Ho, Ho, Ho!

If you don't keep a blog, you may not realize that we bloggers are able to keep track of what search terms people use that end up sending them to our blogs. I love to find out how people find my blog. One recent search prompted the following conversation:

V: Some poor person was sent to my blog while searching for "middle aged woman back door doggie style movies"
M: What????? Middle aged?
V: I read you that string of words and middle aged woman is the part you comment on?

Among the other strange recent searches:

"Have you seen my tweezers?" and "Trimming pot-bellied pig whiskers." Perhaps those two searchers could get together.

But the most searches by far are from people with Christmas in July questions. When PJ first suggested the name for my blog, we were both thinking of several things, including my July birthday, stories about my family's Christmases and unexpected blessings. I don't think either of us realized that a lot of people like to celebrate Christmas in July. Let what I just said wash over you: people like to celebrate Christmas in July. Don't get me wrong. I love Christmas--the music (well, some of it), the lights, the candles, the food, even the shopping. But it is exhausting and that's why it comes once a year. Anyone can understand why QVC would be observing Christmas in July. I can even understand why Australians would have a celebration during their coldest month of the year. But a Christmas party during Summer in the northern hemisphere?

Anyway, searchers, even if I can't understand what on Earth would ever, ever make you want to have a Christmas in July party, at least I can help you with your search questions. So here goes:

I am having a Christmas in July what should I serve: I have to admit to being honestly intrigued by this search, which is the number one search that I get. So, here you have this event which doesn't actually exist. You can do what you want with it, and yet you want to know what the traditional Christmas in July foods are? They don't exist. I actually have given this thought. You could have a regular Christmas dinner, with roast beef, ham, or whatever. Let's face it: canned cream of mushroom soup and canned green beans are available year round!! However, I like the idea of not doing that, but serving foods with a red and green theme: tomatoes and basil; strawberry ice cream; spinach pizza. Nature has given us a lot of red and green in summer. You might as well take advantage.


Christmas in July with fake snow: Sure, go ahead. Try this from QVC. But in these tough economic times, I like to rip up paper and dump it on the ground. Kids love it. Just make sure that it is recycled white paper.

Christmas in July wedding: I absolutely love the idea of taking life's two most stressful joyful events and combining them. Just think about the fights you can have. Not just about red vs. green velvet bridesmaid gowns but red vs. green velvet halter top gowns vs. strapless gowns. And, "I know your mother wants my bouquet to have roses and gladioli, but those are summer flowers!" And, "I don't care if Father doesn't want to officiate in a Santa suit. It's MY wedding!"

Is anyone wanna go to Vegas for a Christmas in July?: Of course I am wanna go to the hottest place in the United States to celebrate Christmas in July. I'm pretty sure that's what God intended when he came up with Christmas in July.

Christmas in July consumer ridiculous: Yes, so true. Now Christmas in December consumer sensible--that would have been a good search.

Christmas in July Golf Cart: I'm speechless (or at least the typing equivalent of speechless).

Catchy phrase for Christmas in July: "It's hot and so are the traditional Brown n Serve rolls."

What else is Christmas in July known as: July 25th.

Merry Christmas in July to all!

Costa Rica: Home Again

I was going to wait a day or two to write my last entry about the trip, wanting to make the trip last a bit longer in my head, but as I write this, I'm listening to news about California budget cuts to education, and I realize that this news is going to use up all my brain cells over the next few weeks, so I should end my writing about Costa Rica before it fades from memory.

I have already spent a lot of time writing about how much I dislike the "getting there" on vacation, so I won't bother any remaining readers with any major details. I will say that our taxi came just on time and our drivers (a father/son team) couldn't have been nicer. Marin's tip for taking taxis, honed from some bad experiences, is to get a clear idea of the fare before you even get into the car. This actually reduces stress greatly (Marin has had a couple of incidences where the driver stated a fare, but did not say whether he meant dollars or the local currency, only to charge the much greater and ridiculously large amount of the two at the destination). One nice thing about being a traveling American is that many people worldwide are more than happy to receive dollars. I ended up never trading dollars for colones the entire time I was there.

Oddly, it was in our final hours in Costa Rica that a couple of things went wrong for us. I slipped and fell in the shower. Our shower was tiled all around with no handles and no non-slip surfaces. Falls are always scary because you don't at first know how much you might have injured yourself. So, as I fell and hit the floor, here's what went through my head, in order: Oh, this is like how T recently fell in the shower; how is an ambulance going to get down that bumpy road; I don't want anyone to see me naked. It's amazing what can run through your head in one second. When I realized I hadn't broken anything, I was greatly relieved. Other than embarrassment, I only suffered some soreness and bruises.

