Baggy Paragraphs

I’ve finally created a slideshow of pictures from Costa Rica that didn’t appear in my blog. Here’s a sample:

You’re invited to use this link to view them all:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/baggyparagraphs/sets/72157623640389944/show/

Be sure to use the “Show Info” tab on the slideshow’s screen to get the captions. Hope you enjoy looking.

Percy and Mayra are two of my acquaintances from the beach at Tamarindo in 2010.

Percy and Mayra are people I got to know recently at the beach in Tamarindo. Percy grew up in the San Jose ghetto and would’ve been a gangster, he said, and probably dead, if not for a surfing vacation to Tamarindo in 1990. He became one of Costa Rica’s first professional surfers until injuring his leg; now he manages a hotel. Mayra is an illiterate woman who lives in a hovel along the alleyway that I walked through when going down to the beach. She was out every morning at 6.15 a.m., sprinkling down the dust.

Through Sunday's haze, Lake Nicaragua, and one of its islands, appears in the middle of this photo.

Not the pigs foraging in the ditch but rather the two stretching streetlights confirmed it. Yep, I was downtown. It was La Virgen, an itty-bitty place right on the Nicaraguan border. There appeared to be a store on the left, but my eyes were fixed on those pigs, lest they suddenly decide to cross, taking me down in the process. Being hog-trampled isn’t the way I’d ever want to fall off a motorcycle, and especially here—not in this remote and rustic region between the volcanic peaks of the Cordillera de Guanacaste and the southern shore of Lake Nicaragua. My misfortune would be the talk of the town, such as it was, for months to come.  

An hour earlier I’d stopped for gas in Santa Cecilia. The attendant filling up the bike’s tank said I needn’t worry about my personal security. He doubted I’d be able to cross into Nicaragua but guaranteed a view of the lake.  

There followed my lunch at Las Brisas de Orosi, a restaurant whose name refers to the eponymous gale that roared off the slopes of the eponymous inactive volcano. “We cook over firewood,” bragged the sign out front. Featured decorations inside the main seating area included not only the crosscut saw blades typical of any frontier outpost, but also the atypical AK-47 machine gun and a belt of spent .30-caliber cartridges.  

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“From the war in Nicaragua,” said the owner, a burly fellow who sat down to chat. The young waitress was reading a newspaper article about the upcoming Metallica concert in San José to a slender, silent, older man who sat watching a shark-attack movie on Channel 6. My host said very few tourists come up here, and it’s primarily an agricultural area. Route 4 had indeed led through extensive groves of citrus and past a big processing plant.  

“How many people here in Santa Cecilia—five hundred?”  

“No, more.”  

“A thousand?”  

“More. It’s big!”  

But the paved road ended at this metropolis, and in subsequently trying to find my way along the border and perhaps across it, I got good and lost while traversing the slopes and gullies south of the lake. At the bottom of one hill, a red flag with a white symbol made me think I might be at a border crossing, but my continuing ahead brought no pursuit. The next time I saw a flag, there were people everywhere in the house. They leaned out of windows, sat on the porch steps, and scattered about the yard. No one spoke or moved. This absolutely had to be a government operation. I pulled up along the barbed-wire fence and took off my helmet.  

No one acknowledged me, so I addressed the boy nearest. That’s when a man rose up and explained the flag is that of a Costa Rican political party. (He named it, but I’ve forgotten.) The earlier flag was that of a rival party. The border crossing was beyond the river and over the hills. He asked someone if my motorcycle could manage the ford. The consultant thought it could. As I put my helmet on again, the boy took off down the road. Meanwhile, a cow wandered up to the fence. The man sat back down.  

As soon as I rounded the bend, the aforementioned river presented itself. It was a good fifteen yards across, flowing briskly, and appearing a bit deeper than I would have preferred.  

“Motorcycles go high,” the boy said, indicating a rickety footbridge.  

I gunned the engine and entered the water, gunning the engine a bit harder as the stream deepened on the far side, preparing myself to snorkel if necessary, and miraculously emerged on the other side, wet to the knees but still upright on two wheels.  

The road was narrow and without directional signs. It surprised me to see how many people lived in this hinterland. The map correctly indicated a few primitive trails and nothing more. The houses, of crude boards, were covered with zinc panels. A couple of old rattletrap Hyundais, parked at a couple of residences, were the only cars. There couldn’t have been regular passenger bus service on such a godforsaken route. And who knows about getting to school? People were lolling about on their Sunday’s respite from whatever work they did during the week. They just sat around and watched. There was absolutely nothing to do: no March Madness, Internet, computer games, Target or Home Depot or manufacturers’ outlet shops, no landscaping to revise, no woodworking projects or knitting or mountain biking or kayak paddling. For the likes of the children from these environs, I suppose, a nationwide supermarket chain that has a Tamarindo location hits up customers to donate for shoes so that schoolkids “can walk to a better future.” All throughout the district a lot of clothes had been washed during the morning; these garments now dangled on the barbed-wire fences like the aftermath of some natural disaster. There would have been dust blowing around if any vehicles had passed by. Almost the only human beings who moved, besides me, were riding on horseback or strolling along with machetes.  

