Fear, Loathing and Pura Vida, or; Back again to Arilapa

This post is particularly exciting to at least me because it adds the fourth country to this ongoing story of backpacking the world, being (between) the two authors: Canada, the United States, Costa Rica, and Panama, listed latitudenally. I wrote it, which now makes it a word, one way or the other. Ive been trying to make it a point to have fun writing lately, so this post may get a bit silly. By the way, it turns out that both Arielle and I made it into Envision Fest's youtube video, which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_hvRmEXEOA. See if you can find us, and see in more detail what that party was all about.

Last I wrote Arielle and I were still in the final midst of Envision Fest, and getting ready to begin our stay at Finca Nube Nueve, Chantel and Roguer's brand new farm in the Las Tombas neighborhood of Tinamasta, Osa, Costa Rica. The farm is located on two hectares of hilly pasture-land at the base of the Diamante Ridge, which is a giant mountain ridge composed entirely of primary rainforest. Chantel and Roguer are two pioneers in the growing movement back towards mankinds sustainability. Both born and raised in western Canada, they have decided to move their growing family to Costa Rica to live and build a sustainable farming community. Their 5-yr-old daughter Anja is attending local schools, and already developing as bilingual, and their almost two-yr-old son is beginning his development in a multilingual environment. Both children exciting and already very intelligent. Chantel and Roguer are both world travelers, avid surfers, and are both very easy-going, amiable, and easy to work with. In the four-and-a-half weeks that we stayed with them, we were able to build and pour cement foundation columns for the family's container home, build paths, stairways, and the first greenhouse for the farm out of primarily resources harvested on the farm, as well as build drainage ditches to help with access to the farm in the coming rainy season, all while living on the farm and drinking and bathing out of the cabrada [small (for Costa Rica) river]; Arielle also spent time acting as a full-time, live-in nanny to help the family with the vast challenges of parenting young children. In our free time we were able to find one of Costa Rica's most beautiful waterfalls, complete with a twenty foot deep pool at the botton; learn how to surf moderatly sized waves on a boogie-board, and I do in fact mean shredding barrels and getting thrashed by double overhead waves on at least two sessions; and spending time surfing (I did stand up a few times and rode little inside waves on a real surf board, but am still at the very very bottom of a brand new, monsterously difficult learning curve), watching movies and surf-porn, and bumming around Dominical with our fellow volunteer's from the farm, Chris and Nick. Nick and Chris were two fellow world-travelers from the Denver-metro area, who had also found their way to Dominical for Envision. They had basically sold everything in CO and moved down to live in Cenral America, bringing only backpacks and surfboards. Friends for literally their entire lives (I mean they sat together in the delivery room), they were both skinny as rails, but with possibly the mightiest appetites I've yet encountered, a dynamic attributed to healthy diets and super-active lifestyles. The first quote I managed to get out of them was "yeah, we like to work hard, then catch a good buzz." In our time together, we built some cool stuff, worked hard, got buzzed proper, and developed a strange accent that was somewhere between stuffy old british aristocrat, and burned out old Aussie surf bumm. I tried to carry the accent with me when we left the farm, but it just wasn't the same without them. They also taught me the benifits of a healthy lifestyle, both for surfing and for face-pushing, and some more of the language of the ocean, which is also one that is still foreign to me. Y hablando que este, yo estoy aprendiendo espanol, poco a poco. No esta dificil, pero mi y Arielle necesitamos practicar mucho, y hablar mucho solamene en espanol si nosotros queremos aprender. Y no esta bueno todos las fincas asi de trabajos en estan dirigen de gringos. Es bueno, y me gusta aprendiendo un otra idioma. After about four-and-a-half weeks, with our time in Costa Rica beginning to run short, we decided to move on. A friend in Puerto Jiminez owed us some money from our time there, and we decided to head down to try and collect, and to spend one more day in the gardens with the monkeys.
