Costa Rica Trip Report - Part 2 - Thanksgiving

Previously – Part 1 – The First Night

Bold links go to photos.

We reached an agreement with the animals of the night that allowed us to get a bit of sleep.  In effect, we won’t bother you if you don’t bother us.  To some this might seem crazy, but we were now situated several kilometers from anything and the snakes, bats, bugs, etc., outnumbered us a couple zillion to one.  A jungle detente seemed like the easy way out of a slightly uncomfortable situation.

The sun rose shortly after 5:00.  It was like no Thanksgiving morning we’d ever experienced.  Snake in its place?  Check.  Tarantula?  Gone.  Tarantula eggs?  Gone.  The sky was a bright blue with puffiest white clouds imaginable.  We stood on the front porch and hung out with the most beautiful birds that we had ever seen in the wild.  Green parrots argued in the branches right above us.  A black bird with brilliant red wings was stunning.  A hummingbird worked its way around the flowers on the front porch.  Lizards scurried across the path into the grass.  Several macaws flew over the house and landed haphazardly in a tree.  Laura started referring to the macaws as the drunken sailors of the bird world.  They seemed loud, clumsy, and totally lacked any grace, except when flying as a blur of red, blue and yellow.  I went out the back door to see what appeared to be a small dinosaur.  Given that I had learned in 2nd grade that dinosaurs are extinct, it must’ve been something else – most likely a very large iguana. Morning at Guanabanas.

Our first task was to figure out how to make our house livable.  We found an old Coleman camp stove and a two burner propane stove in the storage room.  The propane tank felt a bit light and there wasn’t any fuel for the Coleman.  The matches were wet and the lighters weren’t lighting, so there wouldn’t be any coffee for us this morning.  The kitchen has a sink with a faucet, which would imply water.  I opened the tap and what started as a pretty good rush quickly turned into a dribble.  I walked outside past the cistern to the outdoor shower.  I spun the handle and, again, a rush of water was quickly followed by a trickle.  I turned my attention to the large green cistern.  It was over half full.  I climbed a ladder and took a peak inside.  The bottom was full of leaves and the plumbing was completely clogged.  Using a rake and a stick I tried to clean out the cistern.  I ascended and descended the ladder for about an hour trying to troubleshoot the “plumbing.”  In the end we never cleaned it up and for the rest of our stay we pulled water straight out of the well using a bucket.  The property has a small outbuilding for a real toilet, but the attractive blue toilet was still wrapped in cardboard and tucked beneath the sink in the kitchen.  The house does have a solar panel for electricity.  The only use for the panel that we found was to pump water from the well to the cistern.  But given our cistern situation, we packed up the solar panel.

So, in summary, we have a house with rebar windows, rebar doors, a clogged cistern, enough animals to rival the Point Defiance Zoo (most notably the resident snake, Joker), no electricity, an unfinished bathroom, but a fully functional outhouse.  We might have a stove.  We are also in Costa Rica just steps from a beach with nobody on it.  Perfect.

Our second task of the day was to get into town and find food.  After a breakfast of McCallum brand Frosted Flakes and Coke Light (much to my dismay we’d finished the Pringles the night before), we started walking.

The journey to town begins with about 50 yards of mud, followed by 1 kilometer of a narrow dirt road, and 5 kilometers of two lane dirt road.  We hadn’t made it 100 yards before I was trying to take photographs of leaf cutter ants crossing the road.  “Honey, I’ve seen these in National Geographic.  Aren’t they great?”  & “Uhhh… yeah.”  It only took a few minutes for me to convince Laura that these ants were REALLY cool.  We also saw fuzzy caterpillars with red heads, cows with droopy goat-like ears, horses, termite nests, dogs that actually work for a living, and another iguana so large we spotted it sunning itself on a bridge a half mile away.  If anyone thinks ‘everything’s bigger in Texas,’ they haven’t seen the air plants on the Osa Peninsula.  Cowboys were friendly and waved.  Normally, we cover a lot of ground pretty quickly when we walk around Tacoma.  In Costa Rica we seemed to go much slower.  Maybe it was the ‘Look!  It’s an even smaller baby cow!’ and ‘Wow! Look at that view,’ that distracted us from our mission.  After two hours we were still a mile outside of town.