I came to a small school building with two flags. Costa Rica’s own, with its wide red stripe sandwiched between white and then blue ones, was recognizable. But the blue, white and green banner with a semicircle of red on the left was unfamiliar. I concluded it was Nicaragua’s and this school was a co-op. A sign had an inspirational slogan about everyone studying to improve, and it vaguely suggested a collectivist sentiment that could have been associated with the Sandinistas. I made a left onto this road. It narrowed and dropped, twisted and turned, and then simply ended at a tiny stream, which was crossed by a couple of logs. Shutting off the bike, I listened to the monkeys and to the voice of a young girl playing and then of a woman speaking as to another adult. Heavy vegetation hid everything, even the houses. Nearest my stopping point on the trail—the word “road” had been too extravagant for the last few hundred meters—boards propped up a tree’s lower limbs and the clusters of coconuts. I started up the bike and climbed out of there.  

Ines, mounted, and Erin (?) set me straight.

In the uphill environs, near some houses I’d noted earlier, a horseman was just setting out. I put on the brakes and gestured to him.  

“I thought those flags meant the Nicaraguan border was just ahead.”  

“No.” The second one, he explained, was the Guanacaste provincial flag.  

“So there’s not a bi-national educational program with Nicaragua?”  

As graciously as possible, he said, “Pura costa rica.”   

Around the time I felt the need to turn back, that’s when I somehow conveniently found myself on the unpaved stretch of Route 4 to the east of Santa Cecilia, and I just continued eastward to a town called Brasilia (like the capital of the South American nation). Here began a 37-kilometer stretch of unpaved road through a gap between volcanoes in the Guanacaste chain. It was pleasantly cool and verdantly green. But the route turned to the west and led downslope, returning me to the warm dry savannah. My approach to the city of Liberia coincided with the sunset. The big fiesta was in progress. As soon as the bike stopped, a drunk walked up and asked, in correct English, for 2000 colones so he could get a bath. That’s about $4. I declined to help with his “bathing” and went to the correo de toros in which the young men of Liberia stand around inside the stadium and prove their virility by perhaps getting kicked in head by the bull that’s let loose among them. I watched from beneath the grandstands with plenty of fellow cheapskates. The audience squealed every time the bull was roused from its torpor. It was all fairly dull, although I could see how, for anyone who spent most of his or her time in a shack along the Nicaraguan border, the excitement would be overwhelming.  

The remaining 70-kilometers back to Tamarindo was over smooth, well-marked highway. My day’s adventuring ended after more than 300 kilometers in ten and a half hours.

Today, Monday, was my final full one in Tamarindo. I’ve devoted it to paying my departure tax in the bank; reminding the airport shuttle service that I’m not at Hotel Chocolate, as planned; and trying unsuccessfully to get a print out of the photo I took of Mayra in one of the cyber-cafes. Tomorrow morning I depart for Daniel Oduber Airport, near Liberia, and fly home.  

A view of cloud-mantled Rincon de la Vieja on the way downslope from the chain of volcanoes.

Last night the air cooled quite a bit right before sundown, so I decided to shut off the A/C and open the windows. What a mistake! This morning dust from the street covered everything. Marisel, the maid, wiped down the surfaces, but now that the A/C is going again I think it’s blowing dust that collected in the unit itself. I wiped off the keyboard before beginning to write this but feel dust under my fingers and grit on my teeth.

Monkeys were in the trees right behind Portofino this morning. They’ve been howling on and off throughout the day. I went to the next street and uphill to where they were, but they were out of range for a decent photo.

My walk this morning at the beach was nice. I ended up talking to a family who were sitting on the seawall at the Hotel Diria. Sandbags are stacked atop it because of the high tides. I joked with the father about spending his vacation in Costa Rica behind sandbags. They came from Washington, D.C., but it turned out the mother’s Danish, from Vejle. (Yesterday, I met two travelers from Odense.) The couple had three darling girls, ages four, six, and eight. Hearing me say a few words in Swedish to the mom, the six-year-old boasted, “I can speak Danish.”

After having four more kilos of laundry done yesterday, I opened the bag and found a black sock with a Nike swoosh. So I took it back to the lavandería—it’s not very far over there—and said I appreciated the offer but couldn’t use it. The three ladies laughed. A Tico who was standing there talking to them said in English, “It’s for your birthday.” When first picking up the clean laundry, I commented on the heat inside the place with all the machines running. Does it affect their performance? A laundress told me they’re gone through once a month.

“By you ladies?”

Again, they shared a laugh.

“Un mecánico,” she said.

This woman is another who has suffered major facial injuries, and they didn’t get her put back together quite right. She looked like a Picasso drawing. The poor dear!

When they call this a good surfing beach, they're not kidding!

