Baggy Paragraphs

Even though I was only six years old, the airplane ride at the carnival bored me silly after one revolution. The planes were darling, but why couldn’t I just take off and fly somewhere? After I got a bit older, the insufficiency of go-karts presented another disappointment on the course near home. The karts were speed-limited. What was the point if you couldn’t race?

Up and over a sandstone dome

Decades might have elapsed since then, but I had much the same reaction after finally getting to Moab for offroad driving. What an incredible scene it was said to be! And, indeed, the Jeeps and other 4×4s in town were a sight to behold. I was to tag along with a group of Land Cruiser enthusiasts that included a helicopter pilot, an attorney, a web designer, a retired airlines pilot, an IT support guy at an accounting firm, and the chief financial officer of a Jackson Hole resort. Their Cruisers were sometimes stock, sometimes heavily modified. There were interesting stories, like the guy from San Diego whose FJ40 was the first vehicle he had ever bought and almost 30 years later he was still using it. Meanwhile, a 30-year-old guy from Denver told the heart-rending story about being handed down his FJ40 from his late father, who had died of cancer. “He always wished he had something like that to remember his father by, so ‘Keep hold of it, and keep it running,’” was the parting message, the son said. He and a friend had driven from Denver in this thing, which had only a bikini top, and the early morning passage through the Colorado mountains in springtime had been a freezing ordeal.

The night before the run, I camped in my tent at Slickrock Campground, where many in the party were staying. Guys were rebuilding their differentials and tweaking their rigs, and I felt stoked about the next day’s adventure.

Fine day for a sandstorm

We set out on the Hell’s Revenge trail on a bright, windy morning. Rather, I should say, we set out during a sandstorm. At first I was in the rear jump seat of the bikini-clad FJ40 but soon moved to the front passenger seat of an FJ100. Or was it an FJ90? Anyway, it was fully enclosed. As much as I love bikinis, this wasn’t the day to be wearing one.

The trail took us over the tops of narrow fins of sandstone and up the face of an extremely steep dome and down the back of another. Featured obstacles were called Rubble Trouble and Tip-Over Challenge and Escalator. Even the stock rigs negotiated these without the slightest problem. One family from Houston included two young kids who experienced the excursion from their child safety seats in the rear.

The five-mile course ended with the option of driving onto Lion’s Back, a prepossessing ridge of stone. Having packed but a meager lunch of my own, I wanted to get back to town and find something to eat, so my lot was cast with a driver who headed directly for the rendezvous point, an ice cream stand down in Moab. Here, the wind was calm and the spring sun at least allowed me to take off my gloves.

On the road to nowhere

Purists will probably say I could have had a more thrilling experience if the group had run Poison Spider Mesa or another of the extreme courses, but I was told Hell’s Revenge is a pretty good taste of the offroad pudding. If you had to do this type of driving in order to participate in the search-and-rescue of, say, a climber who had amputated his own arm with a dull and rusty knife after being pinned down for days by a capricious boulder, I’d be impressed. (Even more worthwhile if he had taken nutriment from a few scraps of his own flesh, having picked it away from the damaged limb.) Or if teams were racing each other on this course, I’d want to participate. Otherwise, it wasn’t much different from the airplane ride at the carnival.

The next morning, although I could’ve gone back out with the group on a different slickrock course, I hiked instead in Arches National Park, where I could pick my own destination, the Devil’s Garden section, and discover its mysteries. I had a most memorable good time.

I was sitting in the departure lounge at Juan Santamaría International Airport with Costa Rica’s leading daily newspaper, La Nación, spread across my knees. The front page headline declared that drops in the price of food and transport had managed to check inflation at 12.75 percent over the last twelve months. The bottom of the page was taken up by a photo from the night before of Iron Maiden’s lead singer Bruce Dickinson saying, “Scream for me, Costa Rica,” before the band launched into “2 Minutes to Midnight.” Their “Somewhere Back in Time” world tour, which began way back on February 1, 2008, and will end this month, brought them to the Switzerland of Central America for the second time. (The initial date had been 371 days ago, just after the tour opened.) The huge crowd at Alejandro Morera Soto Stadium, in Alajuela, included the likes of Jorge Salazar, one of at least 250 fans who had come all the way from El Salvador by bus, a 24-hour journey through Honduras and Nicaragua. “It was worth the trouble,” he said.

