Bob Marley is The Kine

Or so says a sign on the wall of Coco's Bar in Cahuita, one of the earth's great places. The roads are dusty, cars are few, dogs are many. Tourists, too, but not the jungle-clothes-wearing, binoculared, telephoto-lens-wielding, get-out-of-my-way-as-I-head-back-to-my-airconditioned-tour-bus types I've seen a few too many of. (This is an international type; based on my limited experience here, I'd say the Dutch are perhaps the most, well, what's the nice way to put it? Obnoxious? Americans are obnoxious, too, but in general they seem to smile a lot as they push.) Anyway, Cahuita is too rough around the edges for those folks, which is for the best. The rest of us could walk around in sweaty, grungy clothes, hang out at the beach, eat in the few restaurants, drink killer margaritas at Coco's (they sneak up on you, trust me) where a live band played reggae and a dog sat on the floor next to the lead singer. Lots of pot was being smoked, too, but some of us had had a lot of delicious margaritas and so headed home to bed early. They were made from fresh lime juice, served in champagne glasses. So, yes, I had a few. And a few regrets the next morning, but never mind.

The beach there is spectacular. The water wasn't so warm as on the Pacific side, so it was in fact more enjoyable. Em and I were just getting in for our second swim when a big stingray swam by. We tried to continue swimming but realized we were both sort of treading (shallow) water, afraid to let our feet hit the bottom so we got out to lie on the beach. The trees come practically down to the high tide line, so you are lying beneath the trees and next to the Atlantic. The air is hot and the water deep blue. What more could one want?

Tortaguerro--we stayed at a lodge in the jungle across the river--was fascinating and worth a visit. The town has no cars (it's accessible only by air or water) and so of course the streets aren't really streets, more like winding pathways through the village. I didn't really know places like that existed in the world anymore; it was magical, but of course it was also poor. The local school consists of two buildings, built right next to the sea, without real windows, just rusty metal bars, and is furnished with desks, chairs and a chalkboard. That's all. I don't know, really, if the beauty of the place, and its slow pace, provides enough for the inhabitants. Who can say? But--there we were part of a tour group (horrors! never to be repeated!) and seeing our group members photograph the lives of these people made me uncomfortable. Emily was so upset she walked ahead of the group, sort of pretending she wasn't with us.

I could go on about the absurdities of putting 25 people in a group and dragging them through the jungle together--it was a real study in group dynamics. Suffice it to say the Dutch people told the Spanish people to keep their kids quiet, or else, but the Spanish people ignored them and their kid scared off the monkeys in the jungle. The Dutch people got mad at us because we sat at the wrong table one night with the German woman. The Spanish people asked the Canadians to move at dinner one night so they could all sit together. The Dutch man kept bumping Em out of the way whenever a photo op would pop up, never so much as smiling as he elbowed past her. The German woman ended up traveling with us to Cahuita (one boat ride and three bus rides!) but she got bit by a bug on her eyelid the first night in her $14 hotel and left. We realized we didn't even know her name. I hope she's alright. Needless to say, we did fine and amused ourselves studying the group, but there were moments when I could have punched someone. So I'd suggest Tortaguero on your own. But that's just me. I'm not much of a joiner.

We saw some really cool stuff though--parrots and toucans and green herons and blue herons, monkeys and sloths and iguanas, a crocodile, a strawberry poison dart frog, a green tree frog. I feel so lucky to have seen all these things, to know these creatures still live on this earth. I mean: in Minnesota all this jungle stuff is an abstraction. Waking up 5 of the last 6 mornings to the howl of monkeys is not an abstraction. Even, by this morning, it wasn't so much a thrill as: yep, there they are again. It must be about 5:15. Still, seeing them climb through the trees with their babies on their backs never gets old for me.

On the long bus ride back home, I sat my smelly stuff next to an equally smelly Norwegian who was travelling with his teenage kids. They had just been in Panama, which he raved about. He'd lived in Costa Rica for 5 years, about 7 years ago, and he said that the reason everyone has bars on their windows is that for a while crime was really bad. It's not so bad now, but since everyone has bars on their home, if you didn't your house would, clearly, become an easy target. He also said the Costa Ricans tend to blame the crime on Nicaraguans, who are the farm laborers here--picking bananas (that's hard work...we drove through mile after mile of banana plantation on the way to the river to Tortaguaro), coffee, etc. It was nice to talk to someone who really knew the country but wasn't Costa Rican, so that I could ask questions I wouldn't ask a native.

So much more I could talk about--the banana plantations, the travel, the sunburn, etc. But I'm so tired already at 7:30 that I think I'll call it a night.