The trip to PJ was entertaining, but unsuccessful economically. The friend had been living off of what he was able to make, and had nothing to give us but a place to stay and some rice and beans. Luckily, that is enough for us after a long day of hitchhiking in a tropical country. Yes, hitchhiking in Latin America, which I'm sure is on most good American's list of things never to even consider thinking about it in rational terms. Turns out it is like hitchhiking everywhere else; lots of people flip you off, and you spend lots of time chilling on the side of some road. Then, some nice person comes along and offres to take you some distance in the direction of wherever it is you are going. You then decide to take, or not take them up on their offer. What happens next is generally fairly pleasant, but is subject to the same random swinging pendulum of fate, just like everything else. Central thesis once again, we got where we were going safely and fairly rapidly. The last ride was even "given" to us for the final cost of 3 dollars per person for the last 35 kilometers. We tried to turn them down, but they had stopped the whole bus (which was full) and wouldn't take no for an answer, so we talked them down from their original price of 8 per person. This was the same bus we had payed 25 dollars for to take us from San Jose to Puerto Jiminez in the first week of our trip to Costa. The money we gave hime went straight into his pocket, and we certainly never recieved anything resembling a ticket or stub, so I still feel like we were swindled a bit, but there hadn't been a car in a while, and we felt bad for the other passangers sitting and waiting on the driver to work on his extortion skills. Plus, it is in fact quite hot on the side of the road in the tropics. But that brings us back now to Puerto Jiminez, where we just were, prior to this vortex shaped tanget I went on. We worked one more day in Tom's jungle, and saw all three monkeys, as well as several mackaws and a whole plethora of other jungle wildlife. Despite the access to good phote ops and great board games, we had already been there, and we sure as hell were not going to get stuck there and be broke in the swamp for our last two weeks in "Paradise." Panama seemed the most logical choice based on the information we had gathered that it was in every way cheaper, friendlier, and quieter than Costa Rica. We found all those things to be true, and spent three days lounging on a beach living off of coconuts and body surfing all day. We also started playing coco-bache, a game involving throwing coconuts around the beach at rocks all afternoon. A truly wonderful game if you ever have the time to play it. We kept score with seashells on a scoreboard drawn into the sand. Sadly, the friend we were traveling with was running out of money faster than we were, and had to head out. We traveled with him to David, Panama so he could get his bus back to Puerto Jimenez, then headed up into the mountains to find some hotsprings we had read about that charged one dollar per person. The springs were amazing, and were located on a 100 hectare finca run by a caballero family. They had seen such an influx of travlers in recent years that the sign they had built at the road to their farm now read 2 dollars per person, but we didn't mind paying. We had an incredible afternoon of soaking in the very nicely done, very simple pools and met several wonderful people from all over the world. After relaxing and soothing the many bug-inflicted wounds we had incured, we decided to head back into David and catch the early bus north back to San Jose the next morning. We had already purchased tickets for this bus when we crossed the boarder in by foot and were turned back until we could furnish proof that we would leave at least some at some point in the next three months, which is how long the bus ticket was open for. We arrived in David, and went the the hotel at the bus station where we had stayed before for the reasonable rate of $10 per night. When we walked in this time, the younger clerk working the desk was not willing to let us stey for less than 35 per person. This was the bulk of our budget, and this did not seem like a prudent way to use it with ten or so days still remaining in our trip. After three hours of wandering David looking for a room, we discovered that even in Panama, hub cities jack up prices on commodities like rooms with a shower. The original 35 per person from the terminal was actual the best price we found, so after a cheap cheap meal from a little corner shop and an hour of gin rumi, we decided that we would just find a good squat for the night and break Arielle's hobo virginity. We walked around the whole area surrounding the bus terminal, and decided that any good spots would not be accessable until the city quited down later in the night. Satisfied with our decision, we sat down at a, outdoor table and starting playing some more cards, aiming to kill a few hours. As the time grew late and the local flavour started to come crawling out, we were forced to re-evaluate our situation. The first couple of crackheads