My gaze drifted from the paper to the airport’s runway just as a Boeing 757 lifted its nose into the air and thundered away. “Ed Force One” bore the Iron Maiden logo on the forward part of the fuselage, and the tail was painted with the band’s mummy mascot, Ed. I’m used to seeing the gaudily arrayed buses of touring artists and the tractor-trailer rigs of NASCAR or other racing teams, but this massive jet with a mummy on its tail was a first.

Little did I know that Bruce Dickinson had exchanged his torn camo vest and cordless mike of the night before, put on an airline pilot’s neat uniform, and received clearance for takeoff. The lead singer is also the captain and was delivering his band to its next date: last night they rocked Caracas. Today Iron Maiden takes off for Bogotá and will play Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina before wrapping up “Somewhere Back in Time” in Fort Lauderdale on April 2. Besides the custom paintwork, “Ed Force One” is modified to carry 12 tons of cargo and 60 passengers, so the band has an unusual degree of autonomy.

Why can’t I imagine Bono doing this?

http://laughingsquid.com/ed-force-one-the-iron-maiden-boeing-757

http://www.ironmaiden.com/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=808

To put a lid on our Costa Rican vacation, we went to Santa Cruz to buy a hat. I had been noticing the handsome wide-brimmed headwear of the savannah men riding horseback along the roadsides. Some have high peaked crowns, others are low and flat. A third style has a saggy brim in front and back. They’re made of canvas and have loops for a fancy belt of colorful braided cords with tassels or just a strip of printed fabric or a leather belt.

The Santa Cruz statue honoring men of the savannah.

We arrived downtown a little before noon. The narrow sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and schoolkids in white shirts and blouses and black-and-gold plaid skirts and khaki pants lining up at a fast-food chicken place. A woman sold lottery tickets on one corner. A skinny ragged drunk slept right on the pavement and we had to step over him and I told Susan to watch out because he was going to wake up and grab her. We looked in a couple of clothing shops but saw no hats, so I asked a vendor seated on a three-wheeled cycle with a basket for his cooler of frozen pops where I might find a hat like his. He mumbled something about selling me this one for 1000 colones. Little had I expected my voice to carry to a point behind us, where two women piped up, both with different suggestions. The plump lady in a light-colored sleeveless dress who was selling the lottery tickets suggested the veterinary clinic and store 200 meters down the street. The other woman pointed back over her shoulder.

The veterinary shop was dark inside and pet birds for sale cheeped excitedly. A man emerged from the rear and pulled down some unexceptional hats in a plastic bag, and even though they were only 1300 colones I thanked him and said we were just looking. We crossed to the next block and turned down that street to parallel our original course and came across another veterinary clinic, this one with less merchandise and even less in the way of sabanero hats. Back at the main street we arrived at the store the second woman had indicated. Many hats were displayed in the windows, but the doors were closed for the noon hour.

We went into a bakery for a lunch of empanadas. Susan remarked the buttery crust, I remarked the lack of a public restroom. Afterward, with time to kill, we looked around the main square where each corner was the location for a bronze statue. One commemorated the cowboys (vaqueteros, said the inscription) who had worked with the livestock that the savannah supported for all these centuries of colonial and decades of national life. Another represented a woman who had donated land for the city to grow, and the third saluted the area’s native peoples. A spindly fellow standing between these two spoke to us in English, saying, “Welcome to my city.” The fourth statue recognized the mothers who had kept the homes. Here, some men were gathered in the shade by the curb, and one told me to go into the bank and turn left toward the back and I would find the servicios sanitarios. I did this and met another man already waiting: the doors to the men’s and women’s toilets were locked. We stood there a couple of minutes. The man joked that maybe someone had died in there, which made me laugh aloud. Finally I decided it wasn’t an emergency and left him to keep vigil.

I rejoined Susan and we went around the square to the public library, an unbelievable dump in a rotten old building and only a couple of shelves of books to offer. The librarian said I could use the toilet even though the city had shut off the water. She went into a dark closet where I imagined one would be attacked by rats. Jiggling some of the toilet’s mechanical apparatus, she invited me to go ahead because the tank was full, but I bowed out, thanking her. It still wasn’t an emergency.

