Rainy Season in Monteverde.

24 May

During our first four-and-a-half months in Monteverde, we had nonstop sunshine. The temperature never went above 75 or below 60. Birds sang, butterflies fluttered, children frolicked in the streets. It was possibly the best climate I’ve ever lived in.

Well them days is long gone, my friends. We have officially entered the rainy season here, and it sucks.

The mornings are usually fine, but things start to nosedive around lunchtime. First, the entire town gets engulfed in clouds. They sweep down over the mountaintop and swallow everything. This happens quickly. I’ll come home from grocery shopping and things will be fine. But by the time I’ve shoved the last of the vegetables into the refrigerator, I can no longer see my neighbor’s house out the window. My neighbor lives 50 feet away.

Then the rain starts, gently at first, but it soon hits high gear and really starts pouring. During our last storm, I had to keep collecting all the earthworms that were crawling under our backdoor to escape the deluge.

Our lease ran out on our old apartment, so we had to move into a new place for our last three weeks here. The new house has a metal roof and no real insulation or attic. When the storms come in full force, it sounds like someone is dumping bags of steel ball bearings on top of our house. Sitting at our tiny dining room table, we have to shout at each other to be heard.

This bothers me because it seems like a waste of good shouting. I yell at Rae occasionally, but it’s usually for emphasis, such as “Clean up your room, you pig! It looks like a crack den in there!”

But when I have to scream, “Please pass the salt!” it cheapens and devalues all my other shouting.

Speaking of the new house, it’s tad on the buggy side. The mornings usually begin with shaking the cockroaches out of my clean t-shirts. After I’m dressed, I go out to the kitchen and start stomping spiders. I don’t mind the beetles as much, so I usually leave them alone so Rae can gawk at them for a few minutes. When she’s done, I round them up and flush them down the toilet. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really starting to miss my scorpions.

This latest infestation is most likely due to two things. First, our new place is surrounded by a forest. There’s just simply more nature around us. Second, the whole damn town seems buggier now that the rains have arrived. There’s a lot of hatching going on.

I’ve discovered all kinds of bizarre looking pests on my recent walks into town. Most of them are in the beetle family, but they come in all shapes and sizes. They look like cartoons. Neon blues, oranges and greens are common. If it wasn’t for the fact that I also occasionally discover them in my underwear drawer, I could really get to love these little critters.

We only have a few more weeks left in our trip, though. I’m sure the bugs in the house won’t be too bad. And if their numbers start to get too high, well, I’ll just unleash a rain of Terror on them.

New Terror! Now with 33% more Carnage® and Mayhem®!

Earthquakes and Scorpions? Again?

15 May

Yesterday, Rae and I were sitting on the living room floor playing Jenga. It turns out that Jenga was quite the appropriate game, because a few minutes after we finished playing the whole apartment started shaking back and forth. It reminded me of how the floor sometimes shakes during a washing machine’s spin cycle, except this was about ten times more powerful.

It took me a few seconds to realize that it was an earthquake. The whole thing lasted maybe 15-20 seconds, but that’s plenty of time to think about important things like, “What the hell are you supposed to do in an earthquake?”

I remembered immediately that biggest danger is getting flattened by falling debris. That’s why I very slowly, very carefully, lowered the bookcases on top of Rae before they accidentally came crashing down on her. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the books off first, but there wasn’t really time.

It was our third earthquake/tremor since we’ve been here. (The first one actually happened the same day as the earthquake that wiped out Japan in March. Now that’s a big aftershock.)

I read in the paper today that yesterday’s earthquake registered a 6.0 on the Richter scale. That’s just strong enough to be exciting but not strong enough to kill me (just like my women.)

It was actually very exciting. It was by far the largest earthquake I’ve ever felt. But as Pam and I were talking about how thrilling it was living life on the edge in the middle of some mountain jungle that’s prone to earthquakes, I happened to look over at our kitchen table. Sitting on top of it, in perfect condition, was Rae’s house of cards she had built earlier in the day.

So maybe 6.0 isn’t so big after all.

Later that night, it was just our typical evening. Make dinner, play some games, put our pajamas, crush all the scorpions we find in Rae’s room.

The scorpion infestation kicked into high gear this week. We found three or four baby scorpions crawling around the place. To be honest, I’m starting to lose track of them all. I think our total body count for the trip is somewhere around 14 or 15.

The novelty was starting to wear off, but that was before we discovered a new scorpion trick that has kept amused lately.

Scorpions glow under a black light!

Hey man, have you ever, you know, just stared at your pincers for awhile?

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Crossing the Border from Panama

4 May

Panama and Costa Rica: Building bridges to the late 19th century.

