the Central Valley from a verdant farm field that I wished for all that I experienced, to have another share my peace.
I believe the choice of this unique miniature democracy as a solitary travel adventure was indeed perfect for me, induced to some extent by the excellent guide books as well as thorough preliminary research with maps and travel stories. This travelogue is presented to you for your reading and viewing enjoyment, please share with me your thoughts and experiences.
My Photographic arsenal included a fixed lens waterproof Nikon compact camera with a scruffy unidentifying neck pouch. Trucking around expensive SLR cameras with a plethora of lenses and accessories is just an invitation to endless detail with your insurance company to say nothing of the inconvenience of operation in damp and unpredictable environments. I find automatic "sport style" cameras are more than adequate in auto exposure and focus to capture my travel photos for printing and scanning. I brought with me 7 rolls of 36 exposure 100 ASA Kodak Gold film and returned to Florida for processing.
Adventure is born of a free spirit and evolves by casting aside convention for the pursuit of
the unknown. Threads of this philosophy frequently guided my
path on this series of 4 separate excursions which I took on this my first Travel Tale.
- A search for the energy that gives this miniature city the vitality.
- Enriched farms of volcanic ash produce the "European Roast".
- A rough journey for unique rugged beauty.
- Country town and a view of 2 oceans.
The chosen path was determined by available cash, degree of interest and fear of the unknown.
There are many more ecological and adventurous destinations in this multi-leveled nation
and my choices, in retrospect, were safe and I suppose predictable. Return trips will be more adventurous any further afield. The first route was my sample route where I learned the practice of solo travel.
The motivating force for the development of this travelogue were the memories induced by the presence of my photo albums. Rarely a month would go by that I wouldn't sift through
the images of a truly enjoyable three weeks.
Production tools used in the Cost Rica Travel Tale
Travel tools included an 11 X 14 heavy bound drawing book and several pens and pencils. I do enjoy sketching for relaxation and experimenting with personal techniques but the sketch has limited capacity for expression in a crammed bus seat. The sketch vignettes are important for the recall of subject depth, based on the time spent viewing an event or subject.
The photographic images on this web document were digitized with a Colorburst Hand Scanner and captured on an AMIGA 1200 in IFF format. Graphics and maps were created on an AMIGA 4000 in DPaintIV and conversions were made to .gif format without dithering and reduced to 64 colors resulting in an average file size of 15000 K. A shooting ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 is average for me depending on subject, weather and quanity of cerveza consumed. There are always several shots on at least one roll of film which are not accurately documentable.
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