My new vaquero's hat gets some trimmings.

Our feet carried us down another side street. In it a small tack shop presented a good selection of hats among all the other cowboy gear. I chose a black hat with a low flat crown. The tag inside boasted it was made in Costa Rica. The woman fitted this domestic product with a black-and-brown braided leather belt with a handsome stainless-steel buckle. While she threaded this through the loops she spoke of the city’s water shutoff, saying, “Who knows the reason this time? It happens regularly. Probably repairs.” I can’t remember what I paid for the hat, but Susan says it was the equivalent of around $13.

Making our way back to our Daihatsu bucket of bolts, we headed out of town and finally came to a roadside restaurant in the country. We stopped to rest. I disappeared for a minute, and then joined Susan at the bar to the right of two men from the stock truck parked nearby in the shade. The proprietor of the little place offered her a glass for her soft drink. I asked for one, too, for my beer. “It’s faster,” he said, handing me a wet one out of the sink. He paid no attention to my hat, merely saying it was that of a vaquero before resuming his conversation with the other men.

Flying out the door before 6.30 a.m. on Saturday, we made the 180 kilometers to the Nicaraguan border by about 10.00 a.m. The crossing at Peñas Blancas, which is one of only two between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, was a nightmare. The Nicas search every single truck for drugs, so the line extends three or four kilometers back from the checkpoint. Two Guatemalan truckers I spoke with had been there ten hours, since midnight, and those poor bastards still had about 1.5 kilometers to the finish. This is typical here, they said, and international borders at Honduras and El Salvador loomed yet ahead on their 1200-kilometer trip from San José to Guatemala City. I couldn’t help thinking the congestion must be a dfreadful blight for those whose homes are along the road. The Interamerican Highway has just two lanes, one clogged by these trucks, many of which sit with idling engines. Besides the acrid odor of diesel fumes, there’s lots of commotion with vendors selling juice and whatnot from carts. (Perhaps for those truckers who spend the night, other specialized services are offered.) One driver stood on the top step to his cab, brushing his teeth, and an environmental hazard was implicit in his ultimate need to spit on the road. The men—I haven’t found a woman trucker in Latin America—must also need to answer nature’s call, and who knows about the arrangements for that?

Beating a retreat amongst the poro-poro trees

Returning from the Guatemalan truckers (who lean against their rig).

Northbound cars are allowed past the big rigs, but every so often a southbound vehicle approaches, having just entered from Nicaragua, and you play chicken or decide how to share the lane: it helps that some truckers leave gaps between themselves, but where they’re jammed nose to tail, the imposingly steep shoulder of the road comes into play. When we got to the actual border checkpoint, a nondescript structure without special signs, several young men started waving and yammering, and they directed us to a parking area in front of the building. Wanting to change our money into córdobas and promising a better exchange rate than the commercial houses across the border, one had a thick wad of cash in hand. Another wanted to park our car. Still another wanted to arrange a taxi from the border to the colonial city of Granada. All were in my window and my ear. Leaning through Susan’s window, the Nicaraguan tramitador, a border official, wore a blue polo shirt with a small logo on the right breast. He was very gracious. But as soon as he saw the papers for our Daihatsu bucket of bolts, he said we couldn’t drive a rental into the country. We would have to take a taxi or bus to Granada.

So we turned around and retraced the 23 kilometers south to La Cruz, the pleasant town where we had eaten breakfast in a small restaurant. (Fried eggs, beans and rice, and coffee for me and juice for Susan had come to 3600 colones, or about $6.25.) We continued 11 kilometers farther before turning west. A twisting road led into a bayside village, Cuajiniquil, which might be even harder to pronounce than it appears. Here the paved road ended. I stopped at a tiny store that was just a wing on a family’s shack, bought a grape Fanta there, and got confirmation that the road indeed led into the Murciélago conservation area. There were a few more shacks along the way, and as we were about to go up a hill I stopped for a man and woman who had just walked down it in the road. They were a pleasant-looking, middle-aged pair. Susan observed that the woman, carrying an unopened umbrella for the strong midday sun to come, wore a straw hat over a cloth one, a nearly long-sleeved white and pink printed knit top, a long light-blue skirt, socks, and tennis shoes. I asked them about the trees with deep golden-yellow flowers. We knew the Cortez amarillos, a lighter yellow-blooming tree, but it was our first encounter with these golden blossoms. They said it was the poro-poro. (Or maybe the said poroporo, Poro Poro, Poro-poro, or any of the other ways I’m seeing it written; at any rate, the idea is that it blooms now, in the dry season when so many other trees have dropped their leaves, and produces fruit and then seeds that fall to the ground in time for the rains that come later in the year.)