As we were packing, Marin couldn't find her phone, which was also serving as her camera. We looked everywhere and it was nowhere. As the clock ticked away the minutes before our taxi arrived, the hotel staff was able to contact the driver of the van from our El Silencio tour the night before, and even though the driver had driven several people around after our tour ended, the phone was safely in the van. The hotel staff gave our taxi driver directions to the van driver's house, and the phone/camera was recovered with all of Marin's pictures safely still there.

I loved this trip, but I was ready to go home. I was missing dry California. I was running out of things to wear because everything felt wet, and I was tired of sweating all the time. I don't think I've ever showered so much in my life. I actually felt truly rested and ready to get back to repairing the wall in my living room that I left undone.

I know some people who return to Costa Rica time and time again. Teachers especially, because of our long vacation times, seem to find a place that they feel a longing to return to over and over again. For many people I know, this place is Tahoe. For my friend D, it is Yellowstone. I work with a couple of teachers whose place is Hawaii. My place is probably Alaska, though I've only been there once (it's okay though...the Redwoods of California work, too). I'm not sure I should return to Alaska because I felt such a strong pull when I was there, I was kind of scared. I suddenly understood how people can go away somewhere and not return. Craziness. Costa Rica--I loved the trip, but I don't feel that need to return.

A single trip to Costa Rica made me realize that a whole lot of Americans do go there and feel like they've found the place they want to keep returning to. That would be fine, but I can't stop thinking about the economic and social impacts of this decision on the citizens of Costa Rica. Everywhere I went along the coast, which is a lot of Costa Rica, there were For Sale signs in English. It felt like the whole place was on sale. While, as far as I could see, Costa Ricans live in homes like the one pictured in my previous post or in very small stucco homes, the homes being sold to Americans look like this. Even though Americans are helping the Costa Rican economy when they buy these places (though I would strongly argue that they could help it a lot more by staying at a hotel when they visit), how can this not lead to resentment in the near future? I can imagine how people here in San Leandro would feel if rich foreigners suddenly moved in, but not in the homes that are already here, but instead in a new development with homes much bigger and fancier than ours. And the resentment I'm imagining in Costa Rica isn't just about money. It's about resources. Costa Ricans are justly proud of their low energy use. The entire country's electricity load is handled by more than 90% clean and renewable resources (US electricity load has a long way to go: less than 10% clean and renewable). Huge homes and lots of appliances and air conditioning use a lot of energy. And then there's my observation that a lot of new places were being resold by the owners. That $700,000 dream house you bought two years ago that seemed like a good investment is probably the first thing to go when you realize that you've lost half of your investment money. So our money problems have become Costa Rica's money problems.

I'd like to encourage those who like to return to keep returning, though. The same dollars that I think will lead to resentment are also probably the reason that so many pristine beaches and forests exist there. Without our tourist dollars, people would need to make money in other ways that would no doubt put pressure on these places that tourists love so much. In a world in which thousands of acres of rain forest are destroyed every day, it's great to see a place where it is economically smart to not destroy rain forest.

A few years ago, when I returned from my trip to Alaska, I couldn't stand it for a couple of days. Alaska is really quiet and I had become tuned in to the quiet, even though most of the trip was on a ship--even that was quiet. BART and Amtrak, which run less than a quarter mile from my house were suddenly louder than I could stand. Every airplane, lawnmower and car stereo was more than my ears could handle. It was a sick feeling. I had never felt that way before, and I wondered how I would feel after Costa Rica. It turns out that it was a different experience, but it makes me sad. Costa Rica is noisy. The jungles are full of sounds: running water, birds, monkeys, and mostly cicadas. When walking around, my ears were listening to all of these sounds and especially for rustling leaves, which meant something was causing the rustling. At Arenal, add to all of those sounds an erupting volcano. Several times a day, the volcano would make a rumbling sound, followed by the sound of large rocks rolling down the mountain. You could hear them bumping into each other. The first thing I noticed on my return was that I was hearing BART too much because it sounds a little bit like the volcano rumbling. I also noticed that I heard all kinds of bird sounds, which made me happy because I hadn't noticed them before. But, alas, I was listening to too many sounds and it was overloading my senses, so I'm not hearing the birds anymore. So, this is a less painful return, but I wish I could tune in the birds and tune out everything else.

I guess there is no place like home because I'm glad to be back in this land of the IOU and bad economic news and healthcare fights. And don't even get me started about Michael Jackson.