I received an email yesterday from a guy in Houston, the president of some sort of electric bicycle or scooter company. He wrote a long exposition about why the electric scooters of Current Motors won’t work. That was the very first story I did for AnnArbor.com. It was last July! I have no idea why someone would respond to anything that appeared so long ago. This fellow pointed out, for one thing, that the scooter kits that Current Motors modifies are made in China. I had another look at my story. It very clearly states that the scooter kits that Current Motors modifies are made in China. He concluded that he would’ve posted his letter as a comment on the AnnArbor.com site, but didn’t want to “pee in my petunias” because I hadn’t done my homework. By this he meant that, according to his evaluation, the Current scooters won’t work, and my report had failed to point out this finding.

My impulse was to write him back and say:

1. Why the hell did you wait seven months to comment on an article that appeared in the daily press?
2. The story very clearly states that the scooter kits that Current Motors modifies are made in China.
3. It isn’t the local reporter’s place to insert his opinion about whether the product of a new local business is practical or feasible. When I lived in St. George, Utah, I wrote a story about Ronnie’s Buffalo Burgers. Ronnie was clearly a fool. His optimism about the public’s appetite for buffalo meat was so great that he simultaneously opened not one but two locations, each at different ends of St. George Boulevard. St. George wasn’t a very large town then; one buffalo-meat hamburger stand would’ve overwhelmed the market. But I confined my story to the fact that there were two locations. Neither did I express my doubts about the soundness of the enterprise or of Ronnie’s mind. Of course the twin buffalo burger stands closed up faster than you can explain the that Spanish expression matar a uno el gallo en la mano is a way of saying you’ve floored someone with an argument—really shut him up. (Literally, it appears to mean that you’ve killed someone with a rooster.)
4. Even then, my original story about the scooters was supposed to include the opinion of an outside expert: Barry Winfield, who writes about motorcycles for all sorts of outlets (publishing outlets, not electrical outlets). Barry said that one obstacle facing Current Motor Company is that conventional scooters with gasoline engines “are doing a fantastic job.” And furthermore: “Of all the vehicles that need to reduce their carbon footprint, small scooters are the last.” He pointed out that fuel economy of 70 to 90 miles per gallon is common and engine exhaust is treated to remove pollutants. He said he sees electric scooters aiming for “a very tiny niche market.” But the editor cut all that.

So I just deleted the letter. Why argue? The guy is clearly a pinhead—maybe an autistic pinhead, maybe an autistic pinhead with a gun. It amazes me how certain readers respond to news stories with extreme literal-mindedness. I’d only read the letter’s first couple of sentences and the last paragraph; I barely glanced at those in between, which appeared to be full of careful reasoning about the performance characteristics of electric vehicles. The minuscule fee I got for the story wasn’t enough to obligate me to read hate mail that arrives more than seven months later while I’m in another country.

Living well is the best revenge!

Last night the wildfire glimmered on the slope behind Playa Grande, and I could smell the smoke a mile away on Tamarindo Beach. I’ve been told not to worry about the monkeys, but I do. The tide was far out, and the breakers yowled about the losses. When I looked east, the moon was just getting about the business of hoisting itself up by way of a crotch in the cerro that Tamarindo clings to. I had never beheld the town from the beach at night; it’s like a tiny Beverly Hills.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep, so I’d gone out around 10.00 p.m. Before I could turn down the alley where Mayra lives, the one leading down to the beach, a man in a shadow asked if I wanted to party. Oh, yeah, man! I’m ready to roll! Let’s get some hookers and some blow, and we’ll really have a good time! His wouldn’t be my last invitation of the next little while. But aside from clusters of people in the bars and restaurants, not much was happening in Tamarindo. Just a few taxi drivers standing by their cabs, and whores and pimps scattered here and there. Except for the human kind, there was almost no traffic, so neither was there any dust.

Noe, vigilant throughout the night.

Returning to Portofino, I had a long chat with Noé, the night watchman. He said most of the whores are from the Dominican Republic or Colombia.

“They go up and down this street, too,” he said with obvious distaste.

I closed the door to my apartment but could still hear an odd old disco tune from around 1980, which I thought probably antedated most of the crowd at the club across the street. It’s on the third floor, and from its large terrace multicolored points of light strobed the dust in the road.

The only thing my apartment lacked was a coffeemaker. The other morning one of my neighbors was carrying a cup of coffee out to the pool. I asked where she had got it, thinking perhaps there was a pot brewing in the Portofino’s office. She said she’d made it in her apartment and would make one for me. I demurred. But I had been spending about 1000 colones per day ($2) on coffee from a couple of little shops. Three days ago I asked Marisel the maid about this and she went into another apartment for a moment and returned with a chorreador, a simple rectangular wooden frame with a hole cut into the top crossbar. (Chorrear is to pour, gush, drip—depending on circumstances, I guess.) Into this fits a kind of sock that is fitted around a steel hoop. You just spoon some coffee into the bottom of the sock and then pour in the boiling water from a pot on the stove. A stream runs out the pointed tip into the cup that’s been placed below. It couldn’t be simpler, and it makes pretty good coffee. Later, after drying out, it’s easy to get rid of the grounds merely turning the sock inside out and shaking it a bit.

