Category: Travel Bob

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Walking on the tail of a whale

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Wednesday, August 29

Map that shows the whale’s tail.

Wednesday dawned fresh and cool after the previous night’s downpour, so I decided to take advantage of the relatively clear skies to hike out to the Whale’s Tail.

I ducked into La Ballena Roja (The Red Whale) for a quick breakfast before hitting the beach. There were two options: Continental or Gallo Pinto. I went with the former, despite misgivings at the quoted $7 US price. Add another $1.50 for a glass of pure papaya juice and a buck for coffee and that felt really pricey based on what I’ve been paying for breakfast thus far. But what the hell …

I sat down and the coffee arrived. Then a large fruit plate with acres of pineapple, papaya and watermelon. Then four pieces of toast, plus jam and butter. And a piece of lunch meat and cheese. After a bit more, two scrambled eggs were brought out.

But wait, there’s more. The pièce de résistance: a glass of pure papaya juice. It was more slushy than juice, and then it dawned on me why the woman who took my order looked a tad concerned when I asked for jugo de papaya.

“¿Solamente papaya?” she asked.

“Sí,” I said, wondering if that was the right answer …

It was. Though it really was more solid than liquid.

I ate almost everything except one piece of the toast, the lunchmeat and the cheese. When I went up to pay in colones, I got another pleasant surprise. Total cost: 4,000, or about $7. Still pricey but worth it. I left a generous tip, put in my AirPods and headed to the beach listening to a heartbreaking episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. The episode, “Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment,” details one of the great failures of school desegregation: the integration of African American teachers. In short, they weren’t integrated at all. The white schools were forced to open their doors to black students, but they didn’t have to bring in black teachers. And overwhelmingly, they didn’t. Gladwell cites stats showing that black kids who have at least a few black teachers in elementary school tend to fair much better. All things being equal, white teachers are less likely to channel gifted black children into gifted programs, for instance. So these kids are cast into white schools surrounded by white students and taught by white teachers … and they founder. Gladwell argues, correctly, I think, that we desegregated the schools backward. Teachers should have been desegregated first.

I used the Playa Colonia entrance to the beach, paying $6 US to enter the amazing resource that is Ballena National Marine Park. And I bounced off down la playa toward the Whale’s Tail.

Along the way, I watched several boatloads of tourists launch from the surf to view the humpback whales that frequent this stretch of coast from July through late October. When I finally got to the tombolo that forms the Whale’s Tail, it was beautiful but not exactly what I expected. I timed it perfectly, arriving at low tide. A wide vast stretch of sandy beach was exposed, jutting out toward rocky outcroppings in the sea. To the north was Playa Hermosa and back behind me, to the south, was Playa Colonia. Basically, at this point I was standing on the dorsal ridge leading to the flukes of the whale’s tail.

I walked toward the rocks, which form the flukes. I wasn’t too eager to scramble across the rocks to get to the very end so I stood there and did a slow 360-degree turn, trying to get a sense of the tail.

No way. From ground level, I wouldn’t have known it formed the tail of a whale. Having seen it on maps and photos, it was easy to get my head around the component parts, but amid the rocks and sand, it was a really cool peninsula jutting out into the sea. Until high tide, when it’s more a series of breakers as the sea swamps the sand and most of the rock outcroppings. Even from my perch at the shack, it’s tough to see it as a whale’s tail since my elevation is only a few hundred feet and I’m viewing it from an acute angle.

I took a few photos and started back, passing a woman pushing a tandem baby stroller along the beach. The stroller was empty and its former occupants, a pair of little gingers who looked to be about 2, were smothered in sun block, giving them a ghostly appearance. One trailed close to mom and the carriage. The other stood off a bit, mesmerized by the sea. “She’s going to be the explorer,” I chuckled, watching the child bask in the enormity of it all before her mother reeled her back in.

In all, the walk was about 4 miles round trip and worth every step of it.

Back at the house, I watched a pair of black-mandibled toucans forage in a nearby tree. This was the closest I’d been to them, and the longest they hung around despite my gawking. I’ll never tire of that.

The rest of the day was spent in the hammock, reading Jack Ewing’s marvelous Where Tapirs and Jaguars Once Roamed: Ever-Evolving Costa Rica. When the inevitable rains came, I retreated inside to bang my head off my Spanish workbook for a few hours.

I finished the night listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast. He finally got to the Mexican revolutions, which I’ve long awaited. While I listened to the rise and fall of Father Hidalgo, Guerrero and Santa Ana, lightning danced out over the Pacific. A sublime end to a sublime day.

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Books Day of the Dead Bob El Gringo Feo Transcendental Bob Travel Bob

A haunting, hilarious talk on the beach with George Saunders

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Tuesday, August 28

I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts.

We passed a Tico cemetery at some point while Jeff was driving me from the airport in San José to Uvita, and I noticed the graves there were above ground, a cluster of concrete, casket-sized houses scattered about, similar to the way they do it in New Orleans (though not as grandiose).

I read somewhere that Ticos celebrate El Día de Los Muertos. One of the most moving things I’ve ever seen was in a Mexico City cemetery on the Day of the Dead. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Mexicans were there, clustered around the graves of their loved ones, eating their favorite foods, singing their favorite songs. The ground was a veritable carpet of marigold flowers. I used the word “celebrate” above deliberately. The Day of the Dead isn’t about mourning. It’s joyous. Bittersweet.