A remote beach and the people from Cuajiniquil

Javier, the ranger, welcomed us to Murcielago wilderness area.

At the entrance to Murciélago a ranger stepped out of the small house as we shut off the engine. He’d had a cleft palate repaired but was a fine-looking fellow of around 30, name of Javier. The top couple of buttons of his ranger shirt were undone. We chatted with him and Susan wanted to know how many visitors came through. He said about 30 per week, except Holy Week, when 500 are expected. He pointed to the small campground, raising the question of how deep they stack up at bedtime. When it was time to pay the entrance fee, Susan went back to the car for 11,000 colones. Javier asked which country we were from. I was surprised he couldn’t tell, whether by my accent or how we were dressed, so I asked where he thought we were from. After deliberating long enough to earn the “I’m sorry” buzzer in a game show, he finally said he thought it was the United States. I felt a bit of relief that he hadn’t said Germany. On the other hand, if he had guessed a Nordic country, I might have been flattered.

From the ranger station we started down the 18 kilometers of rocky, single-lane road to the beach at Bahía Playa Blanca. A vista point halfway along displayed the Gulf of Santa Elena and Nicaragua’s mountainous coastline beyond it to the north. Reaching our destination, we found three other vehicles in the parking area, but no one was evident. Then a voice emanating from the shade of the beachside trees startled us. A party of five or six was from the cute little hotel back in Cuajiniquil. Another group beside them was of mestizo fishermen who had motored around Punta Blanca from Bahía Cuajiniquil in a 17-foot wooden boat. We bantered with the hotel crowd and greeted the fishermen, and everybody smiled pleasantly. To my remark about the rough road, a handsome man with a long face and round glasses, who presented a cerebral aspect, responded, “Vale la pena.” I had to remark, at least to myself, the coincidence of this, having just learned the phrase earlier in the week: Worth the trouble. After a couple of minutes of this talk, Susan and I set off on a beach walk. I have to confess feeling immediately as though I were in a Corona commercial. All the white sand, the azure bay, the one small island and one small fishing boat near it, and the flowering trees of the dry forest from Punta Blanca on the right all the way around to Cabo Santa Elena on the left: not a car, an airplane, a voice: just the small breakers washing over our feet. The only birds in view—merely two of them—floated serenely on the water. I would almost rate as the next hour’s highlight the drama that was enacted when we surprised a large crab on the sand. It scrambled off in its panicky way, heading for a hole, and, arriving there, evicted a smaller crab that was now faced with the dilemma of where the hell to go; after quite a long run ahead of me, it decided to become invisible and just scrunched down. I used the bottoms of my sandals, which I’d been carrying in my hands, as a pair of tongs and picked up the little fellow for an eye-to-eye, a carapace-a-tête, and Susan and I found ourselves laughing again after I set him back down and he fled into the water.

She uttered her resolve to preserve this tranquility upon returning home and getting caught up in normal life.

Playa Blanca, on Bahia Playa Blanca, 18 kilometers from the ranger station.

We returned to the Interamerican Highway and drove a couple of hours through the neotropical savannah country—Liberia, Filidelfia, Belén, where we bought beer for me and an ice cream bar for her in the Super Compro market, but I failed to find a sabanero hat like that I’d seen on the head of a horseman along the road—and then back over the coastal hills, arriving at Tamarindo just in time to watch the sun set over the bay. From our vantage point above the estuary, where the water taxis and excursion boats sit at anchor, the sun seemed to be internally fueled by carmine flowers and blood oranges. It met the horizon and plunged beneath it to bring day to the eastern hemisphere.
 