Costa Rica: Days 5 and 6

I’m putting days 5 and 6 together because they were very, very similar. That’s not a bad thing, since we felt in no hurry to do anything, and we didn’t even have to (get to) choose where to eat because any place but the lodge restaurant would have involved the 5 mile grueling drive down the mountain followed by another approximately 5 miles into town--$40 round trip, not including tip.

It rains a lot here in the middle of Costa Rica, up in the mountains, and unlike closer to the Pacific Ocean, where we could see the clouds coming in and feel the air thicken, there is no warning before it begins. Even the lodge’s “naturalist” can’t tell when it is going to rain, though he pointed out that the howler monkeys know. They do call to each other right before the rain.

On our first morning at this lodge, we took the free tour of the surrounding forest. This forced Marin to, if not overcome, confront her fear of hanging bridges (or at least the heights at which they are hung).

The forest is beautiful, and there’s even a small area of primary forest (this is a big deal because primary forest has never been logged and some animals, like spider monkeys, will only live in primary forest).


Even Costa Rica, which its strong commitment to the environment, doesn’t have much land that hasn’t been logged. Unfortunately, we didn’t see one single animal. But Eduardo, our guide, did tell us the story of the volcano, which was pretty interesting. In this story, you begin to realize how much of the landscape you’re looking at has only been there since 1968. A lot of the hilly land surrounding us was flat farmland until it got covered with tons of lava and ash. The area surrounding the volcano contains patches of primary forest, secondary forest, very new forest, rocky areas with few plants, and flat farmland. The old forest was pretty untouched by the volcanic eruption. Then there’s new forest that has tall plants. That’s where the ash fell, but not the lava. Ash is soft and mineral rich. Plants grew fast and well after the eruption. Where lava has flowed and hardened, some moss is growing, but it will take many years to break up the rock into soil that plants can really use. I found the farmland particularly interesting because it changes the landscape so much. The rainforest is wet and shady and full of animal sounds. The farmland, without the shade of the rainforest plants, is sunny and full of light.


Our lodge was built specifically for Smithsonian scientists (Eduardo says there wasn’t a single volcanologist in Costa Rica prior to 1968) to study the volcano up close out of harm’s way as much as possible. After a day here, you realize that you aren’t really out of harm’s way. For a fairly big lava flow, there’s a river gorge between us and the rim, but for a pyroclastic explosion (the kind that sends huge boulders far away), you can’t be out of harm’s way and be this close. The advantage of the placement of our lodge is that the land is pretty much as it was prior to the volcano, which means old forest. It also means old farms are nearby. On our walks, we walked past a dairy farm. This means there are a handful of cows grazing out in the fields, and from the looks of the milking shed, they are milked by hand. This was very interesting to me to see a small, seemingly sustainable farm. The small farm neighborhood consisted of about four houses that were very, very small and simple. It’s odd to visit a place where you, the tourist, live so differently than the people whose country you are visiting. Anything I can say about this would just be a cliché, but I do believe that I saw enough to understand that we probably would envy things about each other.


Our two full days here involved a lot of walks on our own and two with Eduardo. The second walk was a combination El Silencio walk, which involved not much silencio, and a volcano walk. We were driven to a spot where the lava is still apparent, where Eduardo sat us down and repeated the same stories about the volcanoes from the day before. I’m talking word for word, hand gesture for hand gesture. This tour was far from free. It also became clear that Eduardo was a good local guide but no naturalist. When he saw a bird, he’d pick up his bird guide and look for a picture, just like I would if I had a bird guide. What Eduardo was good at was spotting animals that were pretty well camouflaged by their surroundings. We saw a pair of howler monkeys in a tree and a two toed sloth (the meaner of the sloths). All three of these animals were not deep in the jungle, but were in trees found along the sides of a busy highway.

We also used the lodge pool, which is probably the nicest manmade thing here. It is huge, and very welcoming after a day of walking. Even though the temperatures here in the mountains are very pleasant, it is still humid and sticky.



I’d like to say that we saw a lot more of the volcano, but it was obscured by clouds at least half the time (and by obscured I actually mean rendered completely invisible), and at other times, it wasn’t doing much. However, there were periods where it was throwing out some hot rocks, which we could watch rolling down the side of the mountain and we could definitely hear as well. We never did feel the ground shake, as some visitors do, but I have felt the ground shake plenty in my life, living in California.

Costa Rica: Day 4, continued

So, why did we go to Arenal? The main reason is that Arenal is an active volcano. An actual rumbling spewing out lava volcano. In 1968, no one had any idea it was a volcano, and one day it began shaking and making a rumbling noise, and a few days later, it erupted with enough force to throw large rocks a couple of miles and to cover an entire village and its 80 plus inhabitants under meters of rocks and ash. It still is active and has had a few major eruptions since 1968. Another reason to visit is that, due to the altitude, there is a different ecosystem than the rain forest we had just visited. It’s called a cloud forest. It still has many characteristics of the closer to sea level rain forests, but the plant life reminds me more of some of the redwood forests of California or the Hoh Rain Forest of Washington state.


