Reading the news today, I saw that Oliver North was stepping down as the President of the National Rifle Association. This reminded me of something that made the Hotel Costa Verde unique and fun.

You may recall that when we were staying there, we spent one night in the cockpit cottage. They also had another “room” called the 727 Fuselage Home which was constructed from the fuselage of a 727 built in 1965. Additionally, they had one other airplane themed attraction. A restaurant called El Avion.

The thing that makes this restaurant so interesting is that it is built around an entire C-123 Fairchild cargo plane. “Big deal,” I hear you say (or maybe it was “What is a C-123 cargo plane?”). Either way, the type of plane is less important than its history.

For those of you who do not remember Ronald Reagan’s presidency, let me spend a few lines enlightening you. The Iranian people had overthrown the Shah in favor of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Hezbollah, an Iranian backed organization, was fighting a civil war in Lebanon and had taken a number of Americans hostage, Nicaragua had elected the socialist Sandinistas for their government. The president and his advisers were trying to support a group called the Contras who were attempting to overthrow the Sandinistas. Iran’s government was using American weapons bought when the Shah was in power to fight a war with Iraq and was desperate for resupply. It was illegal for the US to provide money or arms to both Iran and the Contras.

In steps our friend Oliver North, who was a lieutenant colonel and member of the National Security Council. Through a complicated web of transactions, he facilitated the illegal sale of weapons to Iran, and then diverted the money to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. All was going well…until people found out. There were Congressional hearings; various members of the executive branch were convicted of various crimes, then pardoned; the Contras attempt to overthrow the Sandinistas collapsed; and Iran’s war with Iraq continued for another 3 brutal years and ended in a stalemate.

So, back to the restaurant: The C-123 plane is one of the ones that Oliver North contracted to ferry the arms to the Contras. Here is how they tell the story.

The restaurant surrounds the plane and is like so many places in Costa Rica, open-sided. We sat upstairs with a beautiful view of Pacific Ocean and had a very nice dinner.