Granada, Nicaragua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granada,_Nicaragua

Poro Poro tree: http://www.cds.ed.cr/teachers/harmon/page43.html

Cuajiniquil, Costa Rica (and map): http://www.cuajiniquil.com/index.html

The route from Tamarindo to the 6200-foot volcano Rincón de la Vieja leads first over the forested hills that separate the coast from the inland agricultural valley of the Río Tempisque. Traveling on the narrow but well-paved highway are semi-trucks loaded with sugar cane. Numerous roadside stands offer watermelons and cantaloupes. One business specialized in seeds for rice growers. The district’s major city is Liberia, and Costa Rica’s second international airport is along the highway a few miles before it. The edge of town offers lots of service businesses and office parks. The road to the volcano issues out the backside of Liberia. Finding it isn’t so hard, but the downtown streets are crowded and the driver also wants to be the tourist and look at all the shops and—right between the traffic lanes—the bronze statue of El Sabanero, the rancher who has run cattle over these savannahs since the Spanish arrived around 1520. After a few blocks, we saw the sign to the village of San Jorge and turned right on a residential street. The houses wear lavender and even chartreuse hues, and the tropical limes and oranges sometimes achieved day-glow intensities.

We were following a garbage truck out of town, so it made sense that we would soon come to the dump. For at least a kilometer beforehand, passing over a road that was cut through thick white clay, we were presented with an ugly mess from plastic bags that had blown everywhere and stuck in the branches of trees. It would shock the tourists who come to Costa Rica for la pura vida in the all-inclusive form that shields them from any ugliness.

Susan provides the scale, but this is one of the smaller anthills.

Rincón de la Vieja National Park is 20 kilometers up the road, which climbs the volcano’s flank. The name is said to refer to an old lady who used to live in a cave; I’m told it translates as “the old corner.” The park is barely developed at all, and there were only three other cars in the small parking lot at the Santa Maria sector office. A couple of old wooden buildings are evidently left over from some sort of sugar making operation. We had to pay $10 each to hike. A young man named Lenin—“Como el ruso,” he said—gave us our permits. Lenin lives and works up here fifteen days at a time, and then he enjoys six days off at home in Liberia. He first said it’s a nice town, but then changed his mind and said there are drugs and crime. At any rate, everybody was in a different world down there.

Whereas we had broiled inside our little Daihatsu bucket of bolts while crossing the Tempisque valley, the air up here was cool, not much more than 70 degrees. We were just at the edge of the clouds that shrouded the volcano’s peak and briefly thought about putting on our rain jackets as heavy mist blew in sheets, but the cloud stuck to the peak and we went away from it on the 2.75-kilometer trail to the hot springs. The footing was often terrible because of slippery wet leaves and red clay. I went down hard once on my butt and almost sprained my shoulder by reaching back to break the fall. Every few hundred meters, a stream crossed the trail and we had to step over the taller rocks and hope our footing was sure. A little trail off to the side took us through the Bosque Encantado, or Enchanted Forest, with some huge trees and a tremendous cataract of about 20 meters. Rejoining the main trail, we came to the Río Negro. Watching four hikers ford this river from the other direction was enough for Susan, who really didn’t care to try it herself, and we turned back. After retracing our steps a ways, we chose the trail to Pailas de Agua Fría. After laboring 900 meters up a steep trail, we came to a field of weird volcanic mineral buildup with bubbling cool water. A large clump of bamboo sealed off one end. The sulphuric air made us want to take the next express bus out, so we didn’t stay long. We were also starving and wanted to get back to Liberia and have something to eat. We descended to the main trail, again going over unbelievable anthills that would make the most ambitious gophers jealous. Long processions of leaf-cutting ants carried torn pieces of green leaves up the trail against us and into the hills. We were dazzled by a black butterfly with two equal circles, one white, one vivid pink, on each wing. A most bizarre rodent, the agouti, which looked like a huge guinea pig, emitted an “eep” upon seeing us and loped ahead on the trail before disappearing into the forest.

Driving back down to Liberia, we found a típica restaurant and ordered fish platters, and mine came with black beans, rice, spaghetti, and a small salad. Susan’s had cooked vegetables. These were priced at about $6 each. The waitress, Jessica, told us they have karaoke night every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night: there’s a screen for a slide projector that displays the lyrics. I’d love to go back and see it.