We arrived at the lodge, which is 9 miles up a steep, rocky, horribly rutted hill. If you’ve ever been on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, where for about 30 seconds, you jeep throws you up and down, left and right, that’s what the ride up the hill is like, except it’s not 30 seconds. I felt as if my breasts were going to bounce out the window and go bouncing down the road. The lodge does not do any transportation of its own, but going down the hill for any reason and then back up again will cost $40 in a local taxi. This did not seem at all exorbitant after experiencing the road and realizing the wear and tear it must have on shocks, tires, and brakes. But it did make me realize that we were probably going to be at the lodge for all three nights without going anywhere else. Forty dollars is too much to spend for a casual shopping trip into town. I thought to myself that this lodge had better be really, really nice.

We checked in with a not very friendly receptionist. No one offered to show us to our room or to take a bag. (See, I did get used to great service after all). It was raining harder than I’ve ever experienced in my life. We rushed to our room, opened the door, and found a bed facing a large window, a small table (like a coffee table), another small table with a fan on top, a closet without doors, and a sink. The ancient mattress on the bed had no box springs. Behind a door, there was a bathroom that looked like it had had many repairs.


A message was posted on the front door to us “urbanites” to not get freaked out when “country guests” show up in our room. By that, they said they meant spiders and ants, but as we learned, it also meant lizards.


Marin wasn’t so bothered by the lack of television. She’s become accustomed to that while living in Russia. We were both bothered by the realization that we were out of luck as far as the internet was concerned. And then Marin pointed out that we couldn’t even see the volcano—the entire reason I got this room was the volcano view. On top of that, I was reading a book, The Master and Margarita, that I wasn’t liking too much. But there really was nothing to do but read. It was raining too hard to even attempt to look at the hotel grounds.

Then, the power went out, too. We heard a generator turn on, and about ten minutes later, the power was restored. The power went out a lot during our visit here.

The book I was reading was one of Marin’s favorite all time books, and that’s saying a lot. She was very amused at my not liking it because I had told her that the title had made me think that it was going to be about a rich guy and a servant falling in love or something like that. She said, “Do you even know me? That is never the kind of novel that would be a favorite of mine.” Since she was not liking the book she was reading much, she decided that she would write the story that I had expected The Master and Margarita to be, which she is letting me put here. She put her misery into creativity, and I decided that if I think of this as camping, we have a very, very nice tent, and I can live with that. Also, forced to read my book, I found that I got to a point where I couldn’t put it down, which unfortunately led to the realization that I hadn’t brought enough to read.

Around nine, we decided to call it a night and fell asleep. Sometime in the night, the rain stopped. I woke up, looked out our window, and saw the volcano very close by with red lava spurting out of the top and flowing down the sides. It turns out that we did have a view, but it was so obscured by the clouds that we couldn’t even see the mile or so to the rim of the crater. It was stunning.

Costa Rica: Day 4 Part 1

Today was a traveling day, so it will not be so filled with the joys of vacation.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been on a vacation and didn’t want to leave a place, but I really didn’t want to leave the Gaia Hotel. I awoke extra early because we had to check out, be driven to a bus stop and catch our bus to Arenal, but I found that I had a little time, so I went back to the pool to see if the monkeys were there. Even though 6:30 is too early for squirrel monkeys, I was rewarded with the sight of many colorful birds (which must disappear when the monkeys show up) and the sound of the Howler Monkeys. They were far away, but their throaty roar can be heard for very long distances.

We were quickly thrown into the real world. The hotel van dropped us at the bus stop (which was just another hotel) in Quepos, the nearest “city.” We were left standing outside by a casino and an adult entertainment place. Luckily, we weren’t there for long. Our friendly bus driver came right on time and told me that our ride would be about three and a half hours. I was happy because that was a half hour less than the website said the trip would take.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet about how few women we’ve seen in Costa Rica (other than tourists, I mean). At our first hotel, there was a room maid and that was it. The receptionists, drivers and waiters were all men. At our second one, even the room cleaners were men. At Manuel Antonio, all men. I did see women. They would be at the sides of roads waiting for a bus with a child in their arms, or they would be working at some of the less fancy restaurants in town. Marin, who had visited Egypt recently, was no stranger to this observation.

I found the bus trip a little scary. Almost all roads are just two lane roads, so our driver did a lot of passing and, a few times, I was sure we were going to have a head-on collision. I would have worn my seatbelt, but it was broken.

