Tag: costa rica

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

The mechanical cacophony of nature

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

Wednesday, September 5

Now I know what they call it a rain forest.

I could see the day building toward a storm, and it delivered. I almost tried to beat it with a dash down to the local soda for a late lunch but thankfully I stayed put. It’s not so much the intensity of the rain that surprised me. It’s how sustained it was. It didn’t let up for a while. I’d been feeling a bit down leading up to it. The impending storm scrambled my mind, and I was brooding over one of our rental houses in Athens that needs a major repair. The Book also was clouding my disposition. I spent much of the day organizing sources and thoughts.. I have a lot of stuff floating around in my files. Links to newspaper articles. Half starts on The Book. Dead-end ideas. Schemes that just might work. Character sketches. This has been percolating in my mind for well over a decade. So I’m trying to sort through it to figure out what’s worth keeping, what isn’t. I made a lot of progress and I think, perhaps, a breakthrough on how I want to handle the “supernatural” element of it. I was terrified of cranking out a weak imitation of George Saunders’ Lincoln the the Bardo. He’s brilliant. I’m not. I need to heed my limitations and write to my strengths. I think I found a way.

Random butterfly/moth thingy that sat still long enough for me to snap its photo.

As the gloom of the day built, I plugged away, finally getting cranky at the nettlesome gnats buzzing my ears. I called it quits, deciding to head up to the Treehouse to lie down for a bit. Then the thunder cranked up like a hot-wired Harley and the rains came. And came. And came. I couldn’t sleep for the roar of it so I stepped out onto the Treehouse’s deck. Deep breaths, sucking in the cool breeze that arrived with the water. Hey, this was proving cathartic, calming.

Though that lightning strike right THERE pushed catharsis to adrenaline, the difference between a relaxing sencha green tea and a triple shot of espresso. At times, it doesn’t even sound like thunder. More like a cannonade. BOOM boom boom boomboomboom as it bounces pinball-like around the surrounding mountains before drifting off into the Pacific.

As the rain faded, the denizens of the jungle started to party. The cicadas rose up in a roar reminiscent of spaceships taking off in 1950s sci-fi movies. I’m astounded at how mechanical nature can sound. A monotonous whoop whoop whoop whoop drones on like a distant car alarm. The first time I heard it, I was convinced it was a car alarm. I”m guessing some sort of frog? ¿Quien sabe? Another sounded like submarine sonar pinging through the jungle. The birds clucked and chattered. Even my house gecko, Chuckles, joined in with a joyous croaking. I never realized they made noise, yet alone noise so profundo. Sometimes Chuckles feels the need to let loose at 3 a.m. I keep a flashlight next to the bed so I can paw around in the blackness to locate it, click it on and shine it in his general direction. Silence. (Jeff advised me to keep a flashlight nearby and use it for nocturnal trips to the bathroom. You really don’t want to step on some stingy bitey thing in the middle of the night when you’re packing a full bladder.)

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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 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.)