Today I whipped up another pot of gallos pintos. When I went out to pick up a couple of things I needed, including a bunch of cilantro, I saw the employee of Super 2001 who had given me pointers the first time around and helped me to find a bottle of the recommended sauce. She was standing on a stool while stocking a shelf. I shouldn’t get started on the unsafe practices that employees have to engage in here while doing their jobs. Yesterday I saw a guy putting up a ladder from the back of his pickup in order to work on a sign; in the middle of all this were electric wires coming in from the street.

Anyway, I told her that my first batch had turned out well, thanks to her technical advice, and I was at it again. I also said she looked familiar from 2008 and 2009. She said she has worked here two years and four months. Her name is Yasmin. She asked if I am here on vacation and what country I come from.

“You can’t tell from my accent?”

“Well,” she said, “you could be Canadian.”

I had to concede that much.

“Soy nica,” she said, meaning she’s Nicaraguan. She had come from Managua with her brother in order to find work.  

“How do you like the life here?”

“Not very well.” The problem is that she misses her family.

Of course, people in the United States and other developed countries move thousands of miles away from their families in order to take jobs. But even though the distance between Managua and Tamarindo isn’t great—I can’t imagine it exceeds the distance between Detroit and Chicago—I get the impression it’s very, very far nonetheless.

Going down to the beach at sunrise on my first morning here, I recognized the woman with the garden hose. She stood in front of her house, sprinkling the alleyway’s dust. Her round face, paunchy belly, and vividly colorful top were somewhat familiar from my two previous visits to Tamarindo. The façade of her house is of solid concrete block, with a row of filigree at the top, and from these openings emanates a fierce amount of woodsmoke as she prepares meals. The garland of flowers on the wall somehow withstands this.

“Buenos días,” I said that first day and repeated it two or three other times in ensuing days. She always has the green manguera in hand. If I have missed her in the act of sprinkling and she has gone inside, I see the wetted dust.

Yesterday, though, I found her where the alley empties into the paved street at the beachside. We started chatting.

“You’re always up so early,” I said.

She told me rises around 4.00 a.m. daily. Indeed, yes, that’s early. “But I go to bed at half-past seven. I don’t like TV.” She allowed that she does enjoy a nap around 2.00 p.m.

I told her my name and that I’m from the United States. I thought she said her name was Maia.

Thinking about her all day, I decided to get her picture this morning. I set off as usual. When I entered her alley, she was just shutting off the water.

“Could I take your picture?” I asked.

She said nothing but didn’t flee inside. She listened to my instructions for posing. I took a three snaps, none of which suited me when we looked at the display.

“Were you born here in Tamarindo?”

“Yes.”

“Do you work?”

“Just here in the house.”

At that moment, a tremendous bang sounded against the zinc roof.

“A mango,” she said.

I looked up and indeed saw a mango tree spreading over much of the roof’s expanse.

“It would be frightening if that happened in the night.”

“Sometimes it happens.”

I told her that I wasn’t sure whether it would be worse to have a mango fall like that or to hear a monkey’s howling at 4.00 a.m.

“They come through these trees,” she said.

Looking through the front door, I noticed firewood stacked against the back wall of the interior. Then I remembered that I had wanted to make sure I could spell her name.

“Is it M-a-i-a or M-a-y-a?”

“Mayra,” she corrected.

“How do you spell it?”

She shrugged her left shoulder ever so slightly.

“Mucho gusto!” I said, turning for the beach.

The big-bellied guy from New York had the inside dope on everything. Poolside on Saturday, when La Puma had swum up to my chaise lounge and started chatting, he was stretched out nearby, and he tossed in a couple of remarks. K—-, floating at pool’s edge in her black one-piece, was talking about the Chinese, who are building a soccer stadium in San José as a gift to the nation of Costa Rica before its textile and agriculture industries are destroyed by “bilateral” trade. (China: “Oh, yes, we’re the world’s largest market, and your products will be welcome here!”) The New Yorker said he has a friend who’s a taxi driver here in Tamarindo, and according to this taxi driver, a pedestrian had been run over and killed on Friday and the cabbie passed the scene just as police were throwing a blanket over the victim. That was Inside Dope Number One.

Early yesterday, as I was returning from the beach, Old New York was wheeling his luggage through the front gate. He said that on his previous visit, he had been here later in March. I asked whether he liked it better this time around. His answer never was clear. Yes, there is in fact the Spring Break scene later in March. So he was glad to have avoided that. But it wasn’t as big as Cancún’s, and he had liked it. So he missed it. Things here had been pretty quiet through the end of February. He missed the Spring Break crowd. But he was glad to have missed it.

