Its annual cabalgata – horse riding procession – time again, this one in the neighbouring hillside community of Miravalles where new ‘gringo’ friends have settled.

The six of us met up at 9.30 ready to see the horses assemble for a 10.00 o’clock start – what a joke, we’ve been here six years and ought to know better: this is ‘Ticolandia’ and NOTHING starts on time. More on that later but no matter how late it was, I was ready for a fun day out after a gruesome few weeks.

Its no secret that Cyber space is littered with useless perverted creatures who take delight in inventing viruses and designing attacks on the big and powerful … like an international bank or the Pentagon.

Even we ordinary punters have protection systems, upload the regular revisions and think we’re safe. It’s the end of January and I’m getting no passing B&B trade but I put that down to the global financial impact on tourism.

Imagine my surprise when a friend, looking for accommodation for visitors, wrote to say our website wasn’t very ‘user friendly’ …. Que?? That was the under-statement of the year – all we had was a heading Index and a load of buttons, or whatever they’re called in geek-speak.

To cut a horrible story short, Routhost, the company who hosted our website, had suffered a defacement attack – apparently these wipe out homepages and insert viruses or rogue programmes in hosted sites. Routhost, however, did not bother to let me know; when questioned, they merely replied that my site had suffered an attack.

Thank heavens, new friend and member of our immigrant community, Mark Arial of webmarkdesign.us was able to access their reports and establish exactly what was going on. No guys, its your server that’s been attacked … please tell me what you are doing about it?

The question no sooner asked than an email arrived saying our website service had been suspended because we were phishing – in the Royal Bank of Scotland of all places! – I wish! That was hotly followed by one demanding we remove the phishing files within five hours.

I wouldn’t know a phishing file if it landed in my soup but expecting a service user to remove files in their server just beggars belief. Despite almost daily emails, Routhost completely failed to accept any responsibility, answer questions or come up with solutions, weeks were passing, and smack in the middle of the ‘hot’ tourist season.

At risk of losing our domain name, Mark came to my rescue; heads down and we had a new site up and running in a week. Our old site was designed when we were still on a go-slow horribly under-powered telephone system; with fast 3g, our new one is ‘all singing and dancing’ and I’m really thrilled with it.

We threw on loads of photos in haste so I’m now working on organising proper photo galleries – no surprise the orchid gallery got first whack and should be up shortly!

Thankfully we don’t depend on our B&B business but this attack must have caused untold damage to all sorts of businesses. My heart goes out to them, it’s a costly, stressful, horrid business which has consumed hours of time. I’m happy now though with bookings coming in for this month, and I hope lots more to follow.

To the end Routhost were useless; I threw the towel in when a techie wrote saying ‘what exactly are your issues’? Are we on the same planet earth?

So yea! A day out admiring the horses was a nice break.

Friends Glen and Linda decided to pay the $6 entry and join their first cabalgata in Costa Rice. But come 12 o’clock and two hours waiting they decided to call it a day and ride the horses home to their paddock.

There’s a saying ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun’ – not true, Ticos do as well … off they set at 12.30 in raging heat for a 3 hour ride round the hillside.

We ended the day with some hilarity – all riders are entered in a grand draw and Glen and Linda won first prize, despite having bowed out. And the prize was ?? – a (young) Brahman bull! Progeny of good US farming stock they might be but a Brahman in your back yard is hardly a pet – within 24 hours it was traded for a new horse, perfect timing to replace the one Linda had on loan.

Retirement in Costa Rica sure has its surprises!

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