The Crescent City Absurdist: The Wild-Life of Costa Rica, in Beaches, Bars, and Rainforests

Tha names of characters in this story were changed since I am writing about them without their knowledge or permission.

Dominica, Costa Rica

Ficus Tree, Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica

          After almost dying during a multi-day ski trek across Norway's Hardangervidda Plateau, explorer Roald Amundsen said, "Adventure is just bad planning."
   By this wisdom, I was beginning a hell of an avenutre. I had arrived in Central America without any plans except to rendevouz at the start with my high-school friend, John, who lived in San Jose, Costa Rica. He had to work during the week so we agreed to regroup on Friday night in a bar in a small beach town called Dominical.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in the hotel room was the toilet didn’t work. But I had noticed it too late. I held the flusher down until the brown water rose to the top and then I stopped, afraid of the consequences of holding it longer. I retreated to the bar.

I spent the night talking to Americans that moved here (click here to read my post about American surfers in Costa Rica) to surf and watching the waves crash amidst flashes of lightning. The Tortilla Flats bar was open-air, a long bamboo and tin roof covering a concrete spread without walls. The bar wrapped around the interior several televisions showed American sports each night. It was also full of wildlife, as crabs, cats, monkeys, and dogs came in and out and around during the storm.

The next day John and I surfed. I drank saltwater for several hours and scraped my side on the fins of the board. Years ago I once caught a real wave, and I never forgot it, and each time I go out hopeful it will happen again, and each time I fail. I decided to spend less time surfing, and more time reading in hammocks. It wasn’t what I imagined my Costa Rican adventure would look like, a book, mosquitos and a hammock but it was too comfortable to complain about.

That night the comfort continued. We went to a Tica’s house for her 30^th birthday celebration, and we ate chicken and steak off a small grill aside the house. We drank whiskey and beers and ate cake. We were surrounded by verdant tropical beach greens, but all we could see were dark woods and hear the song of night birds and cicadas, backdropping the cries from a soccer game on the television in the living room of the green pastel-colored home.

When we returned I went straight back to the hammock with my book and a bottle of Knob Creek whiskey that I had brought for John as a gift only to discover he had stopped drinking. John went to the bathroom.

“Hey, man, you just sitting there drinking and reading in a hammock, eh?” A group of four young Americans were walking by and two of them stopped to notice me. The young man, Jeff, had a sort of scraggly soul patch beard and mustache and the girl, Tess, had blonde dreads down to her shoulder blades. When they opened their mouths, it was like an explosion of enthusiasm, they were effortlessly, intensely friendly.

“That’s it,” I said.

“You’re cradling it like a baby,” the girl said.

I offered them a drink. Jeff took a swig.

“Do you want to go look for caymans in the river?!” the girl asked, almost shouting.

“Of course.”

I left my book and brought my whiskey and a headlamp.

The four Americans were friends from Seattle and Vancouver. Their social leader, Jeff, had lived in Dominical for a couple months and traveled all over Costa Rica. Tess, his girlfriend, and their more-relaxed friends, Nick and Ali, followed him along the beach. At the mouth of the river, where it joins the beach in a stream, we spotted one cayman swimming, and we found several frogs that Tess and Jeff chased. They squealed when they caught them, holding them to their faces and feigning kisses as if the frogs were puppies. It seemed so fun and child-like, and it reminded me of when I was a kid, and I’d capture a toad by the creek after rainfall, when it wasn’t enough to observe nature, but necessary to touch it too.

“Dude, you should come to Corcovado with us!” Tess said.

“What’s Corcovado?”

“The most bad-ass jungle in the world,” Jeff answered. “I’ve been to the heart of the Amazon jungle and it’s nothing like this. It’s got more biodiversity than I don’t know what. I’m talking monkeys, jaguars, snakes, frogs, it’s crazy. You turn on your headlamp at night and you got eyes staring back at you. But it’s a serious hike, not for the weak.”