At any rate, he liked Portofino—especially the pool. His friend in San José owns a hotel and tells him all about the contamination of the beaches. No way he’s going into the ocean.

I thought the pool-only stance just fit perfectly with the it’s-all-a-scam attitude of so many New Yorkers. A four-minute interview was enough to make me sick to death of the guy.

“Ah, excuse me, but I need to get back to my apartment and count the tiles in the kitchen.”

I’m reminded of my first visit here in 2008. An American surfer dude said he confined himself to Playa Negra, which is downshore, because of the bacterial count in Tamarindo Bay. I’m more concerned about being run down by a bus or a taxi, than anything to do with the seawater.

Forty-two years after running into the surf for the first time and (dumb Nebraska kid) not realizing I should keep my mouth shut, I still can’t remember to plug up when facing a breaker. I end up spitting over and over again—Ptui! Ptui!—and trying to rid myself of the salty taste. How can the local dogs stand it when playing fetch with half a coconut shell thrown into the surf?

After seeing another tremendous sunset tonight, I was strolling past the beachside Hotel Diria’s gorgeous courtyard, where I once again noticed the orange blossoms in a tree. I asked a uniformed employee if it was a tamarind. He said it wasn’t—but he would show me one. He led me past the pool, through the reception area, and across the street. The Diria has a new uphill annex. But well before we started up, we stopped at a convoluted low spreading tree with small imbricate leaves. My guide plucked a seedpod from a branch. It resembles a peanut in its husk, except for the addition of a third pod. Twisting away the rind, he handed me one of the dried fruits from inside. It tasted vaguely prunelike (with hints of oak, blackberry, and chocolate). He said they can be soaked in water for a few minutes and are as good as new. I’m not sure why anyone would go to the trouble, not as long as potato chips are sold. But it’s nice to know.

I thanked him for showing me.

His name: Mauricio.

Dining this evening on the patio, I heard my name called. It was my old friends, La Puma and Loverboy. She wore a sensational red-and-white slip dress—I didn’t notice the pattern in particular, nor can I tell you what he wore.

“We moved out today,” she said as they approached. They had found another place, even closer to the beach, and much nicer, for less: $50 a night. “We’re staying another month. My son is coming down, and his sister.” She meant A—’s sister.

“You moved out today?” I said.

Indeed, it was explained (A— took quite an active part in this dialogue) that he’d forgotten a shaver attachment in their former apartment, which necessitated their return.

Then they turned and marched out of Portofino.

How I wish I’d said, “We’ll do lunch!”  

Back to the beach: North of the estuary, a wildfire burned on the hillside. I asked a surfer dude with a terrific Afro whether these fires—I had noted one on Sunday before arriving in Pozo de Agua, and have seen them burning in other years—are of any consequence. He answered in English. They start because of the sun’s heat being magnified through a piece of glass, or the overheating of a small piece of metal. Or it could have been a hunter. But unless a village is threatened, or a ranch, no attempt is made to put out the blaze.

Then he tried to sell me weed.

In the sitting area of my apartment here in Tamarindo, I have a TV, but after a week the screen remains dark. I’ve seen TV in a couple of places when I’ve ventured out. One time was at the motorcycle rental outfit on Sunday morning, where they were watching Italian League soccer en vivo. The game, according to the graphics in the picture, was between MIL and ATL. The employee who was most intent on the game could only tell me that MIL was Milano. As I follow soccer about as closely as crewel, I was unable to fill in the blank behind ATL.

The other occasion for TV was my breakfast last Friday at the Coral Reef, a grandiosely named little soda with about six tables and a huge sign out front promising Comida Típica e Internationale, which suggests the choice of beans and rice or truffles and soufflés. The first table I was shown was too dirty, so I was moved to another. Of course I passed the international fare and had the typical scrambled eggs with beans and rice. Their set was showing CNN en Español, and the reporters were talking about the economic crisis in Greece. It helped me to feel pretty much up-to-date. If only Senators Chris Dodd and Bob Corker, hanging around longer during last week’s five-nation tour of Central America, had dropped in for  breakfast with me, I could have received an exclusive briefing.

In the past two years here, I’ve played music on Yahoo! Radio, but that’s been turned over to CBS Radio and now I’m unable to pick up the feed. This morning I was inclined to tune in to Detroit’s WWJ. It’s salutary to hear the report about traffic on the Big Five and tie-ups in the Mixing Bowl and then reflect on the utter irrelevance of this news—even more so than most days when I’m merely working from home in Ann Arbor.

