(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Friday, August 31
After a restless night, I awoke to a scene from an alien abduction. A rosé glow pulsed outside and the howler monkeys were in full flail, donkey-braying to greet the day. I got up, went to the deck and looked out. My ocean view was nothing but red sky …
How’s that for a 5:15 a.m. wakeup call?
True to form, the red sky gave way to rain, which is falling gently as I write. I ran down to the kitchen long enough to make coffee, slice up a papaya and peel a few bananas. This will be a good day to hunker down and work on The Book. Based on reading and research yesterday, I’m rethinking the first chapter, especially the nature of the protagonist, perhaps taking a darker turn.
Not much else to report. And that’s good. So here’s a gratuitous dog picture. This guy beamed in next to me at the beach the other day while I was sitting on a log watching the waves. I didn’t even hear him approach. I just turned around and there he was. After realizing I wasn’t a Gringo with Food, he padded off toward his next mark. Adiós, dude.
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Thursday, August 30
I love my AirPods.
Apple’s wireless ear buds changed the way I listen to music and podcasts, probably quadrupling my consumption and providing endless diversion, whether I’m plodding along the streets of Athens with my aging great Pyrenees or bouncing along the beaches of Uvita en route to he Whale’s Tail.
But in some previous life, I apparently pissed off Neptune, and he sent one of his minions to this mortal realm to exact his vengeance upon me: the clothes washer.
I was getting ready to go down to the kitchen/bar area last night to write and read, gathering up the assorted paraphernalia required for that: iPhone, laptop, flashlight, water bottle and AirPods. The water was off again most of the afternoon, so I also stripped the bed and and gathered up my dirty clothes to do laundry now that it had been restored.
Bad move.
I’ve already had one unfortunate encounter that started this way. Back in Ohio, I managed to wash my iPhone, and despite thinking I’d delivered a death blow, a bag of rice, prayers to iPhone Jesus and several days of rest resuscitated it, though it’s a tad punch-drunk.
This time I’m not as hopeful. I’m not sure how the AirPods ended up in the washing machine with my laundry, but my best guess is I set them on the bed and when I gathered up the sheets I didn’t notice the white AirPod case sitting there. I found them when I went to move the laundry to the dryer.
I unleashed a bilingual stream of expletives (the only sense, sadly, in which I am bilingual). I cursed the washing machine. I slapped myself upside the head. And I hurled abuse at Neptune, that watery Roman bastard who was the agent of my demise.
¡Cabrón!
OK. I’m being dramatic. But I loved those AirPods. You don’t realize what a pain in the ass it is being tethered to your phone while listening to music until you aren’t fighting with that stupid wire.
So I did the only thing I reasonable person would do in this situation. I got out a bag of rice. Googled around for other AirPod resurrection stories (there are several, but there also are heartbreaking tales of death by drowning), and I beseeched AirPod Jesus (and the Buddha and Allah and every other god I could think to invoke) to grant me one more miracle.
After a few days in the rice, I’ll see if my prayers are answered. If not, I was pessimistic enough to assume something might happen to my beloved AirPods and packed a backup pair of wired Apple ear buds just in case.
As I write this morning, I’m nursing more blisters, this time on the bottoms of both feet. I went on a rambling walk yesterday, stopping at the grocery store, the farmer’s market, the beach and a little breakfast place that turned out to be ho-hum but had wireless. Lots of dirt roads. Lots of rocky, uneven surfaces. About 6 miles worth. But no regrets. Those blisters will heal.
I did see lots of cool wildlife, including:
The largest iguana I’ve ever seen, sunning itself on the gravel parking area here at PurVita. After admiring him from a distance, I went up to the kitchen to cut up papaya and had a thought: Maybe Mr. Iguana would like a chunk of papaya. So I took a piece and walked toward him, intending to toss it off to the side to see if he’d show any interest. He freaked, thrashing off loudly through the fruit trees, thudding against the side of the building in an attempt to climb it and ricocheting back across the lot through the pineapple plants to safety. I’m really hoping I didn’t run him off for good. He was a gorgeous, Rolling-Rock-bottle green. In researching him, I’m pretty certain he was a green iguana, and apparently he wasn’t full grown. They get up to 6 feet and as they get older that brilliant green dulls, a process that already was under way.
When I exited the Treehouse in the morning, I noticed some sort of chewed up, or perhaps digested, berries scattered on the deck right outside the door. I looked up and saw a bat bedded down for the day. He was about 10 feet above me and hunkered, so I couldn’t see him well enough for an ID, but I’m guessing he was a long-nosed bat or maybe Pallas’ nectar bat. Leaning toward the former.
And the usual suspects. The yellow flycatchers have grown accustomed to me, completely unfazed when I walk by whistling at them. I love watching their acrobatics as they grab insects mid-flight. Howler monkeys mourned last night’s sunset and celebrated this morning’s sunrise. An agouti scampered across the driveway. And I spent time watching my favorite gecko hunt bugs on the sliding screen door. At night I often hear him chirping as I drift off to sleep.
Last night’s sunset was subdued but not disappointing.
Yesterday marked my two-week anniversary here (Hace dos semanas que yo llego in Costa Rica). It’s been fantastic. I’m learning tons of new things and feeling very productive for someone who spends his days reading books in a hammock. Last night, after two previous evenings of deluge, there was no rain so I hiked up to the shack for evening vespers. It was a subdued sunset but beautiful nonetheless. And it was cool to see the Whale’s Tail at high tide from this vantage after having walked it the other day at low tide. As the bats took flight, I wondered if one of them was my new roommate.
(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.