Costa Rica makes all tourists leave the country for at least 72 hours every three months. It’s part of the visa requirements. I like this rule because it automatically lends an air of intrigue to our time here.

“We had to blow Costa Rica for a few days, man. The government was about to come down on us, so we split until everything was cool again.”

We spent our three days in Panama enjoying the festive tourist pit of Bocas del Toro. It translates loosely to “Binge Drinking Capital of the Bull.”

Bocas del Toro is an archipelago. Most people live on the indelicately named “Colon Island.” The main city on Colon Island is Bocas Town, and it’s is a hopping place. You can’t swing a surfboard without hitting a bar, restaurant or hotel. Even the local bookstore sells beer. Sure, it’s touristy. But it’s fun touristy, not tacky touristy. Most of the bars back up right to the water. You can hang out on the docks, stare out over the water and watch water taxis come and go while you sip $2.00 caipirinhas.

Most people go to Bocas for the surfing, snorkeling and various nature tours. You’ll have to take a water taxi to enjoy any of these activities, but they only cost a few bucks.

I don’t know if I’d go back any time soon, but it wasn’t a bad place to hole up in for a long weekend.

We ran into an interesting group of travelers on our way home.

We were crossing the border on foot. After carrying our luggage across the bridge in the picture above, we got in line to have our passports stamped by the Costa Rican border agents. (Please note all the suitcases Pam is carrying, by the way.)

The Costa Rican border patrol office resembled a 1960s-era, walk-up hamburger stand in the United States. You don’t enter the building. Instead, you stand outside in the blazing sun and conduct all business through a crusty Plexiglass window.

A few listless customs agents were milling around inside. One geriatric guard stood watch outside. He looked like he was about to collapse beneath the weight of the machine gun slung over his shoulder.

Waiting in line directly in front of us were three backpackers. The first one was enormous. He stood well over six feet tall, probably weighed 220 pounds, and had a full beard and dreadlocks that went down to his waist. If there’s suddenly a rash of Bigfoot sightings in Central America, it’ll be because of this guy.

The other two seemed to be a couple. They both had long dreadlocks like their giant friend, but combined they probably didn’t weigh as much as him. The boyfriend had a cheesy, Shaggy-esque beard. His scrawny girlfriend was sporting half a dozen uninspired tattoos.

All three gave off the sickeningly sweet stench of week-old body odor doused with a few quarts of patchouli. They all wore dingy, olive green cargo shorts, sweat-stained tank tops and worn out brown sandals. Their backpacks were near bursting at the seams. Every inch of their bodies and belongings was covered in a thin layer of dust and grime.

The only colorful thing about them was their vocabulary. Every other word out of their mouths was one form or another of America’s favorite expletive.

“Man, it’s fucking hot out here. I wish they’d hurry the fuck up,” the giant one complained.

“No shit. This is some fucking nasty heat right here,” the woman echoed.

This bothered me. Rae was standing just a few feet away.  She’s only eight years old, and while she’s definitely heard me curse a blue streak before, these three were making me sound like a saint. I was getting more upset the more they cursed, but I figured saying anything to them wasn’t going to accomplish much.

Pam handled it well, though. She and Rae had simply made a game out of counting the number of times the backpackers cursed. It was a good idea, because we had been standing in line for about 15 minutes at this point. The game was keeping Rae very occupied.

I leaned down and whispered to Rae.

“What’s the count?”

“Ninety-eight” she said.

The line moved forward, and it was finally time for the backpackers to go through customs.

The beefy one slid his passport to the agent. She took it, flipped through the pages and reeled off a few quick sentences in Spanish. There was a long pause while she just stared at him through the window without saying anything. Finally, she pushed his unstamped passport back to him. The giant looked confused.

“Repité, por favor?”

The agent repeated what she had said, this time a bit more slowly.

“What the fuck was all that about?” asked the boyfriend.

“I don’t know. I think she’s saying something about tickets.”

The agent stared back at him impatiently.

“What the fuck?” the girlfriend asked.

Rae looked up at me and excitedly whispered, “One hundred!”

Now I was getting even more upset. On top of corrupting my daughter’s angelic little mind, these three were making all of us stand out in the sun for another ten minutes because they had failed to notice what was clearly written in every Costa Rica travel guide I’d ever read.

“She needs to see some kind of onward ticket,” I told them. “You need to show her something that says you have plans to leave Costa Rica. A plane ticket, bus ticket. Anything.”

The giant suddenly switched from confused to angry.

“Are you fucking serious? I’m flying back to the U.S. in two weeks, but I don’t have my fucking ticket on me. Who the fuck prints tickets these days?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rae and Pam busily updating their tabulation.

“Do you have a copy of your itinerary?“ I asked. “A printed itinerary from the airline will work, too.”