Sitting on the beach yesterday, I watched the Pacific roll ashore at low tide, but the roar of the surf wasn’t the only thing in my ears. I had my AirPods in, playing a New York Public Library Podcast recorded in June. George Saunders, one of my favorite writers, was being interviewed by Paul Holdengräber, who asks Saunders if he believes in ghosts. The writer says yes almost immediately, but then provides this nuance :

I certainly believe in ghosts as a literary thing because they’re here,. I mean, in other words, which of us, sitting here, doesn’t have several dead people whispering lovingly or harshly in your ear, and which of us doesn’t sense ourselves as one of those people eventually. Again, in terms of making a scientific view of the universe, you can’t discount the dead. They don’t disappear in any sense. They’re in your neurons. When I use them it’s mostly to say, if i just write a story in a realistic frame, I feel like I’m not quite telling the whole truth — that we all carry dead people around with us, and we carry the prospect of our own death around with us so that, somehow, has to be brought into play a little bit. Plus, they’re fun. They’re a riot.

I keep thinking the book I’m writing is really a ghost story. But I have no interest in cranking out a work of Gothic fiction, and I don’t have the talent to pull off something like Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (which was absolutely brilliant). But the quote above got my wheels turning. There’s something there. I just need to figure out what it is …

(BTW: If you’re into podcasts and literature, I highly recommend that Saunders interview. There were times when I was laughing out loud as I watched the waves. He’s hilarious, brilliant, accessible, yet grounded and down-to-earth.)

As I walked Playa Colonia, I wondered why I’m not hitting this beach every morning. It was low tide, peeling back a long stretch of sand that had been under water just a few hours earlier. I looked for shells, flotsam, jetsam, whatever, but I’d stopped for breakfast on the way and other beachcombers had beaten me to the punch. All that was left were fragments of sand dollars. A washed up stingray. A single, pearly pink shell, which I picked up and pocketed.

I passed novice surfers struggling to master the waves and was delighted to see several people walking with their dogs, including a small white terrier who had no use for the sandpipers scurrying ahead of him.

The dogs here seem well-fed and well cared for overall. I encountered several on my way to breakfast. Most wore collars and all were friendly or indifferent, more focused their morning routines than some random passing Gringo.

It’s hard not to love a place that loves its dogs.

After a simple dinner of pineapple that I picked here on the property and a papaya that would make my umbrella cockatoo drool, I retreated to a deck with a Pacific view to listen to podcasts and battle my book. It wasn’t long before the rain came in torrents, so loud on the metal roof I couldn’t hear the podcast, prompting me to hit pause until it passed. Is this what the rainy season is like? Sweet, clear mornings that yield to stifling humidity in late afternoon and an atmospheric tantrum. to end the day. I can live with this. But I suspect the worst is yet to come. If April is the cruelest month, September is the soggiest. At least here in Central America.

This rain is having an impact on my evening vespers. For the second night in a row, a deluge canceled Sunset at the Shack. No regrets. I’m enjoying the rains, especially the calm that descends after, when crickets, cicadas, frogs and other night creatures rise up to fill the night with their own buzzing din, singing me to sleep in the Treehouse.

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Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

What the thunder said …

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Monday, August 27

Drenching, thunderous rain gave me a welcome excuse to read and write yesterday. I couldn’t help but allude to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the title of this post after thinking about his poem the other night at the shack. The thunder bowled through the valleys in long, guttural grumbles that shook the ground,. It was disconcerting, but not in the way a sudden bolt slaps you in the face. This was visceral, an earthquake rattling your core and leaving you wondering if it’s going to stop.

Phone calls with Lara and my parents were the highlight of the day. All is good back home, and I think everyone was relieved to know that I’m not only surviving here, I’m thriving. The beauty of the jungle hasn’t worn off.

I finished Poilu, and I’ll have to admit I’ll miss that French barrel maker. I’ve read extensively about World War I, from revisionist ideas arguing the generals and leaders weren’t as stupid and heartless as they’ve been portrayed to a study of poetry written in the trenches. One of the most surprising things to me was how literate this working stiff was. Louis Barthas drops classical allusions constantly and references obscure historical events in his narrative. And then he spins out lines like this while describing an artillery battery:

There were thousands and thousands of shells of every caliber, lined up like monstrous insect larvae which one day would burst forth in a blast of fire and brimstone.

And he offers insights like this while discussing a theft:

When killing becomes a duty, a holy thing, then stealing is no more than a peccadillo.

Incongruously, I then picked up Jack Ewing’s Where Tapirs and Jaguars Once Roamed: Ever Evolving Costa Rica, which moves from a geologic history of the area to an ethnographic study, relating tales of people who lived here around the turn of the century. This confirmed much of what Gian said the other night about this area’s isolation causing it to be a bit backward and insular. In the 1900s, the Whale’s Tail was an island where a family lived, and they were the only residents for miles around. Ewing traces the slow growth of the 20th century, fueled by blazed jungle trails and bongo boats that plied the coast, connecting the scattered people and communities along the way.

The Costanera Sur highway wasn’t finished until 2010, which precipitated the current growth that’s occurring along this stretch of coast, growth that endangers the natural resources. There’s a fascinating passage where Ewing works with the road builders to design and build “wildlife bridges” over the highway to allow fauna safe passage. It hasn’t stopped road kill, but apparently is it reducing it.

To close the day, I listened to a few lectures on character development in the Great Courses audiobook Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques. I have to admit it’s been helpful so far and already has me revising some of what I’ve written. James Hynes, a novelist who teaches the course, won me over when he referenced John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. Gardner’s one of my favorite writers, perhaps my main influence for the type of work I’d like to produce. It’s been decades since I encountered the book, so I downloaded that and dove into it, too. I was instantly glad I did when I stumbled across this aside in Gardner’s preface:

(Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)