El Sabanero statue: http://www.liberiacostaricainfo.com/LiberiaPhotos/sabanero.html 

Agouti: http://www.nicoyapeninsula.com/wildlife/rodents.html

Leaf-cutting ants: http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/455.php

We set out for beach at 6.00 a.m. Just after stepping onto the hard-packed sand of low tide, we heard a warning. A tall Englishman called our attention to a baby turtle crawling toward the sea. I looked at it and exclaimed, “Breakfast!” The Englishman actually cracked a smile. And it was a buffet breakfast: Susan found another tortoise. In all, we found five.

The impulse was to pick them up and carry them to water, but we’re not supposed to interfere. Nature doesn’t need us. For once I restrained an impulse.

The tortoises had crawled out of their nest in soft dry sand beyond the reach of high tide. Like a fat bicycle tire, they left a track of three parallel strands. The tracks wended irresolutely. The power of instinct? Overrated, it seemed. Maybe turtles are hatched craving immersion in saltwater, or maybe the draw of French fries at beachside restaurants exceeds that.

The Englishman, from Nottingham, had lived in Tamarindo 12 years after coming here with an American company. He had never seen turtles on this beach. He had to chuckle about the irony of the construction ban in buffer zones to the turtle sanctuary, which includes Tamarindo. The Costa Rican court recently halted development projects until an environmental review is completed. Light pollution, our Englishman said, messed with the turtles’ brains, so they weren’t nesting on beaches where people are doing karaoke in surf bars as a way of warding off the darkness. Yet, as we were witnesses, turtles had hatched right near half-naked bums sleeping on the beach, which is bordered by houses and restaurants. As big a surprise, according to our Englishman, was the fact that locals hadn’t dug out the eggs and eaten them.

Then he surrendered to fancy. “Imagine a 150-year-old tortoise coming up here to lay eggs,” he said. “Starting a family at such an age!”

Yes, almost as heinous, or stupendous, as octo-mom Nadya Suleman’s accomplishment.

One turtle made a beeline for the water, but a couple of others turned right, then right again, back to their birthplace. Career counselors should have been summoned to the scene. As the sun came up, more and more people arrived at the beach, and unless they paid close attention, they couldn’t have distinguished these turtle hatchlings from stones. We warned away joggers wearing sunglasses and ear buds. Had they only come from Jersey, Lauderdale, The Woodlands, for the sake of variety in a workout? We turtle cops busted their asses. Soon a German couple and a man from New Hampshire helped to guard the straying babies.

Another Brit, from Bristol, wandered up. Nick was fair-haired, in his late-50s, a bit pudgy, and clutched a mass-market paperback. He’s lived here a year. As for our leathery wards, he expressed pessimism. The sun would rise and they would expire before reaching the water. They were stragglers, should’ve started earlier, that’s nature for you. But we teamed up on the joggers while continuing our chat. He said these turtles were unprecedented, and he would be ringing up his friend who edits the Holwer, a monthly news publication. I asked about life in Tamarindo. Nick winced and said it’s a double-edged sword. There’s nothing to do, particularly after dark. He’s never been one for much TV, so he reads a lot. People (foreigners, we took it) tend to drink heavily after sundown.

Finally, a Tico of about 60 , wearing olive and camo, advanced from the sand 150 meters away to the right. He exhibited a turtle that nearly filled his hand. The eye sockets goggled inward, and the forelimbs were an orthopedic overstatement. He went to the water’s edge with this dear little creature and put it in. When he turned back, I said there were several others. Did he think they would the sun would kill them? Indeed, he did, and he scooped up the one that had made the greatest progress. This issued license to the German woman, to the New Hampshire man, to me, to Susan. We scooped up a turtle. Mine, mostly docile, sometimes scraped against my palm. Just chill, I thought. Where would you go? We conveyed our parties to the water. The first inrushing wave turned a couple of them back toward Greenwich Mean Time—but more human assistance was availed.

These six turtles, hours-old, had escaped ransacking by human nest raiders and stomping by blindfolded joggers. Now they were now at sea.

Four were probably devoured by the voracious pelicans that waited seventy-five yards offshore.