The giant turned back to the agent. His friends joined him, and the three of them began pleading in broken Spanish. They didn’t make any progress, though. The agent was having none of it.

“But we’re only going to be in Costa Rica for two fucking weeks,” they said.

The agent just shrugged. Her crappy shack in the dirt may have been Third World, but her incredible apathy rivaled anything you’d find in a DMV office back in the United States.

They regrouped for a moment.

“This is fucking bullshit. We live in an age of technology. Who the fuck carries plane tickets with them?” the girlfriend said.

“So what the fuck do we do now?” her boyfriend asked.

The giant asked the agent if there was an internet café anywhere nearby.

I cringed when I heard him ask this. The customs office was in the middle of absolute nowhere. He was not going to like her answer.

She told him the nearest one was a 30-minute cab ride away.

And we have lift-off!

“Thirty fucking minutes?” the giant roared. “Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck that!”

I looked down at Rae. She was counting on her fingers by now.

She looked up at me. “I think it’s around 120.”

It finally became clear to the backpackers that they weren’t getting across the border. They gave up and begrudgingly stepped out of the way. I slid our passports and the copy of our itinerary to the border agent.

The three of them started putting on their backpacks and continued their grumbling.

“Fuck this place,” the woman said.

“No fucking shit,” her boyfriend answered. “This is fucking ridiculous.”

“I’m not going to take a fucking cab for thirty minutes just to print out a fucking email.” the giant said.

He was starting to walk away when I stopped him.

“Then you know what you are, don’t you?”

He turned around and stared at me.

“No. What am I?”

I looked down at Rae, her once innocent ears now sullied forever, then turned back to the giant.

“Fucked,” I said.

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The Hosts Must Be Crazy

28 Apr

Last week was Semana Santa here in Costa Rica. “Semana Santa” is Spanish for “praise the Lord and pass the sunscreen.” Every Easter, the whole country shuts down, and any Tico who has a tent and at least ten bucks takes off an entire week and heads to the beach. This extended vacation is a great way to convert people.

“Sure, we make you to go to church on both Sunday and Saturday in Costa Rica, but look at the vacation package we offer!”

Rae had the week off from school, too. So when one moves to an isolated mountaintop jungle in the middle of Costa Rica, where does one go for vacation to get away from it all?

Why, Drake Bay, of course!

Drake Bay is hidden way down in the southwest corner of the country. There’s nothing most people would call an actual road leading to it, though there are various trails you can take if you have a Jeep, ATV or motorcycle. You have to cross half a dozen rivers, though, and lord only knows what those rivers look like in the rainy season.

Somebody hacked out a runway through the jungle, so you can take a single-prop plane if you’re feeling lucky. Our friends Pascale and Laure are visiting from France, and they took the plane to Drake and lived to tell about it. Still, bouncing around in a tin can 1,500 feet above the ground then landing on a glorified footpath is not Pam’s preferred method of travel, so we opted for taking a boat.

Drake Bay turned out to be one of the more undeveloped places we’ve been to in Costa Rica.

For starters, there is no dock or port of any kind. Boats just back up to the shore as far as they can, then their passengers jump out and wade ashore. As long as the surf is tame this isn’t really a problem. Seldom will you have to go much more than knee-deep into the water. (Several boats flipped here during the tsunami last month, though.)

Secondly, Drake Bay just got internet service five months ago. This sounds at least mildly primitive until you realize it wasn’t until five years ago that Drake Bay got electricity.

And lastly, only 400 people live there. It ain’t no Saint-Tropez.

The town is about what you’d expect, which is nothing much. One dirt road runs through the place. Three or four cruddy restaurants, a few shacks where people sell t-shirts, and one dilapidated grocery store litter both sides of the road. A large, open-air cinder block building dominates on end of the street. It’s the local evangelical church. You can hear singing coming from the place at almost any hour of the day.

We had looked on TripAdvisor.com to find a place to stay, and finally settled on a bed-and-breakfast that got rave reviews. Previous guests stated (correctly) that it was very comfortable. Several reviewers mentioned (correctly) that it was in a nice location. And practically everyone who stayed there spoke (correctly) of how friendly the hosts were.

One thing that no one on TripAdvisor mentioned was that in addition to the hosts being friendly, they are also bat shit crazy.

I will call our hosts “Paul” and “Amy.”

Paul and Amy moved to Drake Bay from Reno about five years ago and opened their small bed-and-breakfast. They actually live in a small casita behind the one they rent out. Between the two buildings is an outdoor kitchen which we all shared.

Paul and Amy are both in their late 50s. Paul has a small frame but is in very good shape and practically bounces everywhere he goes. He’s always quick with a joke and eager to make conversation.