We walked back along the beach picking up frogs and hermit crabs while Jeff explained the plan to me. They would go the next day to get gear. Then drive down and maybe hire a guide. They would hike for three days, but it was hard to say for sure how long they would be in the jungle. Jeff was their adventure-planner, and leader of all things fun, and his charismatic enthusiasm was infectious. I, too, was soon trying to scoop up wildlife from the dark sand of the beach, while thinking about the Costa Rican jungle.

After, we decided to attend a Reggae party in a bar on the one main road of Dominical, and I left my whiskey in the room. Our friend, David was in the bathroom.

            I walked with Jeff and his friends down a dirt alley past a row of small pastel-colored houses. Jeff pointed to one of them.
    "The lady that lives there is crazy," Jeff said. "She is always high on Benzo. I was smoking weed with her in her house once and there was dogpoop all over the floor and she was just downing Benzos and screaming. I got the hell out of there."   I thought that was sound judgment from a guy I might follow into the jungle. He was in a house with an old lady high on cough medicine living amongst dog poop, and he left. I would do the same, I thought, excellent judgment.
Everybody in Dominical gathered at the same reggae bar that night where a DJ wearing a backwards hat and ski goggles played electronic music in an air-conditioned VIP room. Tica women and American men started to pair off quickly. I was drunk and missing my girlfriend. Anytime a Latina girl danced against me, I would do my "possum-move," and stand competely still in the middle of the dance floor, until they thought I was disinterested or awkward or both, and then they would move away quickly and I could resume doing drunk robotic hippie white boy moves, thereby reaffirming my awkwardness in the VIP room. Jeff and Tess danced wildly in the middle of the room. To the side was a stripper's pole that Tica women tried out while laughing. It was fun and unexpected, and I slipped out quietly to go slink off to bed, wondering if I would ever know what Costa Rican culture really was.
         The next day I was hungover. I did some research about Corcovado at an internet cafe. There were several species of poisonous snakes, a 25 km beach hike in the middle of the trek, and a river that had to be forded at low tide only because bull sharks arrived at high tide to feed. It sounded like an adventure.
         It seemed like this was why I came to Costa Rica. To take risks. To go with the flow, and meet the opportunities that travel offered me as a reward for being at a certain place at a certain moment--to go on adventures. I agreed to join. But I was nervous too.
       I told John about my plan and he told me he was jealous, but I knew he was lying. He would go back to his apartment and read books and his hammock and be happy about it.
      Before he left he used the bathroom one last time. I tried to flush it down all afternoon but each time the water rose to the top I got scared and let go. I put the lid down, but I knew I was only covering the problem up, not disposing of it.
       I spent the day sleeping, reading in a hammock, and watching the sun set. I waited for Jeff, Tess, Nick, and Ali. They told me they would be leaving at dark to get gear in San Isidro, but they returned late and changed their plans.
      "We can't go tonight," Jeff explained. "We were too ambitious today and we're exhausted." We sat at the bar drinking beers and they explained they had driven out to a point on the coast called the "Whale's Tail" which was known for snorkeling. They decided to save on money and didn't hire a boat to take them out but swam more than a mile out from shore to get past the murky water toward the corral reef. They could not see or hear each other but swam with poisonous fish for several hours. They swam back at high tide, which took them even longer.
     Ali had stayed behind. She was quiet and clearly not as adventurous. "After about 5 hours I thought you might be dead," she said.   "I couldn't see you all or anything."
       "Yeah, that shit was scary," said Tess, who then squealed and jumped up to capture a blue crab on the bar floor with her beer cup. On the television the Heat played the Spurs in Game 5. A thunderstorm rolled in again and coconunts began to hammer the roof. I found out everyone in the group was around 22 years old, and as they told stories more stories about how they almost died in other misadventures.
      When Jeff went to the bathroom, I asked Nick about the plan. "Yeah, we don't really know what we're doing. We're just kind of following Jeff. But I got to tell you, he's kind of crazy. Don't be surprised if he leads us into some sketchy shit in the jungle. I mean, like today, that was fucked up, but fun." I talked to Jeff about the plan when he got back and the more he explained, the more I realized that he wasn't just missing a plan, but he had the wrong information, and it might be another two days before they entered the jungle.
   Outside the bar a stray cat leaped five feet into the air and hissed. It was fighting a baby boa constrictor, which was curled up in the rocky entrance to the parking lot with its head in striking position. It struck at the cat twice which jumped away then crept closer to counterattack. Tess grabbed the cat in her ams, which probably would have won the fight, and then leand in to cake a closer look at the snake. I could tell she wanted to touch it.