After three and a half hours of travel, we pulled into a stop that seemed to have about 7 or 8 other Grayline buses just like ours. We were told we had 30 minutes, and I wondered why we weren’t at Arenal. The thirty minute place had one tourist shop with very tacky tourist wares and two little restaurants without posted prices. There were some red macaws to look at, but it was a long 30 minutes. I noticed that premade signs, like Open House signs you might see at a corner, started going up next to the buses and that our luggage was being removed. Our driver found us and told us that we were going to now transfer to another bus. He introduced me to the new driver and the new driver said that the trip would take about two and a half hours. Ahhh! This is so different than what the company website said. But of course, we are in the middle of nowhere, and all I could think was that I was going to find another way back to the airport in a few days.

Our new bus took off and the terrain got interesting as we got away from the ocean and started climbing to a higher elevation. It started to look like California, but greener. There’d be fields of grass with cattle grazing (Marin called them goat cows because they have long floppy ears) and an occasional tree that looked exactly like an oak tree.

As we climbed, the roads got worse and the rain started pouring down, and pouring and pouring. There were only two other people on the bus and they were going to a placed called Arenal Springs Resort. The bus dropped them off at the front door, which meant we had to climb up a very steep part dirt road in the rain. It was unnerving. And Marin said to me what I was thinking already: “If they won’t do drop-offs at our hotel, what is the road to there going to be like?”

Our driver got a bit lazy at that point, and tried to talk us into transferring to a cab that would take us to the Arenal Observatory Lodge. He might have been trying to help, but the cab’s proposed fare of $25 to take us down the road a bit was too high, so I told the driver we wanted to be dropped off in town, as we had already said. So, back down the steep hill we went, and into the town of La Fortuna. La Fortuna is a touristy little town that is set up mostly for people who come to see the volcano. Most of the shops are restaurants or places selling tours. But it did have a little central park and a church, so we were able to get some sense of a Costa Rica town. We tried to do a little shopping, but the rain was getting to us, and we were worried about how to get to our hotel.

We walked to the park, as our wonderful Frommer’s Guidebook had told us to do, and there was a taxi. The driver’s proposed fare of $20 seemed good because he was driving us further than the other cab would have. But this made us realize that we weren’t going to be taking little jaunts into town, either. I hoped that the lodge was really nice, and had some television reception and internet access, along with the best possible volcano views.

It turned out that the driver of our cab was really kind and friendly. He spoke almost no English, so my poor Spanish had to do. We have learned on this trip that Costa Ricans love you to try Spanish, no matter how bad. Our driver felt that we shouldn’t take the bus back to the airport and offered us a ride to the airport at a fair rate, so I took him up on that. We had a few funny moments there where he didn’t know if my request to be picked up at doce mean noon or midnight, and I couldn’t remember which word in Spanish meant noon and which meant midnight, but we figured it out. So, as I write this, I’m trusting that he will be here for us as planned.

Costa Rica: Day 3

After just two nights in the same place, we were starting to feel more comfortable. We had figured out how to get around and we had come to realize that the heat and humidity called for a nice, slow pace. I’m used to rushing around a lot during vacations, but I quickly decided that the slow, relaxing resort pace could be a very nice one.

Marin had decided that she wanted to go snorkeling. It turns out she tries to snorkel wherever she goes, and as a result has now had the pleasure of seeing another part of Alaska, Egypt, and now Costa Rica. I almost went, but I wanted to see Manuel Antonio Park one more time and I actually had to think about Day 4, in which we had to travel to Arenal, an active volcano.

Our breakfast, like all hotel breakfasts I’ve had in the last several years, came free with the room. I’ve also noticed that the quality of these breakfasts really varies. So, from all I’ve said about the Gaia so far, it will come as no surprise that the breakfasts were really good. I think we liked the Huevos Rancheros Costa Rica Style breakfast the best. Two crunchy tortilla cups (about the size of a cupcake paper) had black beans in the bottom topped with some salsa, then a single poached egg in each, topped with a little melted cheese. It was very good. I think Marin most fell in love with the coffee. She stopped sweetening her coffee here because the flavor was so good it didn’t need the sugar. Later we found out that it wasn’t just Costa Rican coffee, but an especially good brand of Costa Rican Coffee called Milagro.