Amy has a perky personality and shares Paul’s sense of humor and chatty nature, but she doesn’t have the same spring to her step. She seems to exist in her own, much stronger, gravitational field. Her blond hair hangs straight down as if each strand is tied to a lead weight. She shuffles along when she walks. Her over-sized glasses constantly slip down her nose and threaten to fall off her face. Even her clothes droop, like she’s wearing wet laundry. Nature seems to be on the verge of reducing Amy to a puddle.

Paul and Amy are firm believers in their lifestyle, and the trouble began when they started forcing that lifestyle on us.

“What time is breakfast tomorrow, Amy?”

“4:45!”

“That’s a tad on the early side, isn’t it?”

“Well, we go to bed at 7:00pm and get up at 3:00am down here.”

“Yeah, but I’m not from Down Here. I’m from Up There, on the outskirts of Where Normal People Live. So tomorrow we’ll skip breakfast and have bacon, eggs and toast for lunch at 7:30am., OK?”

There were other similar types of issues.

“Amy, the Internet cut out last night. Can you fix it?”

“Oh, it didn’t ‘cut out.’ I turn it off every evening before I go to bed. People don’t need to shop on Amazon in the middle of the night. You’re here to enjoy nature!”

“But I wasn’t buying anything on Amazon. I was trying to email a friend who’s going through a very serious family crisis.”

“I’m sure your friend is fine. Plenty of time to email her later!”

You get the idea.

I would have protested more, but to be honest, Amy scared me. Though she moved slowly, she spoke in forced, overly cheerful tones that always seemed to verge on screaming. She also sported a painted-on grin that was less Julie Andrews/”Mary Poppins” and more Kathy Bates/”Misery.”

When we were all sitting on the back porch, she would occasionally call me over and tell me she wanted to show me something. I figured it was always even money as to whether she wanted to show me a hummingbird in her garden or a human head in her freezer.

So I decided to let the early wake-up calls and poor internet service slide for the rest of the trip.

There were other areas of concern, though.

When we got home after our fishing trip on the first day, Paul asked me if I wanted to enjoy a cold beer with him out on the back porch.

Hell yeah. Paul and I were going to get along just fine.

I opened two bottles and handed one to Paul. Before I could say “cheers,” Paul knocked back his beer in two gulps.

I like to think that I can hold my liquor, but I quickly abandoned any thought of trying to keep up with Paul. In the next hour, he drank a six-pack and eventually dug into the back of his freezer for a plastic bottle of rum.

He and I were sitting at the little kitchen table on the back porch finishing the last two beers. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon.

“Sure was a beautiful day today,” Paul said.

“Couldn’t have been better.”

“Yep.”

He took another long pull on his beer.

“So Nick, what’s your personal relationship with the Lord?”

Uh-oh.

“Come again, Paul?”

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

“Well, not yet. I was going to check my email and maybe take a nap first.”

This was the first of several occasions when religion came up.

Most of the time it was in the form of harmless, off-hand comments slipped into conversations, but Rae mentioned to me and Pam one night that Amy had asked her outright if she believed in God.

Now, this question had come up before in Ouray. I had instructed Rae to answer by saying, “How can I believe in a god that lets Mike Krzyzewski mold the minds of young men?” but instead she told Amy that she was Buddhist, her father was Christian and her mother was Jewish.

According to Rae, Amy replied, “Well at least one of your parents believes in Christ.”

After she finished telling us this story, Rae leaned over and whispered, “I think they’re Christian.”

I think so, too, Rae. Now help me finish plastering this fake wall for your mother to sleep behind tonight.

For the rest of the trip, I was nervous about leaving Rae alone in a room with Amy or Paul for more than ten seconds. Rae already spends enough time bitching at me and telling me I’m doing things wrong. I don’t need her sifting through the Bible for even more ammunition to use against me.

It was tough to get a read on them.

I don’t know many evangelicals, but I assumed most of them didn’t drink a 12-pack of beer a day. And Paul, who earlier had asked about my relationship with Christ, would drop lines like, “”I hate weak coffee. It’s like having sex with a condom. It’ll get you up, but you won’t enjoy it.”

The next day he also said he liked strong coffee because “it makes my dick hard.”

I never actually witnessed Paul making coffee, but I did switch to orange juice for the remainder of the trip.

Every new conversation with them always made you question whether or not you had correctly understood the previous one.

At various times during our stay they railed against:

1. Plastic grocery bags (OK, they’re hippies.)

2. The I.R.S. (Scratch that. They’re Tea Partiers.)

3. Marijuana prohibition (Rev up the microbus. They’re hippies again.)

4. The oppressive federal government as a whole (Sorry. Skip the microbus. We’re back on the Tea Party Express. I particularly loved this discussion because Paul and Amy made most of their money via contracts with the B.L.M.)