At this point we were attempting eye contact with the few cars that would pass.  Red taxis seemed to be heading to Matapalo, but none were going our way.  The Lapa Rios Land Rovers blazed passed us low-brow backpackers.  A few taxis shot by us filled with bicycles, workers, or boxes.  Finally, four kilometers after leaving our house, a taxi stopped and we were able to get ourselves into town.  There are two main types of taxis in Puerto Jimenez.  The first are the red all-wheel drive SUV models.  The second are the pick up trucks with bench seats in the bed.  This was a bench seat model and the moving air felt great.

Our cab ride ended at Restaurant La Carolina on the town’s main drag.  We ordered the eggs and tomatoes with pintos, their famous yogurt and granola, and two cups of coffee.  The food tasted so fresh and amazing, after our last several meals.  The granola was beyond words with its pineapple, papaya, and sweet yogurt.  The coffee tasted like instant, but even coffee snobs can accept that when desperate.

While we were eating, a man walked into the restaurant with a long white beard, shorts, flip-flops, Hawaiian shirt and an uncanny resemblance to R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural.  He walked straight to the back and exchanged greetings with the restaurant staff.  We quickly realized that we had seen this man before, in Houston, two days prior.  He was on our flight.  As he walked back to the front of the restaurant, I said hello and asked him how his flight was.  He sat down to join us.  We then discovered that his name was John, he now owned Escondido Trex a guide service in Puerto Jimenez, and that he had also been on our flight from Seattle.  We talked to John for nearly an hour and got some recommendations for dinner and places to go.  This outdoor adventurer seemed both impressed and concerned with our rustic accommodations.  He continued to talk and smoke as he was waiting for the keys to his office.  We were trying to figure this place out.

We left Carolina’s and went down the street.  We saw toucans in a home’s front yard, ducked into Cafenet El Sol to check email, and wandered through town until we hit the market.  We stocked up on fresh vegetables, oatmeal, and various household needs.

While Laura was waiting for the cab I went next door to the ice factory.  While I can figure out a grocery store en espanol, wandering around an industrial housing supply looking shop that supposedly sells ice is a bit more daunting.  My Spanish was slowly coming back, but this was still early in the trip.  I took Spanish in high school and did okay when traveling in Spain back in 1995.  But the last time I had tried to put a complex sentence together was in 1995 in a back office of the Seville train station after the regular ticket agent gave up on me.  At the time I was trying to explain that I needed to get to Bergen, Norway from Seville, Spain via Geneva, Switzerland before Monday and before I ran out of money.  Buying ice should be easier.  I asked for a block of ice.  The boy behind the counter grabbed me a bag of cubed ice.  The house had two large coolers and we’d been told to get blocks of ice instead of cubed ice as it lasted longer.  I mimed a block of ice.  ‘Si” and the boy handed me the cubed ice.  I looked confused and the woman from the desk approached.  I continued to draw a block of ice in the air.  She handed me the same bag of ice.  I gave up.  ‘Cuanto cuesta?’  At this point I didn’t clearly hear what she said and my mind was trying to catch up.  I would swear I heard ‘niniento’ which means absolutely nothing to me.  I pulled the change out of my pocket and stared at the various colones coins.  The woman reaches across the counter and grabs the largest coin.  She then shakes her head and gives a thin smile.  Ahhh… 500.  Quiniento.  I left the store with my tail between my legs.  Laura laughed at my tale.

The cab ride back to the house reminded us of just how far we were from town.  Once back in the house we filled the coolers and started making dinner.

For us, Thanksgiving Dinner 2005 was a single course affair involving a salad with some slightly scary looking lettuce, amazing carrots, cucumber, a tomato, several avocados (oh so cheap!), and an onion.  The beverage selection included Coke, Coke Light, pineapple juice, and rum.  It all tasted amazing.

Before heading to bed I chased a cockroach underneath a cooler.  When I pulled away the cooler a halloween crab ran out.  I helped the crab out the door and blew out the candles.  Snake in its place?  Check.  Tarantula?  Still Gone.  We went to bed.