03.16.2008 -- Home, home! Safe at Last!

The deck of the rental house looking down on Playa Negra. Some people call it the best surf break in Costa Rica.

We got home last night from a week away. It was unbelievably good to see Lucy and Zoe. Brian has been doing most of the putting away so far (Lucy wants to play with shells, wants to read books, etc.). We'll got things back to normal soon.

In the meantime, if I don't put something down now about the trip, it may never get done.

***

So... We were in Costa Rica last week. Our last day there, I spent time on the beach alone because I wanted to buy some jewelry for some people and needed to get some altered. I also wanted to avoid going into Tamarindo. (Tamarindo, to me, was a small town under construction--on it's way to high rises. You get traffic with muddy roads and sweltering heat.)

Anyway, while I was there, at Playa Avellanas, I met a local...and well, let's just say that we got a picture taken together on the beach.

When my husband saw it, he said, "Nice picture. Who is this Costa Rican pig, Val?"

I explained that it was me who approached this "pig" and that I just wanted a picture to remember the afternoon.


Below is the photo.

Me and Lola the pig

We were in the Guanacaste province...on a peninsula--the driest area in all of Costa Rica. Despite this, and despite it being the dry season, it rained twice while we were there. From what we were told, this NEVER happens. We liked it. I think that all in all, the weather was the best we could have hoped for, it was relatively cool a lot of the time we were there.



The whole point of this trip was to surf. All of us like to surf and all of us love the idea of really being able to surf (ie. dropping in, carving, etc.), but most of us are from Utah. That makes learning how to surf a little more difficult. There was no lack of enthusiasm, though. We decided that it would be a good idea to take a break and go inland to the Monteverde Cloud Forest to take "The Original" zip-line tour of the canopy. The best part of that outing for me was the drive. We got to see a lot more of Costa Rica. It's beautiful.




Here we are with our zip-line gear, posing on a ficus tree. Our guide told us that another name for the tree is the "strangulating" Fig tree. He explained that when seeds from the ficus fig fruit are deposited by relieved monkeys in the boughs of a tree, the seeds sprout and send down viney-looking runners to the forest floor. Eventually, the other tree dies and the hollow ficus is left. They are very cool trees. One nice thing about this zip line company is that all of the platforms and lines are attached to the trees by ropes. The trees are protected by padding and they don't drill any holes into the supporting trees. This only makes sense, as you would certainly want to preserve the integrity of any tree that is routinely holding 10 or more people...but it was still nice to see.

Speaking of fruit: yum. Fresh pineapple and mangoes! We also got some bananas and papayas, but the consensus was that no one really loved the taste of papaya alone. This led us to pose the question, "Is there anyone in the world whose favorite fruit is papaya?" Reason would point to yes, as an answer, but our group still had trouble really believing this. If anyone reading this knows anyone whose FAVORITE fruit is papaya, please contact me (valerie.tayler@gmail.com) in the name of science and curiosity.

Another thing we learned when we took this tour was the sound that a howler monkey (monocongo) makes. It's a very odd sound that you could compare to a deranged angry dog.

Monocongo at Playa Avellanas

Speaking of dogs: There were wild dogs all over in the area where we were. These were some chilled out dogs--and extremely well socialized. It made me a little frustrated with the situation with dogs here where we live. I think that most people expect all dogs to be on leash or contained in some way. This makes it so when a dog IS loose, people with this expectation may get afraid or even angry. What I wonder is why we don't have higher expectations for dog owners in not just containing dogs, but in socializing them as well. Of course, there will always be the risk of one losing it and harming someone.

Like so many lone gunmen who have gone on shooting sprees of late.

Back to Costa Rican dogs, though. They really are all over the place. On the beach hunting crabs, hanging out by soccer fields. I never met one of these dogs that I didn't like.

We had some good meals in Costa Rica. Some of the best food, we found at a little three-table place in a nearby village which was about a ten minute walk away. The place was owned and run by a young American/South American couple, Miguel and Kimberly. Miguel had gone to culinary school and knew his stuff. Kimberly was very good at chatting with locals and tourists... She had some good stories to tell. There was a wild horse milling about by the restaurant and this reminded Kimberly how she and Miguel had been kept awake all night by three wild horses that ran around and around their house all night long. Apparently, they woke up to the leavings of these horses distributed liberally around the house.

One night (Thursday past, I think), our friends Rob, Sarah and Phil were walking back to the rental house after a really delicious meal by Miguel and Kimberly involving Tuna tartar, Marlin, Mahi Mahi and Passionfruit pie. While we were at the restaurant, under a pitched roof of corrugated metal, watching skateboarding movies from the seventies on a plasma t.v. attached to the wall, it rained. This is when we learned that it NEVER rains in March. It was raining hard, but by the time we had finished our really *choose-your-own- superlative* food, it had stopped. This is why Phil and Sarah and Rob could walk back.

Now picture this:

You are walking late at night on dirt roads in unfamiliar territory. Not only is this not your home town, it is not even your home country. You have seen all kinds of wild animals on the loose in the several days you have been here, and know that you are also walking past people's homes, although is is not light enough to see well whose homes they may be.

All of a sudden, you hear a mad dog. It is close. It is very, very angry.

You and your friends decide to arm yourselves. You pick up rocks and sticks. You have only the light of the moon to illuminate the uneven, rocky road and the crazy dog that is terrifyingly close. You can't see jack squat. .

..Well, actually you can see, a little.

A light far behind you is making it possible to see your shadow and the shadows of your friends. Crouched. Trembling. Two of you clutching rocks and one weilding a long, twiggy branch.

You evaluate the shadows and notice of a sudden that this is utterly,
overwhelmingly....

...funny.

You have just had your fear tolerance tested by a howler monkey.

If you didn't follow this monocongo link before, follow it now. It will put Phil, Sarah and Rob's story into perspective.

We heard this story from Phil after he came back to the house. (Rob and Sarah stayed in the room that the eight of us got at the Playa Negra Hotel. The house sleeps only six and we had a group of eight. The hotel is on the way to the house we rented. This left poor Phil to navigate the dark, monocongo infested night alone.)

We heard Phil before we saw him. When he got to the bottom of the long flight of stairs that leads into the house, he called out, "Home, home! Safe at last."

I just want to point out that "Home, home! Safe at last!" as a title comes from Phil and that, unlike Sarah, Phil or Rob, who got yelled at by the monocongo, I never felt like I was in any danger in Costa Rica.



It's interesting how drastically your perspective can change in only a week. When we first arrived at the Liberia airport, the terminals seemed (in a friend's words) almost "pathetic", they lacked proper walls, let in the dust and hot, muggy air and were so insubstantial as to lack proper gates to get passengers to the planes. By the time we left, they seemed logical, if not ingenious, to me--being open-air and cooled by gigantic fans...

The picture below was taken as we were waiting to board the flight home to L.A.

Brian loves to make silly faces when I point the camera at him. I took this picture and it instantly reminded me of Zoolander.

Blue Steel