Homeland Bound

Sitting in a strangers house on the Caribbean side of the country, hopefully shaking off the last traces of a sickness that started this morning, I'm preparing physically and mentally to go home. Not that I'm going back to Missouri, or even Moab, but it just feels different to be in the States; even if I'm travelling through unknown territory, there's still the odd feeling that it's my unknown territory.

Let's back up. I'm in Cahuita, right? A literal stone's throw from the Caribbean, and much more than a figurative stone's throw from the Pacific that I've grown so comfortable with. And like all worth-while adventures, this came about through a series of unexpected and chance encounters. A week ago, I was tying up loose ends in Uvita, saying goodbye to my family band (which is breaking up due to geographical differences), and preparing to say goodbye to my friends at the Flutterby House, with intentions to head north a little early, stop in Silencio to see Aaron and his family for a couple days, and then to continue up to San Jose in time for my August 3rd flight back to Denver. This attempt to plan more than an hour in advance, of course, went astray. The last day I spent with the Zunigas, I was riding my bike back to the container when I saw a gringa hitching south, and on a whim I asked her where she was headed.

To make a long story less long, in 30 minutes I had a small backpack with a few shirts in it and was sitting next to Nadia, from Slovakia, on a bus heading 15 minutes south to Ojochal. That evening, I met the 2 Estonian girls, Gerli and Liis, Nadia intended to travel with the next morning; that night, we slept at the gorgeous mountain casa Nadia was housesitting; and the next morning found us catching our first ride towards the Caribbean, sitting in the back of a pick-up truck with 6 Ticos, 8 machetes, and us, and with me learning that Nadia knows pretty much no Spanish, and appreciating the last language lessons with the Zunigas. (We were late to meet the Estonians that morning, and they began without us, leaving a note with the number of the place we were to meet in Cahuita.) We caught 6 separate rides that day, from Ojochal to Uvita, Uvita to Dominical, Dominical to San Isidro, San Isidro to Cartago, Cartago to Limon, and then finally a bus from Limon to Cahuita, where we arrived around 5pm. This massive day of wonderful rides ended at the house of a stranger, Cameron, who offers his couches (and guest bedroom, inflatable mattresses, and hammocks) to strangers through a site called CouchSurfing.com.

By a twist of chance, Cameron had the biggest couch surfing week ever, peaking the night before last with Nadia and me, the two Estonian girls, Cameron's friend Alicia from Georgia, Mattias from Slovakia, and Jon from Boston. It's been a full house, but very fun, as we've all gotten along wonderfully and enjoyed different combinations of one another's company. My highlights have been as follows: hiking through Cahuita National Park with Nadia and the Estonians, where we saw monkeys and various other interesting jungle creatures in a jungle that snuggles right up to the narrow beach; going to the market in Limon with Mattias, and then returning in time to hunt and eat various exotic fruits, and swim and play in the salty Caribbean at dusk; going to the bar with the remains of the crew last night, with Cameron, the Estonians, Nadia, and Jon, and then staying up very late talking and giggling with one another back at the house; and finally, being able to hold down cornflakes and water this afternoon. (No, I didn't drink that much, but I wouldn't mind having that clear of a cause...)

So, yeah, I'm writing this from a slightly diminished state. My stomach is still precarious, despite my attempts to sleep all day long, and be nice to my body. But I'm moving forward with wonderful experiences and friends, and with the stubborn faith that tomorrow when I wake up I'll be recovered and feeling good enough to backtrack to Uvita with the Slovakians for a couple days of surfing with Mattias, and a last night of swimming with the light-up plankton before I lock up the container for good, leave the keys with Pam from the Flutterby, and along with Mattias take our swelling backpacks up to San Jose, where Mattias flies out a day after me.

It's been a delightful adventure, filled with plenty of new friends as well as time to think. I know it's not over, especially with my intentions to cross the country one and half more times before I leave, but I can feel it winding down. I feel the imminence of my return to the homeland, and in advance I can imagine how the plane will feel, with it's determined and unstoppable track. Not that I wouldn't love to return to Costa Rica in the future. Not that I'm not leaving so much that I'd still like to see, and so many friends I'd still like to hang out with, and so many others I'd still like to meet. But right now, or in a few days rather, it's time to be home. Wherever that is.

La Banda Familia

So, while I of course miss all my friends and family, I´ve found myself of late really missing Sonnie. I spent a lot of time with him in Moab this spring, and he´s waiting for me right now in Denver, sitting alone in a friend´s basement, just waiting. Awww, Sonnie.