So I have a few CDs. So far I’ve listened to two: “Highway to Hell” and “Back in Black.” Aside from the fact that she could never have abided AC/DC—at least there was no report of “Let There Be Rock” among her effects when she passed in the 1990s—and particularly because the voltage boys from Down Under glory in their descent into Hell—I almost feel like my grandmother: “Sakes, perhaps I’ll listen to the Victrola again tonight.” Mostly, I just enjoy hearing the dogs and monkeys and birds, the Super Compro announcement that blared from a truck the other day, and the roaring of ATVs and motorcycles and cars and trucks. It seems the vehicles make more than their share of racket at odd hours during the night. I’ve received no monkey news today, but they’d congregated in a grove about 150 yards away last evening, and when I saw them on my return from an invigorating sunset session of body-surfing, they duly extended greetings to my readers.

I’d given Susan a little update on a couple of people we know here. This morning I bought coffee from the tiny Italian cafeteria next door and recognized the star tattoos on the shoulders of the woman who got it for me: Silvia, the Italian who’s married to a Tico. Last year she owned the Laundromat we went to near Hotel Chocolate. She said the location was too far up the hill from the beach, and she had to close. Much money was lost. Now she’s an employee in this little place, which ain’t air-conditioned and is pretty dusty besides, being right on this Y-intersection with Portofino, among others. But as I told her, at least she has a job. I thought there was something familiar about her when I went in there yesterday. She had a little stereo set playing, and the opening chords of “Roxanne” were just starting. I mentioned that I’d seen The Police live in 2008.

“So did I.”

“Really, where?”

“Venezia,” she said.

There’s a Canal Zone much closer than that, but I doubt she could have caught that kind of Sting there.

And Saturday as I was going down to the beach I passed Carminia Moncada’s old shop, where she sold her handmade jewelry in addition to having some phones for international calls and a couple of computers for the Internet. The shop, repainted white after her garish, jabbering Rasta paint job, now offers women’s swimming suits, but it’s hard to imagine many sell. The girl in the shop said Carminia lives in San José and works for a fashion designer. At least I think that’s what she said. Something to do with the fashion industry, anyway.

Either I had a faulty recollection of how much money I’d brought along, or things weren’t adding up. I had to cash my last $200 in traveler’s checks. At first, after I’d got set up last week, I thought I wouldn’t need this dough. Well, after going through receipts, it looks as though everything does add up.

After the bank this morning, I went to Super Compro (those noisy ads work!) and bought enough provender to through the next week, faulting only such things like bananas and eggs. I even bought a half-kilo of hamburger and three sliced ham steaks because I’m tired of tuna and sardines with my beans and rice. (Last night I did include a lettuce salad with carrot slices and a bit of avocado.) Some shrimp remain in the freezer. My primary concern is that there should be enough money for renting a motorcycle on the weekend, and it appears that won’t be a problem. Besides the checks I tendered today, I have $55 USD to cover the departure tax ($26), which can be prepaid at the bank, and the airport shuttle ($18).

Just back from my sundown visit to the beach, and who’d I see at Le Beach Club? It was the La Puma herself, K—-, and lover boy A—, squeezing together into one of those hanging basket chairs, drinks in hand. I’ve been telling a couple of my e-mail correspondents about this couple, who are my apartment neighbors. When I flopped into a chaise lounge at the pool on Saturday afternoon, K—- paddled up in her black one-piece and started chatting with the newbie. She divulged that she lives in Asheville and Charleston and is in the home-care biz with her mom. She said “we” had been in Nicaragua for a couple of weeks before coming to Tamarindo.

She said she's from Denver (he's from Toronto), and just last week she was riding a snowboard.

Then A— came out, and I realized he wasn’t her son. He’s tall and slender, platinum on top and hairless in the middle. I guess he’s twenty-six and she’s forty-eight or fifty. Seeing the report I was reading on batteries for electric cars, she put in that A— is an electrical engineer. Something else had already led her to designate him a Canadian. Neither should count against him.

This evening, as long as I had the advantage of excellent lighting due to another rock ’em-sock ’em sunset, I walked right up to their cozy chair, which dangled from the limb of a tree.

“Hello, Ronald,” K—- said.

I told them I thought they must have decamped because I hadn’t noticed them today.

“Oh, we just stayed inside and were on the Internet.”

“Right,” I thought. “You just stayed inside and played filthy degrading sex games.”

K—- has that ex-cheerleader, ex-Kappa-president look, but despite an arresting bosom (even in her black one-piece) and nice legs, I don’t find her remarkable. A— is tall and slender and is in fact balding, so that he combs his platinum hair forward and lets it sweep across the high forehead. He didn’t seem completely comfortable with my interloping, but I’m certain it delighted her. I’ll strive to get a picture of them—sniping it paparazzi-style, if necessary. And I want more of their story. Let’s see what Marisel, the maid, has to say.

I’m also interested to hear Marisel’s take on the Colombian woman who comes into the office from 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. (When I peeked in yesterday and asked her favorite auto carrerista colombiano, she said, “Juan Pablo.”) Last week the air conditioner malfunctioned, and I gabbed with the repairman José, a Nicaraguan, about the gorgeous babe in the front office. He said she’s really rich. I don’t know if that means spiritually, temporally, or physically.

