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Every Day's A Weekend: An Insider's Guide to Early Retirement and Exotic Travel

by Newton Hockey

260 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0219; ISBN 1-55212-819-9; US$25.00, C$29.95, EUR20.50, £14.50

The author and his wife realized their dream of retiring early and travelling the world. Humorous anecdotes are incorporated to illustrate the experiences of living and travelling in third world countries.

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About the book      About the author      Table of Contents and Sample excerpt      Catalogue info

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About the Book Most people dream of early retirement and of travelling to exotic places. This book describes how the author and his wife realized that dream by retiring at fifty years of age and travelled the world on a modest budget. It presents ideas on how the reader can do the same thing. It describes the countries and people who have given the writer a wonderful first ten years of retirement while his friends are still busy working. Humorous anecdotes are incorporated to illustrate the experiences of living and travelling in third world countries. The book will appeal to a very large market as it focuses on the dreams and aspirations of all those people over forty who would like to retire but who need encouragement to do so. It is an inspiration for its readers to reach their personal goals. Places described include: Central America, South-East Asia, Australasia and the British Isles. Emphasis is placed on the people encountered and the stories surrounding them. Maps and photographs illustrate the book.

About the Author Born during the Battle of Britain, Newton was educated in Newport, Monmouthshire and in Nottingham University where he received a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1963. He worked in Steel Mills and Pulp Mills in the U.K. and Canada before becoming a Consulting Engineer in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later, he became a High Tech Marketing Consultant and retired in 1990. Published works include technical articles for international lighting periodicals and building magazines as well as travel articles for local newspapers. In the summer, Newton and his wife, Noreen, live in West Vancouver, Canada where they cycle and hike in the local mountains. In the winter, they travel extensively in warm countries. Once a year they take a group of adventurous travellers to Bali and Lombok and soon they plan to take a group tour to Borneo. They spend several months each winter in Honduras, where they own a small beachfront property. Newton has three adult daughters who live in England and a son and stepdaughter living in Canada. Click here to visit the author's web site Newton Hockey

Table of Contents and Sample Excerpt

CONTENTS

Horse Riding in the Jungle

The most memorable horse ride was when we were invited to join a group of Costa Ricans on an expedition to find some caves in the mountains of Cerro Muerte. There were nine riders with two packhorses. Two of the riders were campesinos acting as guides. The organizer was a gentleman farmer called Vinicio, who operated a bus importing business in San Jose. He would drive old school buses from the U.S.A. to his factory and rebuild them for the terrible roads of Costa Rica. His beautiful girlfriend, Alejandra, accompanied him on the trek. Also with us was an American, Rick, and his athletic wife, Ileana, who was a gold medallist cyclist in the Pan American Games. Rick had moved from Alaska where he ran a windshield repair shop and had opened a similar shop in San Jose. About the only thing that Alaska and Costa Rica have in common is bad roads.

We set off at 4:30 A.M. in total darkness and began to climb very steeply almost immediately. We passed peasants headed down the mountain on foot with goods for the market. It was hot going, even at that time of the morning. We stopped only briefly from time to time for drinks and by noon we had reached a campesino's hut with an outstanding view over idyllic scenery of cleared land and jungle. We understood the reason for the early start when the heavens opened just after we arrived and the downpour lasted several hours while we rested after our long trek.

In the evening we cooked the chilli con carne that we had prepared at home and frozen for the journey and sang songs on the deck to the strains of a guitar played by Ileana. Other than our oil lamp and candles, there were no lights for miles, and the stars shone more brightly than we had ever seen before. We went to bed early that night to prepare for our trek on horseback and on foot the following day.

The going was steep and tough, and finally we had to abandon the horses and slash our way through the jungle with machetes. We came across a valley, which had been cleared for crops, and a farmhouse near a river. One of our guides approached the farmhouse, spoke with the farmer's wife and told us he had arranged for lunch for our group on our return from the caves.

The final assault to the caves involved an arduous climb, which was made worse by the heat of the midday sun, but we all made it and entered the cool caves with relief. The only light we had was from our flashlights, and it was pretty eerie, especially when we realized that few people had ever been here before us. The local residents of the cave were enormous spiders, and we soon cooled off and left for the safety of the daylight outside. The clamber down to the farm was quite tricky but the thought of food and a cool drink drove us on. We were somewhat dehydrated and drank voraciously from a nearby stream.