     A Tico bartender stepped forward and went to pick it up. Just then the power went out. When the lights returned seconds later, the bartender was laughing. Then he grabbed the snake by both its ends and put in a tree in the back of the lot.
   That night I went to sleep early.   I was worried but it seemed natural to worry about entering a jungle. There were jaguars there. Of course I worried, but I also was tired of second-guessing myself. I wanted to go on an adventure. But there was something nagging me about my decision. Was I forcing it? What had I come to Costa Rica for if not this kind of opportunity? As I dozed off I heard Jake and Nate talking about handling snakes and how to identify the Fer-de-Lance, Bothrops asper, which accounted for 50% of snakebites in Costa Rica.
       "But it's not as dangerous as the Bushmaster," Jeff said, "that shit will kill you. It'll stop your heart." Then they went back to recounting how scared they were during their swim that day and laughing about it.
       I woke up less than an hour later to the smell of shit and urine stewing in the open-air bathroom. It was too powerful to return to sleep. I turned in bed and stuck my nose by the window but nothing worked. Its odor was furious, persistent, out to get me. I went to the bathroom and stared at the contents of the bowl, a whole weekend of wet waste. I held the flusher down.   I waited until the water got the top. I held the it another three seconds, also holding my breath. I took the risk. Then a sucking noise. The whoosh of water, and like that, the poop moved on.
      I went back to bed. Nick and Jeff were back to discussing snakes.
     "If we're lucky we'll see the jumping pit viper...."
     "You mean if we're unlucky, if you see that shit, then you've been gotten!"
      The fresh air afforded me some clean thinking. It wasn't the snakes I was worried about. It was the people. They were young and without a plan, and that was ok, but could I follow along and be happy about it. I thought of Amundsen, what would he say? And then I realized I didn't have a plan either, but I wasn't an adventurer--I was a traveler, and I was backpacking to Mexico City. Wasn't that exciting enough without following a careless group of kids into the jungle in search of fer-de-langs? Or would we even make it to the jungle? Three years ago I would have done it, but now at 27, and more important than any sense of safety, I had no interest in being an inconvenient victim to the impulsive whims of people I didn't know or trust. And it didn't matter if I was making a wrong choice. I made the decision, that was all that mattered. I wasn't going. I knocked on the wood of my headboard, opened my guidebook and read about Monteverde, a tourist hotspot because of its cloud rainforests and wildlife.
   The next morning I told them the news but they already knew. Ali made the same decision.
   "They're just more adventurous than me." She was reading her book in the hammock.
Two days later I was in the mountains. I climbed a wet TV tower on top of a summit. I drank a liter of beer and then hopped into a van full of white people to go take a night tour of the rainforest during a thunderstorm. Our guide rushed us through the dark trails and we saw monkeys, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, toucans, and a two-toed sloth. The next day I saw four quetzales, the bird that put Monteverde on the international travel map.
     The next day I went to the Serpantario, which displayed a collection of reptiles. I saw all the snakes of Corcovado behind glass, the Eyelash Palm Pit Viper, the Boa Constrictor, the Central Amerian Jumping Pit Viper...
   A guide followed me to explain each snake. "This is the Fer-de-Lance," he said. "She just had 50 babies, some of which will grow as long as eight feet. She is poisonous, but not the most."
"Which is?"
We moved on to the bushmaster. It was curled in the corner, but its beaded eye seemed fixed on us.
   "I have a lot of respect for the power of the bushmaster."
   "Have you ever been to Corcovado?" I asked.
   "No," he said, and nothing more, and like that, we moved on the turtles.