Jan 31 2008
Day Tours, Night Tours
I woke up to wait for my wake-up call, but it never came.
The guidebooks are right about Costa Rican food: rice and beans todo el tiempo. To quote Utah Phillips: good, though.
It’s hard to practice Spanish here. In Guatemala they patiently let you bumble along (even though, more often than not, they speak much better English than you do Spanish). Here, most people segue into English within the first couple sentences.
My taxi driver to the airport suckered me into leaving him a big tip by telling me about his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter and how hard he works and how impossible it is to get ahead.
In Nature Air’s in-flight magazine I learned more about my alleged guardian creature. Its head attaches directly to its thorax, it has no antennae, it’s nocturnal and carnivorous and has bad eyesight.
I also read a flyer about “hand gliding,” which sounds risky unless you’ve got really big arms.
Now let’s talk about Twin Otters for a bit. It seats 19 passengers, snugly.
Nature Air says that because of its STOL (short take-off and landing) it can reach difficult-to-access places.
The Twin Otter essentially opened up the harsh Canadian Northern Territory to adventurous travelers, and the subsequent rescue operations…
It’s also supposed to be the quietest aircraft in its class, but my ears didn’t agree. Not only were the engines loud, but that group of woman from Tennessee were practically shrieking about wanting a mouthful of hydrocodone as we came in for a landing. And at the end of our fifty-minute flight: “Here we are in PORT-o HY-minnez!”
I had a fleeting moment of anxiety: what if Jill and Lewis weren’t in town? But hooray! There they were, waiting for me at the airstrip, which is ominously abutted by the Puerto Jiménez cemetery.
We braved intense heat to tackle the tasks at hand: figuring out our itinerary over the next five days, making reservations with the National Park Service, going to the bank, buying groceries…
We checked into my room at a small, friendly backpacker’s hotel. It’s hot, smells a bit like pee, has no hot water and features a pillow that must be filled with marbles. However, it’s cheap (about US $12), safe, and a perfect way to break me in for what lies ahead.
At dusk we walked over to the mangrove swamp where Lewis instantly found me a few crocodiles. Creepy, especially after dark; you see blackness broken only by glowing copper orbs.
Headlamps on, we went in search of other creatures. Our flashlights illuminated only a narrow swath; the rest was just texture: dark, indistinct patterns of trees and foliage and water, dotted with luminescent specks which were usually the eyes of spiders.
Tonight, Lewis and Jill found five species of frog, a Jesus Christ lizard, a whip-scorpion and a northern cat-eye snake.
We retired early to our respective lodgings to prepare for a pre-dawn awakening.
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