Tamarindo News link to court decision: http://tamarindonews.com/Tamarindo_Community_News/315.html

The Howler: http://tamarindobeach.net/thehowler/index.html

Monday morning we set out over a rocky road for the Cabo Blanco nature preserve, seven kilometers away. The first such preserve in Costa Rica, it was established in 1963 through the initiative of Nils Olof Vestberg, a Swede, and Karen Mogensen, a Dane, who had a farm near Montezuma but were appalled to see the climax forest disappear as the government promoted agriculture. Having been here in 2005, Susan and I could hardly wait to show Marianne and Leif. Dozens of trees are named and described along the “Danish trail,” and there’s a great hike over the “Swedish trail” to a secluded beach. What we hadn’t anticipated is that the preserve is closed Monday and Tuesday. A Swedish girl who’s volunteering at the office for a few weeks was the only person around. She said we could stay for a while and look at the white-faced monkeys that were right there in the trees. As we returned to the car, howler monkeys were fed on leaves of trees at the parking lot’s perimeter, and Leif got pictures of them, too.

Marianne, me, Nena, and Susan. Photo by Leif.

On the way back to Montezuma we stopped where a placard advertised Nena Marmalade, the very same stuff we were consuming with the homemade bread at Amor de Mar (the four of us shared Casa Luna there). The Swedish woman who supervised breakfast at the inn mentioned Nena sold her marmalade directly to tourists, and Marianne spotted the sign and we shared a sense of accomplishment in having tracked down the jam. We turned into the dirt yard and parked. Nena greeted us without indicating she spoke any English, so I said in Spanish that we were interested in her jams, and she beckoned us inside. We crossed a beautifully tiled porch and a small living room adorned with the poster of a singer. The couple of rooms off the short hallway were closed off by curtains. The kitchen was rather large with tiled counters, above which Susan noticed coffee mugs hanging from hooks on a sort of mesh screen. Nena opened the refrigerator door, revealing jars of different sizes, and then started to set them out one by one on the table. Coconut-mango was succeeded by pineapple and papaya in brilliant hues of yellow. What she called limón looked more like lime. One dark jar contained mora, a blackberry. Another flavor was unrecognizable by name, and after I repeated it, she picked up a paper bag filled with plumlike fruits. Marianne selected a couple of flavors and Susan said she wanted limón, but I protested and we ended up with coconut-pineapple. Nena reminded us, as the sign at the road indicated, that she also sells coconut oil. Slender bottles were kept in a cupboard. She said the oil was for cooking but also for application to the hair and skin. We paid her 2500 colones per jar, equaling about $4.33. Despite our lack of interest in coconut oil, she threw in a smaller jar of mango jam with each purchase. Nena told us she’s 52 years old and had lived down the road for 35 years and right in this house the last 17 years. During tourist season she spends her days in the kitchen. She asked what countries we came from and we were just telling her when her cell phone rang, so we shook hands and went outside, noticing her setup under a metal roof supported by sturdy poles.

Marianne checks out Nena's bubbling pot.

A blackened pot was brimful of syrupy yellow-orange mash that bubbled languidly atop a burner fired by a couple of pieces of wood. A dozen or so pineapples clustered in a rack just beyond this cooking station. Throughout the rest of the shed, I noticed lots of toys, like a green plastic pedal tractor. Nena finished her call and came out to stir the pot. We got into our BeGo and as crossed a bridge immediately after turning out of her yard. The white ducks in the water of the shallow creek were undoubtedly hers. We went away thinking about the marmalade pot bubbling near Cabuya, on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. While space satellites collide in orbit and drug cartels spread chaos across Mexico and economic collapse makes a zillion dollars of personal wealth disappear with a giant slurping sound, jam is eternal verity.