I bought a half-kilo of “premium” ground beef today and am going to treat myself to meat and potatoes tonight. I’ve had enough gallos pintos for a while. Trying to remember the “gallo,” which as the reader probably knows is “rooster,” I consulted my dictionary and found a couple of gems:

Matar a uno el gallo en la mano: This one’s a little bit too loquacious for me to translate literally, although it looks like: Kill somebody with a rooster in hand. But it means: Floor somebody with an argument, shut somebody up.

En menos que canto un gallo: Literally, in less than a rooster crows (or sings): Colloquially, In an instant.

After the beach I stopped at Super Compro and bought some beer. There’s a cute senorita cashier who, alas,must have gone through a windshield. Her face, especially around the left eye and upper lip, along with that side of her neck, is a crazy quilt. Still, not an unattractive girl. When I got back to the apartment and put on my readers, I saw that she’d charged me for a bag of ice, and it was 1290 colones ($2.25). So I trudged back through the dusty street and demanded a refund. I’m so glad for the ability to express myself in these situations.

“Me exculpa!” she said.

Of course, dear one! You’re exculpated!  

As Edward Abbey wrote, “A beautiful woman can do no wrong.”

“Do you know anyone who wants to buy a ranch?”

The speaker, Arturo, a gaunt man in his late sixties, sat in front of a pottery shop in Guaitíl, chatting with an artisan named Elgar Sanchez. Arturo elaborated: The finca, owned by a Colombian, comprised 412 hectares and was for sale for 5 million colones. I can’t keep track of the exchange rate. Just shy of $100,000 ought to take care of it, I think.

A shopkeeper opens up at noontime on Sunday in Guaitil.

I said I would ask around. Of course, quite a few of my wealthy friends in Costa Rica, as well as in the United States, are presently looking for a finca of around 400 hectares, although none would want to run cattle but instead to open a yoga institute with a fitness center and spa—notice how “spa” and “sap” have the same letters—and would also want to produce organic herbs and vegetables.

So I made the rounds of Guaitíl (“gwy-TEEL”). The church was on the proper side of the town square, which was surrounded by Cortéz amarillo trees. My course through town took me past several domed ovens. Near each was a large pile of wood. I assumed the ovens were kilns for pottery, although the maid who cleans my apartment says her mother has a similar oven for baking bread. While on my rounds I also noticed a woman washing dishes in the free-standing sink behind her house, with the soapy water running out into the ditch. And I saw a soccer ball made of newspaper and tape.

One oven belonged to Filemon Campos, a slightly built fellow of around sixty years who wore sunglasses and had some whiskers under his lower lip. He wouldn’t pose for a photo, but he did tell me he’d built the oven twenty-two years ago with his own hands according to a formula requiring “pure earth,” something in the bag that he pointed to, and crude heavy tiles like those stacked against a tree. Those tejas are also layered along with wood when firing the kiln for a load of pots or baking focaccia or whatever he use he made of the oven.

Returning to the square, I sat down on a bench and started writing notes. Coming out from Mass (the Lamb of God Bible Church down the road had been in session at the same time), Marta Espinoza-Grijalba said hello. She was a plump woman in her late-forties and a Guaitíl native. She said the name comes from an arboreal fruit. The town has 715 inhabitants and sixty percent are in the pottery business, which according to her estimate has been going strong here since the 18th century. (It might go back even farther than that.) When I asked if there is any other town like it in Costa Rica, she said no, it’s unique.

Before leaving Guaitíl, I looked into a shack where a woodcarver displayed his pieces from rosewood and jocote. They were pretty crude and tended to repeat clichéd themes about ancient grandeur that Costa Rica’s indigenous peoples had never realized. The man told me that he works in business in Santa Cruz and only comes up here on Sundays.

I asked his name.

“Franklin,” he said, “like the president.”

I pointed out that Benjamin Franklin never was president.

“What was he?”

“Ambassador to France,” I said, perhaps confusing Franklin and Jefferson.

“But he discovered light!”

That, I agreed, was true. In its way.

From Guaitíl, I traveled east, running along the base of the Cerros Guaycamayo, which reach to 820 feet above sea level, and later along the comparable Cerros Del Rosario. The lowlands presented sugar fields, some dairy operations, single-lane bridges, and lots of iguanas running back and forth in front of me. When the gravel road crested a hilltop, it also tended to curve. I was riding a 125-cc Honda dirt bike that I rented for $45. It was fast enough, but the anemic drum-type front brake could barely stop the thing; but on the other hand, it was almost impossible to lock up the wheel, and this might once have saved me from low-siding the bike and sliding head-first under the rear wheels of an oncoming Pepsi truck. I was bound for Puerto Humo, which translates as SmokeyFumingVapor Port. Who could resist going? It’s on the Tempisque River just upstream from the mouth of the Gulf of Nicoya. I estimated the distance from my starting point in Tamarindo at 90 kilometers.

The dance hall cooks and their daughters posed for me in Pozo de Agua.