5. Capitalism (Bingo! Problem solved. They’re definitely stinking hippies.)

6. The A.C.L.U., because they made Quaker Oats remove Aunt Jemima’s do-rag. (Hmm. Racist tea party Civil War reënactors?)

“The do-rag was tradition!” said Paul.

“So what? Slavery was a tradition, too,” said Pam.

(Bad mouth the ACLU to Pam and brace for impact.)

But ultimately, when Paul and Amy weren’t trying to convert Rae to Christianity, deprive us all of sleep, or cut off all electronic communication with the outside world, they actually were very nice hosts. They cooked tasty, albeit early, meals. They offered exciting tours of the area. They provided plenty of interesting local information.

I suppose the moral of the story is this: If you vacation in a place where the sun beats on your head all day, there are no roads leading out, and electricity is considered a newfangled contraption, you’d have to be crazy to think the people living there are going to be normal.

Montezuma, Costa Rica.

13 Apr

Rae had this past Monday off from school, so we headed to the beach at Montezuma. It was going to be our first time there. We left Friday after school.

As always, getting around Costa Rica was a tad laborious. We caught a ride down off the mountain in Monteverde to the beat-up sand pit that is the town of Puntarenas. It took us about two hours. Puntarenas is probably the biggest town on the Nicoya Gulf. The casual observer might initially think the whole place is nothing more than a weather-beaten sand pit in need of a good, cleansing hurricane. The more seasoned eye would note that Puntarenas is also home to an outstanding community of winos, pimps and drug addicts.

In Puntarenas, we hopped on the Tambor Ferry for a 90 minute ride across the gulf to the town of Paquera. Grabbing a cab in Paquera, we started the last leg of our trip. The drive from Paquera to Montezuma only takes an hour. You get to enjoy some beautiful views of the ocean as you start working your way toward the southern end of the Nicoya Peninsula. The whole trip from Monteverde took about five hours, but it felt much shorter.

Now, about Montezuma…

Montezuma just made me feel old. I recognize that there was a time in my life when I would have had a blast there. Sadly, that time has come and gone. Instead of embracing the laid back, chill atmosphere of the Montezuma, I just wanted to turn a fire hose on the whole place.

The main part of town is only about two blocks long. There are a handful of restaurants and bars along the water, a couple of hotels, a grocery store, and a few shops selling various crap. The whole place is crawling with 22-year-old clumps of dirt with dreadlocks, leathery old hippies wandering helplessly through the trees while searching the sand for 1967, and a handful of tired Ticos who have be asking themselves, “Seriously? This is what a global super power like the United States breeds?”

I hauled our bags out of the back of the cab and grabbed a table at a restaurant looking out onto the street. Our hotel was actually a five minute drive along the beach just north of town, but the tide had come in so the hotel’s Jeep couldn’t come pick us up for another hour. We had to wait in town until the tide went out again.

We ordered drinks and a few snacks then sat back to watch some of the street scene. Rae enjoyed it, and Pam got a kick out of it, too. I just couldn’t quite buy into the vibe.

Some guy in front of us was trying to hustle some change from tourists. Again, there was a time when I would have admired his carefree spirit and playful nature. Now, though, I just wanted to take him by the shoulders and say, “Look, I wish Jerry was still alive, too. We all miss him. But please, take off the jester’s cap and stop juggling bowling pins in the middle of the street! You look like an asshole, and you’re blocking traffic.”

Our ride to the hotel eventually arrived, and we headed up the beach.

The hotel was pretty cool. It is called the Hotel Ylang Ylang and bills itself as some kind of eco resort. Normally I’m a bit skeptical of eco resorts. “Eco Resort” is usually code for “we didn’t spring for A/C or hot water,” but the Ylang Ylang has both. And instead of hippies juggling bowling pins, they have hippies doing yoga. I don’t really care for either, but at least Ylang Ylang’s hippies do their yoga in a separate room and not in the middle of the hotel’s pathways.

We threw our bags in the little geodesic dome that was our cabin and grabbed a bite to eat. If you ever feel like heading down here, I highly recommend the restaurant. It was probably the best food we’ve come across in Costa Rica. The hotel itself is fine, but you can probably find better values in town. The beach in front was a death trap when we were there. Lots of rocks and a very strong undertow. No one was swimming there the whole weekend. Our room was also tiny and had a few issues that I will get to in a moment.

Another strange thing about Montezuma is that for a beach town, it has pretty crappy beaches (at least when we were there.) You can’t really swim or surf. There are rocks the size of Volkswagens all over the place, and many of them are just under the water where you can’t really see them until you’re being pounded into little pieces. There were no surfable waves when we were there. Most people head over to Mal Pais if they want to catch a wave. Just like the beach in front of our hotel, the parts of the beach in Montezuma that weren’t blocked by boulders dealt wicked undertows.