to bother us where harmless old men, and I managed to ward them off by telling them how we had been traveling for some time and had no money, and that's why we were playing cards at a table in downtown David after dark with framepacks and white skin. After the old men, a younger and distinctly more alert local street person came by and asked what we were playing. I showed him, and explained the rules of gin-rumi, as best I could in my broken spanish. After a few hands, he asked if he could join us, and not wanting to be rude, I told him he could. The area we were in was still very well lit and full of people, and all our belongings were immediately visible and within reach. It was actual turning into a fairly pleasant conversation. I was managing to practice my spanish, and communicate with a local, and the man appeared to be harmless, and just frienly and bored. Soon, a proper crack head, the kind with fresh bleeding head-wounds and swollen lips, walked over and asked us for some change. I told him the same thing, that we were flat broke, and didn't even have money for a hotel room. The card-player told the crackhead to fuck off, and we resumed playing. A few minutes later card-player asks us if we want to buy any pot. We told him "no man, like we said, we don't have any money." Then he started asking about our familys, and if they had any money to send us. We politely shrugged the question and brought the card game to an end. We told him that we had to go now and that we heeded to find a place where we could sleep. We started walking in the direction of the bus terminal, and he said he would help us, and picked up Arielle's purse. Arielle pounced, and covered ten feet in a single bound, snatching her purse from his hand with a quickly mumbled "I'll get that." The look that car-player pulled at the manuever was one of pure confusion, and he walked quickly ahead of us with a wave of his arm, as if he would take us someplace safe to sleep. He walked straight to the bus terminal, which was now closed and vacant, and starting motioning at a bush in one of the gardens. He said something that I was unable to understand, even after he repeated it several times, but I think he was trying to get us to burrow in for the night. We shook our heads, and I took out a bandana with a flaming eagle and two skulls on it. He offered it to me and pointed at the dirty black bandanda that I was wearing. He seemed insistant, and so I took the bandana, and tied it onto my head. I offered him my bandana in return, slightly confused by the oddly-timed gift. He shook his head, and so I thrust the dream catcher that had been my first attempt into his hands, that being the only thing i could think of that had any sort of aesthetic value to this man. I explained what it was, and he smiled and thanked me and ran off into the darkness. Arielle and I looked at each other, and headed straight for the hotel, where we walked in and slapped a 20 on the counter. In the best spanish I could muster i told him "this is the last money we have in our possession, and your manager has already made us this deal once before, and God damn it, we are not going to get our fucking innards ripped out by rabid drug-fiends in a foreign country just because you are a fucking errand boy!" The clerk considered our proposal for a moment, then agreed, provided we were out by ten. "Thats fine with us, our bus leaves at 8 in the morning anyway." The shower and cheap latin porn on the television was certainly worth the money, as was the knowledge that it was intirely possible that we had just narrowly avoided a very unpleasant situation. It was also possible that we acted very weird at a harmless local bum who really was just bored and friendly. Either way, I slept much better on a bed that I would have outside, no doubt about that. The next morning, we caught the early bus to San Jose, and made our next random connection while standing in an inspection line to cross back over the Panama/ Costa Rica border.
Ivan is a young looking 30 year old surf bum who lives in Quepos where he has a landscaping company that does all sorts of municipal and private jobs. He also has a finca up in the mountains where he has a tree nursery that specialises in thirty or so species of palm trees. One of Ivan's projects is the reforestation of migratory pathways for the various species of animals affected by deforestation, primarily monkeys, who develop numerous problems caused by inbreeding as the troops are isolated into islands of primary forest. When we asked him if he had any projects that he needed help with in exchange for some rice, beans, vegetables and a safe place to put our tent with a water source, he rattled off about six in his first sentance. We started talking about life, the universe, and everything, and decided there in line that we wanted to work together for the next week until Arielle and I would be heading to Arilapa for our last few days in the country. The boarder crossing went completely smoothly until the very last moment, and then blew up into one of the most flagrant abuse of power i've yet witnessed.