But before reaching Puerto Humo, I had to go through Pozo de Agua, which translates most literally as Water Wells, although it might also more generally mean Artesian Wells.

The towns are four or five kilometers apart. When I reached Pozo de Agua, I found in progress the preparations for a fiesta. I was more than a couple of hours early for the Sunday events. One man was swinging a machete as he tried to fashion a piece of wood into something that probably should have been made of steel in the first place. He and his partner said it was OK if I went through the open gate and photographed the bull ring/rodeo ring. There were two grandstands. One was of metal, while the other was a rickety wooden structure with banners advertising the Bank of Costa Rica and the Costa Rican Red Cross. It would be nice to know the Red Cross was at hand when the bleachers collapsed. The only other permanent facility on the fairgrounds was the dance hall. Some women in the hall’s food preparation area were roasting chicken over a wood fire, and they posed with their daughters for a photo. I gave my card to one of the ladies and said she could find the photo on the Internet, but she said there is no Internet in Pozo and she would have to wait till she went to Nicoya sometime. (The Spaniards founded Nicoya in 1521, which was before the Internet.)

Cortez amarillos predominate in the dry-season landscape between Pozo and Puerto Humo.

I started up the bike and continued to Puerto Humo, which turned out to be a little nothing place of about 250 souls. I’d counted on having a late lunch, but there wasn’t even a restaurant. Staying only long enough to snap a few pictures, I turned back to Pozo de Agua, which had two cantinas: La Conchita and La Sombra. I chose the latter for the eponymous shade. It offered a small bar, a separate food counter with five kinds of chicken and rice, some wooden stools, and dusty tabletops of plywood. The floor was of concrete. The men’s urinario was an unlit closet with an open pipe going out the back wall at floor level. Several of the men who used this facility didn’t even bother to close the door. After exiting, they rinsed one or maybe both hands in the nearby sink that stood outside; the rinsewater was piped into the urinario at knee level and drained through the outlet. Something made me hope the outlet pipe led to a septic tank. I couldn’t work up the nerve to ask what the women’s restroom was like.

An agreeable collection of polka music by xylophone was playing through loudspeakers. The festive crowd were all wearing brimmed hats, nicely pressed white shirts, and despite the heat, jeans and boots.

The plastic cup I’d received with my beer contained three ice cubes. I didn’t want to fling them out on the concrete floor; it seemed disrespectful.

“I don’t like ice with my beer,” I told the older of the two teenaged girls working the chicken-and-rice counter. “Could you throw this somewhere?”

She took my cup out back to another sink and dumped the ice there.

The remaining girl, who was bent way over on her side of the counter, so that I could only see her face, kept staring at me.

“What are you looking at, the foreigner?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I couldn’t think of a snappy comeback. Maybe, if I hadn’t wanted to leave there alive, I could’ve asked about the status of her virginity.

One of the male customers, a young guy in his twenties, more than stared: he was glaring at me every time I glanced his way. I figured he’d been indoctrinated about Yankees and the evil United States, and tried to avoid looking at him. (Just last week, Óscar Arias, the outgoing leader of this nation, lectured his fellow Latin American and Caribbean heads of state at a big conference, telling them to stop blaming the U.S. for the region’s lack of progress.) The piece of chicken I’d received with my rice and salsa—which in this case amounted to minced up red pepper and tomato—was from the ribs and hip. I couldn’t help thinking the poor bird had probably escaped to Costa Rica after being held in a dungeon maintained by the Ortega regime in Nicaragua. The first bite kept me spitting out huesos pequeños for several minutes.

Luckily for me, the repast was interrupted by the arrival in Pozo de Agua of about 150 caballistas: men and woman mounted on horses, many of which pranced in the unique style of this nation’s equestrianism. I soon learned the procession is called tope de caballo. Riders and horses came in on the main road from the west. Proceeding once around the square brought them to La Sombra. The staff rushed out to greet them with cups and bottles of beer. I ditched my plate of rice and bones and went into the street with the camera that I had until now been reluctant to pull out of my knapsack. This action resulted in a long conversation with a man named Berny, from Nandayure, who couldn’t tell me enough about Costa Rican horsemanship. I also talked to an older fellow leaning against a very dusty 1990 Mazda Miata. He was the original owner. He takes the car out about once a year, he said, because it’s too low for the gravel roads. I hadn’t even seen pavement for at least thirty-five kilometers.

By now it was around 4.00 p.m. I wanted to return to Tamarindo before the motorcycle rental place closed at 6.00 p.m. I retraced the route through Zapote, San Lazaro, and Guaitíl. At Santa Cruz, the Nicoya Peninsula’s major commercial town, I stopped for a quick fill-up. Indeed, with about seven minutes to spare, I made it back just in time to see the sun half sunken in Tamarindo Bay. The full moon was just rising behind me. Between sun and moon, my head was filled with everything from the day’s journey.

As seen and photographed through my kitchen window… and a link is included:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-crowned_Motmot