What made the Huevos Rancheros “Costa Rica style” was apparently the black beans. I tried to eat Costa Rican food as much as I could, but found a lot of it unsatisfying. While I could probably live pretty well on black beans and white rice, I was surprised by the blandness of the beans. When I cook black beans at home, I add some onions and garlic, and some cumin or coriander, and a little citrus. At one place, I ordered Costa Rican style chicken. I got a couple of pieces of chicken in a very bland gravy, a little salad, and mashed potatoes, and crowded onto this plate was a helping of black beans and a small pile of white rice. I guess we can think of it as their bread. There is fruit everywhere, but it doesn’t figure into the foods at all, except as a little thing on the side. And, where there’s coffee, there should be chocolate, but it seems to be found mostly in the imported Milky Way Bars. The crops we passed on the roads were pineapple, sugar cane, rice and coffee.

After Marin and I had breakfast, we parted, and I decided to take my laptop poolside and check out facebook and figure out how we could get to Arenal the next day. As soon as I got there, I realized I’d made a perfect choice. There was no one else around, and the forest right next to the pool was full of squirrel monkeys. There was one on top of the umbrella that was shading my table. I watched them play for a while, then, after making our reservations for the next day’s bus trip, I wrote a bit and read a bit and asked to be taken to the National Park.

I wanted to see if I could figure out how to find the animals the way that our guide did the day before. I couldn’t, but I was glad to go again. This time, I didn’t have William to protect me from people insisting I buy goods or tours from them. It wasn’t so bad though. People were a little pushy, but took no for an answer, and if the no was said with a smile, I got a smile back.

On this trip, I couldn’t find any howler monkeys, but I did see two sloths and a coatimundi, which looks like an elongated, pointier raccoon. I also got to enjoy the plant life more. The diversity is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There are light greens, dark greens, huge leaves and small. There are many plants that I recognized as indoor houseplants back home. There are many plants that have found a home by growing high in the canopy on the side of a tree. It actually roots itself into the tree. My favorite thing is the vines that hang down from the tall trees—the Tarzan vines. I had always thought this was just a handy movie device. Nope. On top of that, there are plants that send roots down from high in the canopy, trying to root in the ground. One plant, rightly called a strangler fig, actually starts out by growing in a tree, sends roots down on all sides, and then eventually kills the tree that it was growing on, leaving behind what looks like a tree, but with a kind of hollow inside.

After I returned to the hotel, Marin returned from her trip, excited by the bottle nosed dolphins she had seen. She said that they even were jumping high out of the water. The snorkeling was just okay; the water was not too clear, but the dolphins were clearly the highlight for her. She had also been fed a nice lunch of grilled fish skewers on the boat. Marin followed her adventure with a long nap, I read and watched television. We went swimming. I went online and found many nice birthday wishes. We had a nice birthday dinner, though I missed Cameron and PJ. My birthdays are always nice, and this one was definitely no exception.

Costa Rica: Day 2

A good sleep will cure a lot, so it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did that I woke up feeling refreshed and happy and ready to explore. The afternoon before, I had had the sense to ask for a tour of Manuel Antonio National Park. I did this not so much because I wanted a tour. I like to explore on my own when possible. I couldn’t figure out how to get to the park. The cute little golf carts that took us up the hill were a sign that no taxi was going to drive right up to the front door of the hotel, so I figured buying a tour would be my way of ensuring transportation to the park.
Are all Americans this uncomfortable with great service? I have to describe more about what the Gaia was like. There were always two receptionists on duty, who stopped whatever they might be doing the moment I walked in. If I said, as I did on day 3, “I would like to go shopping outside of Manuel Antonio National Park,” one of the receptionists would get on the radio immediately and ask for a driver to be ready down the hill. Then a golf cart driver would show up right outside the reception area, whisk me down the hill, but stop to show me if there was an interesting animal in one of the trees on the way down the hill, and drive me right next to the van that would take me to the shopping area. Oh, and the golf cart driver would ask about my stay. When Marin was with me in the cart, there would be some friendly flirting as they tried to get her to speak some Spanish. The van driver would then take me to where I wanted to go, and ask what time I wished to be picked up. He spoke little English and was kind and grateful for the little Spanish I could speak. When I returned, there was the driver, waiting, and as we approached the hotel, he would radio that Senora Vicki was returning and the golf cart would be waiting. And what did I do? I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to handle all this, and I especially didn’t know how, when, and how much to tip (I caught on after a while). It was probably good for us that the Gaia was pretty remote, so we had to learn how to negotiate all this great service.

What this brings me to is the National Park. Manuel Antonio is the smallest National Park in Costa Rica, and that’s saying a lot because this tiny country (put together New Hampshire and Vermont and you've got the size) has many National Parks (about 25% of the land). You can walk every trail in the park in one day, and that includes stopping to look. It is one of the most popular parks because it is relatively close to San Jose and easy to get to (by Costa Rica standards) and because it has a large diversity of plants and animals. William, the hotel’s favorite park guide, met us at the hotel. I noticed right away that he carried a large telescopic lens on a tripod. I thought it was a camera at first, but it turned out to be just for viewing.