Arielle has been harvesting the roots and vines we have been clearing in the last few months of work, and using them to create dozens of dream-catchers that she has been gifting along the way. They are all quite incredible works of organic art, and over the last few months, has built up quite a supply of various stones, feathers, and shells to use in her dream-catchers. With the combined workshop/storage closet/home backpack, we had both become accostomed to there being up to 6 or 7 dream catchers in various stages of production pinned to one or both of our bags at all times. They fit nicely onto the outer rings, and at the time of our crossing, Arielle had about 5 hoops, as well as the first atrapasuenos that she had made, and had been constantly working on strung on the outside of her pack. She also had, behind the dreamcatchers, a custom hand made sign reading "ENVISION 2011" that Russell had gotten us as a gift from a local artist in Dominical who makes custom signs on pieces of driftwood. As fate had it, the dream-catcher I gave the bum in David was the the last one i had at the time, and i didn't have any organic material on my pack. Although I don't think it even would have mattered, because the man assigned to check my pack brushed me through i could even open the thing up. Arielle was not so lucky. The short, skinny, balding, younger Tico thug that saw rings of vines on a pretty white girls pack nearly blew his top. By the time I got there, the evil bastard had worked Arielle to the point of tears by taking all of her dream catchers, the driftwood sign, and digging her pack out like a rabid wolverine until he found a pouch with the feathers and seeds and shells and other assorted supplies that she had gathered in our travels. He even had one of her hemp necklaces in the pile that he had gathered. Arielle's spanish isn't amazing, but I know that she was able to explain that all of these things had come from Costa Rica over the past few months, and that none of this had been a problem when we went through the boarder in the reverse direction. This mean prick was making absolutely no attempt to even communicate with her, though I'm almost positive that a career of boarder-checking in a tourist flooded country has given the man more English than I managed to get out of him. He explained to me that his pile of loot was all under the list of organic materials not to be allowed over the boarder to prevent the spreading of insects and such. I understand the law, and the principles behind it, but all of these things were already from Costa Rica, and I figured that once I explained that to the man in Spanish, he would return Arielle's passport and her supplies, and we'd be on our way. I first calmly explained to him that all of the things he had taken were from Costa Rica already. That we had been working on farms and clearing trails in the botanical gardens in Puerto Jimenez (which was only an hour away), and that the sign came from a local artist in Dominical, and was a gift from a friend and that we were making the dream catchers to give as gifts to our families. In spanish that was spoken much faster than I could understand he told me that he didn't believe me. I grabbed the bracelet from the top of his pile and said, slightly more agitated "Y este! Este de los estados unidos, tiene. para un ano. Y este (picking up the sign), es un regalo de nuestros amigo. De un artiste en la playa en Dominical donde trabajamos para la fiesta de envision! he responded by angrily throwing the bracelet at me and grabbing the sign back. At this point I get a little Taurian, and started to get angry. I grabbed the sign again and told him that it was a gift and the it was very important to us and he replied by very coldly telling me that it was more important to him, and grabbing it back out of my hands. The third time I picked it back off his pile he went into a tirade about how if I interered with his job again, he would sick a pack of rabid, crack-fueled police chihuahas on me, then throw my stupid american ass in jail. I responded as appropriately as my limited spanish would let me, and he stormed off with Arielles passport and the pile of our things, as well as a giant bouque of professionally done orchids that a Tico man had brought with him on the same bus. Luckily our new friend Ivan speaks much better spanish than I do, and with the help of the bus driver, we were able to talk to nazi scumbag into giving us back the sign when we produced official flyers from the festival bearing the ENVISION and Dominical, Costa Rica. He returned Arielles passport, with a small notice of our "Violation", and the sign, along with an angry glare towards me. I moved to grab the dream catchers, saying "Y estos, todos de envision, estan art, art de envision. He retaliated with a speech about what a nice guy he was for even giving us the sign. "I shouldn't even be doing this, but she was crying, and I felt bad." I still think that if i had just slipped the fucker a 20 he would have handed over the whole pile, but he might have been on a quest from god that day to fuck someones day as hard as he could. Our lasting sentiment is that we hope that his miserable little life brings him some joy one day, and that he will see through and come to the light.
