Stranger in a Strange (Wet) Land

This past weekend, we went on our first class excursion to Manuel Antonio, a national park on the central Pacific coast. The best way I can describe it is that it was kind of like a four hour bus ride through Topanga Canyon, only with much more black exhaust in your mouth (I’m kind of getting the black lung here) and a girl who had to get off to throw up along the way. The paving was spotty at parts, there were these curious bridges that could only take cars going in one direction at a time (traffic laws are screwy here) and under these bridges were collections of crocodiles (we’ll return to these bridges in a few). I was stuck sitting next to one of the two gay fellas on the trip, who was genial enough and he smelled like an entire can of axe body spray, but then he fell asleep on me, and I couldn’t figure out a way to get him off my shoulder without looking like an insensitive homophobe (this characterization existed exclusively in my mind). He had fallen asleep with his ipod headphones on, with it tucked into the seat in front of us, so I slowly started to increase the volume on his ipod (I think it was playing N’Sync at the time) until he stirred during some song that wasn’t one of the singles I knew. I’m now wondering if my reputation has shifted from light-hearted bald guy to light-hearted in the closet bald guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Upon arriving, Manuel Antonio felt like resort town mostly composed of ambling, bathing-suited tourists, but I can easily understand why. Photos are forthcoming, but it was basically a small lush peninsula surrounded by a postcard-ish beach scene. After getting off the bus, I was praying for rain. This was the worst humidity of the entire trip, easily 90%+. I felt like I was in the devil’s crock pot (hell is probably a difficult place to cook over an open flame). It got a little lighter once we started hiking through the peninsula, but the weather can change quickly down here. More on that in a second.

The national park here is basically a trail through the aforementioned peninsula, full of bugs, birds, sloths, some kind of raccoon-relative, and monkeys(!). Time to close the book on the monkeywatch; they were in mating season and were making crazy noises, mostly unaffected by the humans snapping photos around them. The other animals were cool too, but I’ll leave that to the pics. The beaches themselves here are okay, but they’re apparently somewhat spoiled by the touristic influence and, at this time of year, the runoff from the heavy tropical rain (the water isn’t that clear near the shore, it’s immaculate further out).

The foliage cover from above was so dense, and the animal chatter was very loud at times, so it was hard to tell how hard it was beginning to rain. After looping around back to the entrance of the trail, I stepped out into the heaviest downpour of the trip, to this point. The human reactions were amusingly mixed. Some people were walking through the rain unaffected, some people went into national emergency mode, trying to valiantly direct people under awnings and trees using (mostly) unapproved navy seal hand signals. The true measure of the moment was somewhere in between. No small children were being washed into the ocean, but it was kind of serious. We first took shelter under a street merchant’s awning, made of wood and leaves that was lined with plastic, which promptly collapsed onto a group of us under the weight of the water it was collecting. No one was hurt, but everyone was drenched. I tried to cross to a bus stop across the flash-flooded street and the water was about halfway up my calves. After crossing what was once a grassy roundabout that was less 5-star scenery and more like trying to dodge the Viet Cong, we managed to huddle everyone in front of a brick and mortar restaurant a block up. Here, we were given Fantas and told we might have to leave tonight because the aforementioned one-way croc bridges we crossed might get swamped over if the rain didn’t stop soon. I like to think this was god’s vengeance, destroying this touristy temple for spoiling his creation, but we were just idiots for coming during the rainy season.

The shuttle to our hotel finally came back and took the soppy collection back up. Back at the hotel, the group grumbled back to their rooms to pack, but it was only about an hour later that the storm broke and we were reassured we’d have safe passage home by morning. Our room smelled like wet dog throughout the night, but at least we were able to go compare disaster stories at the bar that night. It was fun.