In case the steamy weather and the tropical plants didn’t clue me in, I would have known immediately that I was not at home when we got to the entrance of the park. Before getting there, all the tourists are surrounded by guides who are dressed exactly like William and who are all carrying the same telephoto lens. The guides do not work for the park. They make a living by being hired by people to walk them through the park. Most people turn them down, but the guides keep following them all the way up to the place where you hand over your ticket and enter the park, saying, “You’ll have a much better visit if you hire me.” They are pushy. Worse than that, for most Americans, is that you have to negotiate the price of their services with them.

As soon as you’ve hired a guide, they back off. Since Marin and I showed up with William, we didn’t have to deal with them. William, probably in his mid-thirties, was older than most of the guides, and he probably is envied by them because he doesn’t have to stand out there and negotiate.

As soon as we got in the park, it was clear how necessary a guide was, and it was also clear that the very same guides who are hustling people outside the park really know what they are talking about. They become serious naturalists once inside.

This is what William would do: He’d take a few steps, look around, stop and look more carefully at what looked to me to be a sea of plants. Then he would place his telephoto lens on the tripod in the middle of the wide trail, look through his lens, make a few adjustments (the adjustments took all of about 10 seconds), and then invite us to look. There we would see a magnificent spider or bird or lizard. He would tell us about the animal—why it liked that plant, what its predators are, what its coloration did for it—and then show us how we could stick our cameras’ lenses onto the lens of his device and take pictures.


At first he was so good at this (and I couldn’t for the life of me see the real animal with my own eyes) that I wondered if he somehow had pictures loaded in the lens and was only making us believe that we were looking at animals, especially since the first animals stayed so still for us. Later, we got better at seeing the animal with our own eyes (but never at finding them ourselves).

In approximately two hours, we saw grasshoppers colored like none I’ve ever seen before, sloths (both the two toed and three toed species….did you know that the two toed ones are kind of mean?), Jesus Christ lizards, which run across water, spiders building webs, a toucan (that was really exciting), and two howler monkeys. One of the howler monkeys, asleep in a tree branch, had draped his bright white testicles over a smaller branch, so they were hanging there, kind of like laundry drying on a line. They (the testicles) are completely white. William, who exhibited absolutely no sense of humor, said, "Nature porn!" He was pretty amused with himself.


After a life of imagining steamy rainforest jungles as being way inland with a murky river nearby, it came as a surprise the the Pacific Ocean forms one of the borders of the park. As you are walking past the dense growth, you can hear it. Then suddenly, there it is. There’s maybe 100 feet of sand, then a stand of coconut trees, and then jungle.


We walked along the beach for a bit and then we exited the National Park. Immediately outside the exit gate, there are all kinds of people waiting to sell you things. Some of it looked poorly made (actually most of it looked that way), but much of it looked very nice. But it was such a shock to be suddenly thrust into the harsh light and heat and noise outside of the more shaded park, that I had very little time to think about all this. I did stop and buy some pottery and then William walked us back to our starting point, and there was Omar, our hotel driver, waiting to rush us back to the hotel.

Back in our room, I turned on the television. The day before, almost every channel was carrying Michael Jackson’s service, but today, Heaven. It was noon and All My Children was on. I decided that I was having a perfect day. Amazing natural wonders followed by a break in front of the television. Following that, Marin and I decided to try out the hotel pool. This is a terraced pool, built on a few levels going down the hill. I quickly realized that I should have used the pool the day before, too, to get the feeling of travel out of my system. After a swim, where we could stop often and look out over the land and the Pacific Ocean beyond, we went back to our room, where Marin took a nap and I finally figured out how to use their wireless internet system (it wasn’t functioning in our room, so we had to take the laptop somewhere else on the property). The dark clouds started to gather, the air felt oppressive (Marin had described it as walking through soup), and it started to rain.


After the rain, I went back outside with my computer and noticed that the trees were moving a lot. They were full of squirrel monkeys. I watched as they wrestled, tumbled, and jumped from tree to tree. There were babies, adults, and adolescents. I went and got Marin and we watched together for a very long time. At one point, I tried to count them, but they were jumping around so wildly that I couldn’t. There were a good two dozen of them, though, and many were not more than 15 feet from us. It seems hard to believe that these are an endangered species, but their habitat is getting smaller and smaller, and some groups have found homes right next to some of the hotels. Our hotel was built on a biological reserve that is no longer in use, but the builders made a commitment to preserve most of the reserve.