Ivan's palm nursery was a beautiful farm/orchard with a large valley of primary jungle. His plans are to eventually turn the place into a sustainable eco-treehouse community. This was just one of many incredible projects that Ivan had running, and we never actually saw him again after he dropped us at the farm. Luckily, Sandy and Chip live on the property in a house that they have built over the last eight years. Wonderful people that treated us like we were their grandchildren while we worked on weeding the nurseries and rebuilding some of the structures that the jungle has eaten over the years. It was during this time that we came to grips with the fact that Arielle's bite had been from some sort of venomous spider somewhere between central Panama and Central Costa Rica. We did find a spider in the tent that I think may have been the culprit, and removed him, but it quickly became evident that Arielles bite have become infected, and I had been biten as many as five times by the same spider. We sought medical treatment for Arielle's infection at a local pharmacy where Chip and Sandy knew a good doctor who they trusted, and got antibiotics for her infection and an antibiotic cream for a mild fungal infection I had gotten on my toe. Everything seemed to clear up nicely over the next few days, and though we had spent the last of our money on the antibiotics, we knew we had a safe place to stay at Arilapa, where we had arranged to work in the gardens in exchange for a room and veggies from the gardens. After one of the best rides we've ever gotten together, certainly the best ride in latin America, me did make it safely to Alijuela, and then caught the local bus up to Arilapa. The ride was a true golden ticket. A van full of college-aged Tico kids rolled passed us and pulled to the side, waving us over on the north end of Jaco, a sluzzy, skeezy little beach city built to prey off of the Gringo sufer/hooker/drug culture. The ride we got in was from a cool local couple who told us they would never pick up a Tico, but always stopped for gringos, who probably really needed the ride if they were asking for it with their thumbs. This was a very ironic counterpoint to the fact that we did not get picked up by one single tourist vehicle the entire time we were here. In fact, the only white person that ever picked us up was the owner of a small Italian restaurant in Uvita who had moved to Costa Rica to raise his family, and didn't really seem like a "gringo". A big hearty FUCK YOU!!!!! with both fingers to all you dirty rotten asshole tourists who wouldn't lift a finger to help another person, even if they looked like they might just be your cousins kids, stranded on the side of the road in a foreign country. I absolutely respect a persons right to choose not to pick someone up for a variety of reasons, but after the tenth Range Rover with two or three waspy ass, gringo muddafukkas actually waved and smiled at us, or honked and waved, then drove by with an empty back seat, I was almost ready to step into the road, make the fuckers stop, then steal the fucking rental car and leave them duct-taped to a palm tree on some obscure beach for the local cops to get to deal with and really give these assholes a reason not to stop. In reality, I just waved and smiled, like I always do, flashed a peace sign for them to see in their rear-view mirror to say "Thanks anyway, drive safe now", but lets not dismiss the theraputic benefits of writing sometimes. It did raise an interesting new point in that people don't seem to trust members of their own "race" who are stuck somewhere and need help. Weird. Serious spastic tangents at 3 in the morning on my last day of this trip to Latin America. In ten hours I need to get on a plane to back to the United States, and I still need to get some sleep, and this is all still a fucking tangent from the ride from jaco to Alijuela. In the spirit of getting some sleep while it's still dark outside, I'll summarize that ride with the first thing that they said once they crammed us into their van. I asked them if they were students, down on vacation for the easter weekend, and the one sitting next to me yelled "NO, Somos alcoholicos!!" followed by a loud round of cheering and yelling from the group. Good, good kids who got us safely back to familiar waters.
Once we were safely settled at Arilapa, i started researching the bites, which were all quite painful, based off of a very distinct pattern of symptoms that all the bites had followed, letting us deduce that Arielle had picked the spider up and gotten the first bite, then it got into the tent and bit me three times on the left leg one night, and twice on the right leg the next night. All my research pointd to a spider with necrotic venom, which causes the cells and tissue around the bite to die while preventing the build up of dead cells into scabs, thus creating a wound that basically eats itself away into a small hole that slowly oozes out the puss and blood. This is even less fun than in sounds in writing, i promise. The family of spider typically associated with necrotic venoms is the loxosceles family, of which there are two spiders that live living in Costa Rica and Panama. This family is the same family as the brown recluse of the American southwest, and i think that they are called reaper spiders down here, but i have been unable to find any pictures of the actual spiders i'm looking for to confirm or disconfirm my theory. when my foot started swelling up on easter sunday my friends quickly talked me into going to a hospital, where a doctor said that yes, the spider bites were probably recluse spiders, and turns out the cream that the pharmacist gave me did nothing for the infection in my foot, which was made worse by the presence of the potent venom. he prescribed me an antibiotic that would combat both the infection and the venom, and advised me to keep them clean. I have been using a combination of oregano oil and fresh Aloe vera, as well as lots and lots of neosporin, and the combination of herbal supplements and antibiotics seems to have worked for both Arielle and My bites/infections. The last few days we have been weeding the crap out of the gardens at Arilapa and trying as hard as we can to repay the wonderful hospitality that they have bestowed upon us every time we have been here. That, i think is the last i'm going to write until I make it safely home stateside later this afternoon. Thanks to anyone that made it this far, stay tuned for pictures, they will be coming in the next few days with an update on the whole situation. And remember when you read this that every single morning of your entire life you wake up with the choice to change your life, today. Pura Vida!!!!!