***

This afternoon, we went to a place called “The Butterfly Farm,” after it took about a week to find a cab driver who knew where that was. This place is actually a farm, about a hectare of land owned by some Dutchman who grew up in England who came to Costa Rica to grow tomatoes then changed his mind and decided he wanted to conserve (and later farm and sell) butterflies. The end result is a farm full of crazy foliage that you can walk through that is flooded with butterflies everywhere you look. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I’m planning on going back to this place, so pictures will be up soon. They export about 5,000 pupa per week to schools, museums, and other butterfly farms. It’s a strikingly organized operation, when you see all of the host plants they need to keep up in order to maintain the biodiversity of the butterflies. You can walk around and see dozens of species, in all their stages (egg -> larva/caterpillar -> pupa/chrysalis -> adult/butterfly). It’s a secluded place, deep in one of the Costa Rican central valleys, so there are very few tourists, but the staff is suspiciously friendly. What’s more, they gave us complimentary ponchos (it was raining again), coffee, a tour guide, and a 20 minute video on the history of this particular butterfly farm. My suspicions were for naught; this place was simply cool.

Tonight was a different story. The people I was with decided they wanted an American dinner, so they opted to go to the Outback steakhouse in Azcazul (sp?). If you think this is out of place or antithetical, you should know, there was a Hooters across the street. Anyway, I had a burger and even though my host mom’s cooking has been great, it was damn good burger. We stayed at this restaurant until around 7:00 when asked the hostess to call a cab for us. The cab didn’t arrive until nearly 8:00, which was frustrating until we went outside and saw part two of the other night’s rainstorm. Apparently, it followed us back to the outskirts of San Jose, because the taxi driver had about 10 feet of visibility and drove about 20 kmph the entire way home. What was usually a 20 minute drive back to Ciudad Colon took nearly an hour, as the rain wouldn’t let up. Making matters worse, as soon as we entered Colon (remember, the sleepy little mountain town), there was a bright flash of lightning and then all the power went out in the village.

There are no addresses in Colon; this is the place Bono was talking about where the streets have no name. You have to tell taxis driving you home, “turn right at the blue house with the horse in the front yard, and right after the bridge.” Problematically, in the pitch black darkness, we can’t see any landmarks to tell the taxi driver where to go, and he only has one working headlight. We essentially have to have him drive at a crawl and wait for lightning (which is striking about every 2 minutes) to give him directions. There were three stops to get all of us home, but he was getting irritated and was only willing to make the first two. This meant that the only person who was getting off at the last stop was going to have navigate through Colon at night, in the rain, by lightning. This person was wearing flip-flops, shorts and a brown polo t-shirt, and wishing he hadn’t left his complimentary butterfly poncho at the kitschy Australian-themed restaurant. This person was me.

Even in the abject darkness of a lightless village, I’m too proud to run in public, so I’m doing the old man power-walk through the mall thing, repeatedly dropping my foot in a mud puddle or in an unannounced marshy pit, literally trying to feel my way along the edges of buildings (when there are some). Every two or three minutes, a car would drive by and I could at least see that for the next 50 yards, I wasn’t going to walk off the gravel road into some peat bog. When the car was out of sight, I had to stop and wait for either lightning, or another car’s headlights to pass so I could pick out my next turn. It was kind of like when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but don’t want to turn on the lights to make it to the bathroom, and you have to feel your way past your doorjam, to the cold tile under your feet, to the sink, to the seat. Except here, your bathroom is ten blocks down and someone is spraying you in the face with a super-soaker. FINALLY, I see Banco Nacional lit up in a flash, which means my house is three blocks to the right over the bridge. Now I’m kind of running, but it’s more like a homerun trot around the bases. I’m feeling vindicated, even though I’m wet through to my underwear. I walk in through the front door and see Rom playing Uno by candlelight with our host family’s 12 yr old cousins and they ask me what happened. I’m getting to the part where I’m standing on the rainy corner near our house like some pathetic loser in a Coldplay music video when the power comes back on, and the 12 year olds point and laugh at me, since now they can see I look like a bald rat that’s been through the rinse cycle.

So to summarize, I’m having a good time.

This entry was posted by VJ, on Monday, July 23, 2007. You can leave your response.