Like concussions and multiple contusions? Swim here.

So when we wanted to get into the water, we walked about 30 minutes north to Playa Grande. It was great. The beach is maybe 1.5 miles long and incredibly wide. It’s probably 150 yeards from the edge of the trees to the water, and in between is fairly pristine sand. The only real downside is that from the water, it takes about 30 seconds to cover those 150 yards when you’re trying to catch the kids who just jumped out of the trees and stole all your shit. The three women we ran into who had just been robbed explained this in great detail.

We found a group of tourists who were hanging out on the beach and asked if they could watch our stuff while we hit the waves.

The waves at Playa Grande were perfect for body boarding, and Rae wasted no time. She really enjoys the water. She was riding the white water for about 50 yards. Pam grabbed the board and caught some waves, too. She wouldn’t go out very deep, so she was just riding the white water, too. There was one wave, though, where I really wish I had the camera.

Most of the wave faces were in the 3-5 foot range. Pam wold let them break first, then ride the foam. She was in the middle of doing this when a wave formed behind her that was closer to the seven feet. It formed perfectly and was a beautiful clear blue. It closed out all at once and sent spray and foam exploding about 12 feet into the air. Pam was riding the previous wave and had her back to it. Good thing, too. She would have had a heart attack if she had seen that thing coming at her.

I didn’t tell her about it and just sent her out to catch another wave.

Playa Grande–great for playing in the waves and robbing people.

If you don’t feel like swimming in the ocean, you can take a dip in one of the rivers that comes down out of the hills to meet the sea. There are plenty of nice little swimming holes and waterfalls that you can hike to. We stopped at one that was about halfway between Playa Grande and our hotel. A few folks were hanging around and drinking beers, but it wasn’t overly crowded. There was also a pretty nice rock garden there.

The whole rock garden.

OK. Stacking rocks is actually a cool hippie pastime.

Back at our hotel, we had two nice run-ins with the local wildlife. For starters, the Hotel Ylang Ylang is overrun with crabs. Not “three-day shore leave in Okinawa” kind of crabs. I’m talking about Halloween crabs like this one that was hanging out with his beetle pal on our screen door:

Who doesn't enjoy a tasty beetle for breakfast?

The other wildlife story is now becoming old hat around here. We were all in bed. Pam and I were reading. Rae, of course, was refusing to go to sleep. It was about 10:00p.m., and she was pulling out all the usual tricks.

“Dad, I’m really hungry. Can I have a snack?”

“No, Rae. You just ate dinner. Now go to sleep.”

“Dad, can you tuck me in?”

“No, Rae. I tucked you in 15 times already. Now go to sleep.”

“Dad, there are ghosts in the room.”

“There aren’t any ghosts in here, Rae. Now go to sleep.”

“Dad, there’s a giant scorpion by your head.”

“No there’s not, Rae. Now go to… HOLY SHIT!”

There was indeed a giant scorpion on the wall right by head. It was the same kind that I showed you in the last blog entry. I pancaked it with my shoe and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling directly above my head.

Overall, I’m glad we checked out Montezuma. I’d heard a lot about it and wanted to see it. That having been said, I see no real reason to go back. There are much, much better beaches in Costa Rica. The town itself isn’t enough to be a real draw. It’s not really funky enough to be interesting. It’s only funky enough to be annoying.

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A Little Too Much Nature.

4 Apr

A quick mention about Costa Rican wildlife.

Costa Rican kittens are adorable.

 

 

Costa Rican sloths are absolutely cuddly.

 

 

Costa Rican toucans are exciting and appropriately exotic.

 

 

Costa Rican scorpions can kiss my ass. Meet Victim #5:

Somebody call The Cleaner.

Definitely not the shoe I used to smack him.

Note the guts on the wall.

So how does one realize there’s a scorpion in the house? Just listen for the shrieks coming from your daughter’s bedroom, that’s how!

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A Brief Plug for Two Friends.

30 Mar

I’m briefly interrupting my riveting travelogue to mention two friends who have Big Things in the works.

The first is Mat Johnson. Mat and I met years six years ago when he was teaching at Bard and Pam and I were living the area while she underwent chemo in NYC.

Not only is Mat a good friend and overall outstanding human being, he’s also a talented author. His latest book, Pym, is getting rave reviews from NPR’s “Fresh Air,” the “New York Times Sunday Book Review,” “Time Out Chicago” (Frank, are you still out there?) and countless other major outlets.

Grab your copy today.