Link for the Cabo Blanco natural preserve:  http://caboblancopark.com 

Link to Montezuma hotels, with a page for Amor de Mar: http://www.montezumacostarica.net

The sea, aquamarine in the foreground, deepens to ultramarine at the horizon, where haze obscures the main body of Costa Rica across the Gulf of Nicoya. Cobalt dabbles the vault of heaven. At the shore before us, black volcanic rocks that are seamed white make the small breakers froth almost blithely; their sound Saturday night was like heavy rain drumming the roof. About seventy-five yards offshore a brow of rock is the nighttime roost and daytime redoubt of pelicans, a few of which linger during the morning, watching the occasional smug show-off glide past, wings held back, bellies inches from the water. Three placid loafers bob around. Inward from the shore, a sprinkler rotates lazily on the grass. The lawn—dotted with a few coconut palms and divided by a mass of dracaenas from which a large, thorny, leafless acacia rises (itself half strangled by the vine of a philodendron with enormous yellow and green leaves)—is of a thick, thirsty type of grass. A closer inspection of the grounds turns up various ferns, succulents, gingers, bananas, mangoes, and even a wispy, waving thing with neat rows of tiny leaves and every so often a brown dangling seed pod: a tree looking suspiciously like a locust. The lone conifer with branches spaced at regular, airy intervals could be a spruce.

Casa Luna

A couple of loras just flashed past and landed where the tasseled jays have been castigating everybody since today’s dawn. Possessing the camp robber gene, they mingled with us during breakfast on the patio, stealing a cube of melon whenever an unsuspecting guest rose from the table. One of this little troupe was missing its tail feathers, and the Swedish woman who manages the restaurant told two Swedes at the table beside ours that a cat had acquired the feathers, but the jay still demonstrated remarkable agility. Drifting in and out of view higher overhead are a frigate bird and four smaller yet formidable gray-white birds with sharply pointed straight wings.

Every so often someone goes by: the auburn-haired Swedish girl with a straw bag slung from her shoulder brings a cup of coffee out to a hammock and sits in it. Now she’s walking barefoot on the rocks, her faintly pink sarong stuffed into the bag. She sets her bag down. A seam in the rock admits inrushing tidewater. She carefully steps into it using a ledge that leaves her shoulders and head visible, but then she disappears. Every so often her tan cap pokes out of the little canyon. When she finally climbs out again, she reclaims her shoulder bag and leaves, stage right, behind the dracaena thicket. The birds are silent now. The breakers keep up their murmuring and the sprinkler still chatters away.

The whiskered man was missing his front teeth, and those at the corners of his mouth were crooked and yellow. His closed right eye suggested injury. A red T-shirt billowed from his bony torso, emphasizing the whole shaky way he had approached us from across the highway, where the gas station was flanked by a tiny soda shop that featured the mural of an iguana and a tortoise looking at the sunset as a swordfish bursts from the water.

Arriving at the driver’s window, he asked, “Do you need any help?”

Daihatsu BeGo bucket of bolts

Supposing it was as much English as he knew, I replied in Spanish that we were just waiting for friends. But he continued, “Where are you from?” When we answered, he said the United States was a very big country, unlike Costa Rica. “Canada, States, Brazil,” he elaborated. We agreed that Costa Rica is big on friendship, and then I asked about his English. “I learn it in the streets,” he said. “I never went to school.” He offered his hand. “My name is Alex.”

Now that he had our confidence, he showed us the scabbed inside of his left wrist. Some trouble with his wife had led to his sleeping under the Rio Diria bridge, two hundred meters behind us. The scabs formed after ants bit him.

“Hormigas.” I said, bringing a big smile to his lips.

“Very good! Hormigas.” Alex proceeded to explain about his eye. He was sanding a floor when a particle lodged. Drawing apart the lids with his fingers and exhibiting the bloodshot pupil, he waved his other hand in front to prove that he couldn’t see it. How was this said in English?

“Blind,” I told him. “Blind in one eye.”

The clinic here in Santa Cruz couldn’t help him. He needed laser treatment at Hospital Mexicana, in San José, but couldn’t get there. “I’m broke. Could you help me out? I’m hungry.”

I handed over 2000 colones: what we had paid for breakfast at a tipica restaurant in Tamarindo. I couldn’t remember the name but said it was near a better-known beach place, El Pescador. With a tottery bon vivant’s air, Alex said he knew it. Then, sensing I wanted assurance the money was really going for food instead of beer, he pointed down the highway, where a restaurant that was just out of sight would assuage his hunger in plenty of time for him to catch the 12.30 bus home. His wife might take him back. He wobbled away on the road’s dusty shoulder.