One thing that’s difficult to get used to is that, because we’re close to the equator, the summer days don’t lengthen here. At home right now, I have enough daylight for walking dogs until about 8:30, but the sun sets here at around 5 pm, and by 6 it is completely dark. I noticed that by day two, we were already kind of living by the light, feeling like the day was finished by 6. Before dark, we went to the hotel restaurant and had linner (or dunch). And thus ended a very happy day.

Costa Rica, Day 1

First, you must understand that I am a horrible traveler. I dread leaving home. I worry about my dogs, my plants, whether or not I left anything unlocked or turned on. I worry about getting there…what if my luggage is lost, what if the hotel isn’t expecting us after all, what if people don’t understand English. I really envy people who thrive on such nervousness. People have said to me, “Running into problems is half the fun.” That’s nice for them. By the way, all of those things have happened to me more than once, and I’ve lived, but that doesn’t stop the worry. Then there’s the part I hate most: getting there. I don’t like flying. The emptier the flight, the more likely (I tell myself) it is to fall out of the sky. Nutty, I know.

This trip to Costa Rica hit on all of my travel woes. To get there took two flights with an almost four hour layover between. The second leg left Los Angeles at 2:15 a.m. The flight, on TACA airlines, was completely full. TACA, which oddly goes by different names depending on where you buy tickets, is a major Central American carrier. The airplane was medium sized with three seats, an aisle, then three seats. This created the narrowest aisle I’d ever seen. Even the drink carts were about half the width that they usually are. The attendants, who were very professional and polite, kept bumping into my shoulder and elbow. They couldn’t help it. I’m sure they were doing it to a lot of people. I slept a bit on the flight and then they fed us breakfast. I ate because I thought I should, but it was really horrible. I had pancakes, which were not fresh off the griddly and which oddly came with a croissant and a muffin, along with a fruit cup. I ate a pancake, realized it tasted awful, and then ate nothing else. Soon I was looking at Costa Rica out of the airplane window. I could see green everywhere, with houses clinging to hillsides, blue sky, and mountains beyond.

No luggage was lost, and the driver I’d asked the hotel to hire for us was there waiting for us. Unfortunately, we had a 3.5 hour drive ahead of us on rough roads. At first it was wonderful. When we got out of San Jose, the capitol city, we were surrounded everywhere by tropical plants. Then, I looked out the window and saw a bird of prey with a huge wingspan. I looked in my guidebook and realized it was an osprey. Soon, I saw many osprey, which are beautiful birds of prey, and because we were high above the forest floor, they were at eye level. However, looking out the windows was my second mistake (after the pancakes). With the exhaustion and the pancakes and all, I realized I was feeling really carsick. So I spent the rest of the trip worrying that I was going to vomit all over the nice SUV we were in.

About halfway there, our driver stopped at a bridge that was famous for being over a river with crocodiles in it. I was very glad to stop. My stomach settled some, and then there was the thrill of the crocodiles. They were huge. According to my guide book, then can get about 21 feet long. At least one of these must have been that long. At this stop, I also got to see one of the many restaurants we had passed on the road up close. They are called sodas, and they are basically a roof held up by posts with a few tables and a kitchen inside. It was dark and felt very inviting. And there was something very old movie-ish tropical feeling about it. I felt as if Humphrey Bogart was going to come out of the back and ask me when I got into town. Too bad I couldn’t eat anything.

Back in the car, more windy roads, and then, thankfully, we arrived. For our first three nights, I chose a hotel called Gaia that I’d read great reviews about. The car was met by two nice young men. One got on a walkie-talkie and announced our arrival to someone. The other shuttled us into the back seat of a golf cart and drove us up a steep hill. As we got about halfway up, he stopped the cart and pointed to a tree right next to the little road we were on. There was a sloth!

At the top of the hill, we were greeted by one of the receptionists, and another worker who brought us each a tropical fruity drink. It was cold, refreshing, and delicious. After they felt that we were ready, we were shown the grounds, including the pool and spa, and our lovely room with a DVD player, satellite television, and a Jacuzzi tub. Marin and I walked around a bit and then we had tapas at the hotel lounge, which is open air, like the sodas that we saw, except it was on top of a hill and clearly very designed. We could see osprey all over the place and we could see the rainclouds coming in from the Pacific Ocean.

The air just got more and more humid and the sky grew dark. We heard thunder. Then it started to rain. It was about 4:30. I was tired, but Marin said that we should stay awake. She’s the world traveler, so I listen to her. I turned on the television and Marin opened up her book. Five minutes later, the world traveler was fast asleep. I joined her and we woke up the next morning.