If you do, Mat might cheer up before his next author’s photo.

Don't make Mat reach through your computer and slap you.

The second friend is Doug Heye. Doug and I have known each other since we were in grade school. This Friday, he is appearing on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” He will play the role of “Conservative Villain.”

Even though Doug is a heartless Republican who sweetens his coffee with the blood of newborn kittens, he’s always good for a laugh. I wish him well this Friday. He’s walking straight into the lion’s den.

And here’s the “Official Doug Heye Television Appearance Fundraiser Game:” make a contribution to Moveon.org every time Doug references “The A-Team,” the New York Yankees, “Smokey and the Bandit” or Frank Sinatra.

He’ll either have to not speak for the entire show or single-handedly put the Democrats in office for another term.

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Tortuguero, Costa Rica

29 Mar

Rae had a week off from school so we decided to head to the Caribbean and check out the town of Tortuguero. We went with two friends of ours, Kathryn and Gary, who were visiting from the States. We piled into their rental car on Thursday afternoon and headed for the port town of Moin. We were scheduled to go to Tortuguero Friday morning.

Getting to Moin from Monteverde takes about six-and-a-half hours if you know where you’re going. It took us eight.

Things were going smoothly until we missed a turn for the seemingly nonexistent “San Jose business loop.” This error sent us straight into the guts of downtown San Jose. It was like flushing yourself down the toilet.

San Jose is impossibly crowded, and to make matters worse there are zero street signs. Navigating the city consisted of us driving two blocks, stopping to ask a gas station attendant for directions, then getting immediately lost again. I kept threatening to go back and strangle each gas station attendant with my bare hands, but I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to him. Kudos to Gary, though. He did an excellent job driving and managed to keep his cursing to an acceptable level.

Once we extricated ourselves from San Jose, we had two-and-a-half more hours to drive before getting to the coastal town of Moin. We arrived at our hotel around 9:30, grabbed a bite at the restaurant before it closed, then headed off for bed.

We caught our boat the next morning. (Tortuguero is a tad remote and can only be reached by boat or plane.) Our guide’s name was Modesto Watson. He owns this joint: http://tortuguerocanals.com/

Modesto could not have been nicer or more informative. If you ever want to head to Tortuguero, look him up. He’s been running tours in the area for 21 years and is considered the grandfather of the river.

We had barely started our three-hour ride to the town of Tortuguero before Modesto stopped the boat and pointed out a group of howler monkeys in the trees, a basilisk (or “Jesus Christ lizard”) sitting by the water and a few ringed kingfisher birds flying around. This went on for three hours. We would be flying down the canals at 20 mph (yes Mark, I know that’s fast on water) when Modesto would suddenly stop the boat and point out some bats, lizards or birds that were all but invisible in the jungle. If nothing else, Modesto has a keen eye.

We zigzagged our way through various rivers and a few man-made canals before reaching the beginnings of Tortuguero. The first thing you see when you get to town are various small hotels and lodges lining both sides of the 250-meter wide waterway. There are also dumpy little houses scattered about. They aren’t much to look at. The town has only about 700 full-time residents, and they don’t seem to spend a lot of time watching Bob Vila videos. Then again, the nearest Home Depot is 2,500 miles away.

During our three days in Tortuguero, we spent our mornings and evenings going on boat tours with Modesto. Each tour was about three hours long. I was skeptical at first. I had visions of sitting in a swamp some place while mosquitoes the size of buzzards picked up Rae and flew her off to their mosquito lair.

I’m happy to report that not only were there no mosquitoes the size of buzzards, there were really no mosquitoes at all. Also, the tours themselves were as interesting as our original ride to Tortuguero.

I’ve been on similar types of tours before where you see one or two animals an hour, but Tortuguero never had a dull moment. The whole place teems with wildlife, especially birds. We saw multiple varieties of kingfishers, egrets, herons and toucans. In fact, you couldn’t swing the bat I brought with me to fight off mosquitoes without hitting at least two or three kinds of birds.

The birds helped pass the time between monkey sightings, which were our favorites. We saw three kinds of monkeys: howler monkeys, white-faced capuchins (the kind that tried to kill Rae in Monteverde) and spider monkeys. The howlers and capuchins were interesting to a point, but for the most part they just sort of hang out on branches and soak up the sun. I didn’t ride three hours on a boat to watch them watch me. When I see monkeys, I want those monkeys to perform for my amusement.

Which is where the spider monkeys come in. We had five or six spider monkey sightings, and they were all great. I don’t know where exactly those spider monkeys were going, but they were going there in a damn hurry. They were swinging and jumping like something out of a cartoon. It was excellent. Definitely a good show. Here’s a clip of a mother monkey giving her kid a piggyback ride through the trees.