The farmhouse with its mud floor kitchen was a surprise to us, but it also boasted a sleeping area of beautiful wood floors in a series of bunk-bedded rooms, all in immaculate shape. The lady had borne twenty-two children and twenty-one were alive with most still living at home. A new grandchild, less than a week old, was being nursed, and other grandchildren were scattered around the house and garden. A grand feast had been prepared for us--after all, what are nine more guests for lunch?

After lunch we relaxed and enjoyed the outstanding jungle scenery and watched as twelve toucans flew into a tree nearby. I was able to catch this rare sight on my video camera. We returned to pick up our horses and make our way back to our campesino's house for another night, totally exhausted. Our guides were not tired and they unsaddled and washed the horses down for us.

The guides were up before us in the morning and had saddled all the horses and loaded the packs ready for our trek home to Londres. We reached the ranch from where we had started and felt tired but happy after the unique experience our new Tico (Costa Rican) friends had given us. The whole trip was free to us and the guides refused any payment. We got around this, though, by giving them some tools, which they could use in their fields. We were able to relive our trip a week later by looking at my video in San Jose; in fact, we have done so on several occasions in Canada as well. I shall always remember the woman with twenty-two children and the twelve toucans in one tree outside her house.

A visitor's visa in Costa Rica is only valid for three months and then it is necessary to leave the country for seventy-two hours before re-entering for another three months. Some people fly to San Andreas Island, part of Columbia, not far from the Costa Rica East Coast. Others drive north to Nicaragua or south to Panama. We chose to drive to Panama with two friends, one Tica and one American, George. At the border town, we parked our rental car and walked to the immigration office to have our passports stamped with an exit stamp and proceeded to Panama to be stamped-in to that country. Now we were legally in Panama but entered the back door of a shop and left by the front door, which opened into Costa Rica. We were now in Costa Rica illegally, of course, and we walked back to our car to drive back to Golfito, a port town opposite the Osa Peninsula.

We had hardly driven a mile when we were stopped by the police and asked for our papers. They would have shown that we were in Panama so we had to say our papers were back in our hotel in Quepos, a day's drive north. The policeman seemed to buy our story but asked to look in the trunk of the car, which he did but didn't spot anything out of order. He stepped back, I saluted him and thanked him for his courtesy, and he allowed us to proceed.

We went on to the dutyfree zone in Golfito where we stocked up on duty free goods and stayed two nights before reversing our border crossing procedure and coming back into Costa Rica legally for another three months. This is one of several ways in which people get around the silly regulations that some Central American countries make. At least in Honduras one can get a visa renewed at a local immigration office without leaving the country but there they want you to do it every month. The added complication about Honduran regulations is that you have to buy a special stamp, only available at a particular bank, before taking it to immigration. Another illogical thing is that, if you drive in your own vehicle, the visa for you is valid for one month and that for the car is valid for three months. To renew the car visa you have to go to the capital and get a certain man to give you special permission. No other person can do this very important job. I shall have more to say about such "catch- 22" regulations in my chapter on Honduras.

A big problem for expatriates in Costa Rica and in many other tropical retirement zones is that they have nothing to do. As a result, they resort to drinking alcohol, which is generally quite cheap, at least for the locally distilled hooch. This often means the drinking starts in the morning and by noon many are well in the bag. Our special friend, George, had an enormous capacity for booze and could always be seen with a glass in his hand any time after five in the afternoon. He is a very generous and compassionate man and oneday when he learned that a friend of his had lost her mother, he whisked the friend, Noreen and me off to a village out of town to entertain and distract her from her loss. George took us to a bar where there was a Ping-Pong table and a jukebox and proceeded to ply us with drinks of beer and guarro (the local hooch). Soon none of us were feeling any pain; I was playing Ping-Pong with the five-year-old daughter of our bereaved friend on my shoulders. Noreen was commiserating with the others over songs played on the jukebox, sharing the loss of their respective mothers.

Somehow we drove back to Quepos in an inebriated state and I resolved never to drink guarro again. Unfortunately a year later, alcoholism caught up with our friend, George, and he suffered a stroke which has left him partially paralysed and with difficulty in speaking and handling numbers. Even this, though, did not stop him drinking and he has had another stroke and continues to drink. Such is the nature of alcoholism. We still hear from George from time to time and reminisce over the good times we had with him in Costa Rica. He used to take us to all the parties in town in his beaten-up Volkswagen jeep, carrying his large container of booze. We lived with him for a few months and marvelled at his stamina with the scores of girlfriends he brought home. At night, he would fall asleep watching videos of Fawlty Towers episodes. He never did see the endings.

Catalogue Information