Day 4 (In which we meet the man who should be in charge of all tourism in Costa Rica)

Day 4 (In which we meet the man who should be in charge of all tourism in Costa Rica)

Before we left for Costa Rica, I found a website called Eco Adventures. There were quite a few day trips available. I made reservations for a river boat cruise through a national park and a day trip to Arenal volcano. The guide named Carlos told me in an e-mail to meet him at the gate of our resort at 7:30 a.m.

The Costa Rican 5:45 a.m. sunrise made this much easier than it sounds.

I had no idea what to expect, but suspected that we would be crammed into a hot, crowded school bus with a handful of obnoxious American families for a miserable drive. I could not have been more wrong. Carlos pulls up in a new, immaculately clean 4x4 and introduces himself. We all take a seat and we assume that he is taking us to a meeting point for a large group and again we are wrong. We are his only family for the day.

He starts the drive to Palo Verde national park, but stops at a supermarket to buy some snacks and drinks for us. (He would not let me pay for anything.) He bought Isaac a little bag of chocolate covered raisins and a can if Imperial lager for me (it was like he knew us both for years!) in addition to fruit juice and other snacks.

We started the long drive toward Palo Verde. Carlos spoke impeccable English and was a funny and amicable host. He answered even the most odd ball questions about Costa Rica that we lobbed at him. (The woman on the 10,000 colones bill was a children’s author. The Motmot’s tail feathers don’t grow that way, they actually groom them into that shape. He also taught us how to tell the difference between the green and black iguanas and the two toe and three toe sloths.)

The car ride to Palo Verde was much longer than I expected. Much of the rode was along long straight dirt roads through sugarcane fields. Whenever we came to the edge of one of Costa Rica’s world famous potholes, Carlos would slow down and strategically pick the route which would do the least damage to his vehicle’s suspension.

We talked for a long time and I learned that although he had never been to America, he did have two things on his itinerary when he does visit. 1) He wants to grow a long beard and get into a bar fight in Texas and 2) He wants to go for a ride in a cab in New York City with a daredevil driver of Middle Eastern descent.

Carlos would stop frequently to point out local birds. I don’t mean slow down the car and point them out, but stop the car, get out a telescope that we could use to take pictures, and tell us about whatever it was we were looking at. He was never in a hurry, and seemed to really savor being outside and sharing the beauty of his home country with us.

When we arrived at the river, a small boy greeted us and pointed out some howler monkeys and iguanas to Isaac. There actually were about a dozen other people on the boat with three or four other guides, but Carlos took the lead in pointing out the local animals. We saw numerous birds, a larger gathering of iguanas, howlers, and a tree covered with bats. The other guides shared fresh pineapple with us.

We stopped near a gathering of Capuchins and the other guides gave out pieces of banana for us to feed the monkeys. Nancy later asked Carlos about feeding wild animals in a National Park. He told us that it is not something he would ever do, but as long as the other guides bring the animals food that they would find in the wild naturally, he doesn’t make a big deal out of it.

Near the end of our river tour, our boat drifted up to a crocodile on the banks. I could have reached out and touched it. Isaac immediately moved from his waterside seat to a more comfortable aisle seat. I will admit I was pretty excited, but when one of the other guides attached a piece of chicken to a stick and started feeding him, my heart rate definitely picked up. The feeding attracted a second and then a third croc, each one bigger than the last.

As the crocs jostled for the chicken inches away from me and the guide’s stick got progressively shorter with each chomp, I did a quick mental tally of the subtle differences between this crocodile feeding and the still interesting but 100% less terrifying alligator feedings I had seen from behind Plexiglas in Florida.

Carlos took us to very cool restaurant/ boat tour staging area for lunch. The food was fantastic. I recall beans, rice, beets, beef, cassava, spicy vegetables, and finished up with mango ice cream. By this time in the day, Carlos was like an old family friend. Isaac had certainly taken a shine to him (in fact Carlos was the first person that Isaac used a little bit of Spanish for.)

We went back to the hotel to watch the parakeets roost and the sun set over the ocean. Out at the beach we ran into the couple that we had ziplined with the day before. They had actually been staying at a different hotel in a different city, but missed their plane back to America that morning and went from hotel to hotel trying to find a room until that wound up at ours.

We walked down the beach to find dinner. The next hotel down had a restaurant on the beach that was completely empty except for a bored waiter, chef, and bartender. This should have been our first clue. The second should have been that they were out of shrimp…..100 yards from the ocean…..with no other visible diners. I still decided to be daring and ordered the catch of the day, “Red Snapper” not realizing that I would get it in pretty much the same shape (minus a few organs) it was in when it was pulled from the ocean. Isaac ordered ice cream for dessert and although I’m pretty sure the day and month on the expiration date was safe; one mouthful suggested that it was perhaps the year which may have been a bit off.

Although I had the communication advantage over Nancy with my limited command of Spanish, she could speak fluently with two of our neighbors. To our right was a family from Colorado (She was Tico, their two sons became Isaac’s friends during the week and he taught school). He and Nancy spoke the special “Teacher’s Language”, casually dropping a dizzying number of acronym titled standardized test and teaching methods that each seemed to disapprove of. Two doors down was Joe who was taking his son on a trip as a graduation present. He and Nancy both spoke New York/ Jersey (which is a lot like English, only much louder.)

Isaac and I watched the first 20 minutes of Rocky Horror Picture Show (in English) before falling asleep. The last thought before I blacked out was, “This vacation is going by too damned fast.”

Strength and Honor,
Big Matt