We also saw a handful of two-and three-toed sloths. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of circuses featuring sloths in their acts. The only way you could spot one was to look for a dark lump growing out of a tree branch.

Straddling the line between colossally boring and extremely exciting were the spectacle caimans. Spectacle caimans are in the alligator family. They have a small feature around their eyes that makes them look like they’re wearing a monocle. (Imagine that Tick Tock the Crocodile ate Colonel Klink’s head instead of Captain Hook’s hand.) We saw a few of these sitting on the banks of the river.

The extremely exciting part of the spectacle caiman comes from the fact that they’re alligators, for crying out loud. Who doesn’t love to watch alligators in their native habitat? As it turns out, me. Watching caimans gets boring quickly because caimans simply do not move. We flew by one in the boat and swamped it in our wake. It didn’t budge. We turned the boat around and eased to within five or six feet of it. It didn’t even turn its head to look at us. I had Rae hop out of the boat and pull its tail as hard as she could. It didn’t even wince. I was about to accuse Modesto of planting a lawn ornament on the shore when the caiman, in an explosion of energy, slowly blinked one eye lid.

We came across one caiman that had an added twist. This guy had just eaten a porcupine and turned his face into a pin cushion.

These guy just ate a porcupine and has the quills to prove it.

We spent one short afternoon walking around in the actual town center of Tortuguero. It is, to be polite, a shit hole. A handful of small tourist shops sell beaded bracelets and turtle figurines carved out of driftwood. Some locals have opened little restaurants, but they aren’t much to write home about–unless a professor of infectious diseases happens to live in your house. One or two beat-up bars on stilts sit over the river. The local drunks cheerfully shout hello to you if you happen to glance their way.

The town can definitely be done in an hour. See it to say you’ve seen it, then head back to the river.

Now, as usual, the obligatory bad photos.

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.

7 Mar

I never really thought of myself as a tree-hugger before. There were warning signs, of course. The hazy Grateful Dead shows up and down the East Coast in the 90s. The organic, fair trade coffee in my pantry now. The fact that I know who Terry Gross is.

On the other hand, I eat more red meat than the entire Green Bay Packers offensive line. I subscribed to National Review for ten years. And if I thought I could do it without blowing off my foot first, I’d shoot any bear that wandered into my backyard in Colorado.

But now that I’ve visited the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve a few times, the pendulum is swinging hard in the “filthy hippie” direction.

Forget about reducing global warming and offsetting your carbon footprint. Forget about pretending snails are really just a few evolutionary years away from getting their PhDs in computer science. We should save places like the Monteverde Reserve because of the simple fact that they’re incredibly cool to look at.

Pam, Rae and I hiked through the Reserve yesterday. Walking around in the forest there is like walking around in “Avatar,” minus the derivative screenplay. Now, normally I can blow through tourist attractions in about 30 minutes. I’m the master of slowing down briefly to take a quick whiff in the general direction of the roses that someone told me might be growing near the side of the road. So I was surprised when I found myself moving along the Reserve trails at a crawl.

The forest overwhelms you with 360 degrees of cartoonish plants, eerie bird calls and insects so brightly colored they look like a kindergartner just attacked them with a set of finger paints. You could spend three hours and not cover more distance than a long par 4. (Of course given my handicap, three hours on a long par 4 is fairly normal.)

Just when we were ready to head up the trail Rae would spot some weird colony of mushrooms growing at our feet, or Pam would see a bird flying around 20 feet above us that looked like it just escaped from some exotic Upper East Side pet shop,. We never knew where to look next. Fortunately, you can just look anywhere and find something intriguing.

And being the typical lazy gringos that we are, we went at 10:00 in the morning. People tell us that’s way too late to see they really exciting animals. They say there are ten times as many creatures out if you go around 6:00am. I can’t wait to get Pam’s report on those creatures next Sunday over brunch.

Speaking of miraculous creatures soaring over people’s heads, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to a video of one such beautiful specimen.

Behold, the dexterus stricklandius. It feeds on seven-foot-tall sloths.

Eat it, Krzyz%ewfhnlw42F$fsnrlen3ski!

And now some other highlights from the weekend.

 

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Show and Tell #2: Monteverde, Samara, Playa de Azucar

26 Feb

OK. Picture time. Here’s a chunk of photos for your viewing pleasure. My apologies to photographers everywhere.

Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version of the photo. You’ll also be rewarded with a riveting description of each picture. If you want to return to this gallery page, just click on “Idiot Abroad.”

Speaking of that, I’m thinking about changing “Idiot Abroad” since Ricky Gervais has a show of the same name. Suggestions are welcome. And while “Asshole Abroad” may be accurate, it is still discouraged.


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