Let me explain. Since I´ve lived in Pete´s house in Moab, he´s been very generous in sharing his things, including his guitars and his knowledge about guitars. However, it wasn´t until this spring that I realized, thanks to some additional info from my friend Chelsea, that if I learn to strum like 3 chords, I can play rudimentary versions of several songs, and even do what I proudly refer to as singing, though other people may call it something along the lines of very heart-felt and very out-of-tune talking. Huh. Anyway, as I was preparing to move out, I asked Pete if I could buy this extra guitar that he didn´t like and that I like so much I´d named. This, of course, is Sonnie. And out of some grand realization that about the absurdity of the myth of ownership--or, maybe more likely, out of his vast generosity--Pete said I could have Sonnie.

So that brings us to this point, with my Sonnie and his beautiful sunburst face locked in a basement alone, and me, an up-and-coming acoustic legend, stranded and guitarless in a foreign land, quickly forgetting the lyrics to all of the three and a half songs that once made up my set.

With the stage set, let me quickly get into my recent activities. Of course I´ve been surfing, though I´ve caught the ocean at high tide the last few times, and have found the waves much more choppy and aggressive. This means that it looks like I´m getting worse to anyone watching, and myself, but really I like to think I´m playing a harder game, and improving in more subtle ways, so subtle that maybe no one can even tell. Yes, that subtle. Also, I´ve been making several friends around the Flutterfy house, and around the area. Fernando, an older man who lives across the street from me is now my bike mechanic, due to his insistence on fixing my flat tire a few days ago (which required not only a screw driver and a new tube, but a battery-powered drill as well--very exciting business). And among other new friends, Julia from Canada stands out. She´s volunteering at a hostel above town, and we keep meeting up out of a mix of coincidence and our common interest in talking for endless amounts of time.

It was with Julie that I went to the Farmer´s Market last Saturday, a small gathering of vendors that seems really to be a gathering of area gringos who have moved here in the last 10 years. After consuming many baked goods, I stopped into the internet place next door, a large open room with two and half working computers, and played poke-the-keys for a while, before I found the girl working here to pay her. Which is when I noticed the guitar leaning against the wall (!) and shyly asked if I could play it.

Quite happily, I sat down with the strange guitar, and began working through my set in the backstage area of this empty room. Struggling through a newer addition, a voice from behind said, ¨House of the Rising Sun, yes.¨ A shorter man in his 50´s had entered the room and in two seconds he was sitting across from me with the guitar in his lap, speaking in eager second-language English about different songs I should learn. He played and sang several for me, and his daughter who´d taken my internet fee joined in with her beautiful voice on a few. Throughout the afternoon, Alexander, this excited Tico musician, showed me videos of his son playing jazz drums in California, taught me how to play La Bamba on the guitar, and asked me to come back and play anytime I wanted. And while I of course still miss my Sonnie, this is awesome!

So, I´m sitting in that same room now, a couple days later. Alexander tells me that tomorrow I should come back in the morning and he´ll have his son´s drumset here and we can all play (as I told him that, unlike the guitar, I actually do know how to play drums at some kind of tolerable level). So mañana, his son Alex will show me some latin rythyms, while his daughter Irma sings, and Alexander plays guitar. Yes, I´m joining a Tico family band. And no, it doesn´t bother me that I´m not a Tica. I know that Rolling Stone will make a big deal out of this fact in our first big interview, and in later interviews they´ll marvel that a drummer can be so skilled on guitar as well as the set.

Not to go on and bore you with my future plans, but I just wanted to let you in behind the scenes. You´ll all of course have back-stage access. But for now, I have to get over to the guitar and practice. (I´m not completely detached from reality--I do of course understand that I´ll have to practice for at least one more afternoon before the record companies call.)

And maybe, a few years from now, when we´re touring the states regularly, I´ll make sure we give special preference to certain previously ignored venues. Yosemite Valley, CA. Moab, UT. Springfield, MO. Oh, and don´t forget Denver... I gotta get back to Sonnie sometime.

The Continuing Adventures...

So, I read through part of that last post, and I feel the need to justify the typos. The keyboard is different here, and I´m payin´ by the minute!!! (That was directed more at myself than anyone else.)

The days alone are oddly long, I´m noticing, so when it feels like it´s been a week, it´s in fact been a half week. This is no problem, though, because I´ve done plenty with the time. I´ve done some more surfing, which has been good. For some reason I don´t go out more than once a day, and I don´t even go out every day. Odd how that´s working out, but I´m enjoying myself in other way. For instance, I´ve now spent a couple evening swimming in the ocean at night, among what I can only describe as firefly plankton, but what is called bioluminescents (sp?). These little otherwise invisible plankton light up like static electricity when agitated. So, when swimming in the ocean at night, one can see this warm little sparks lighting up in the churning waves, and even against your skin while moving in the water. There don´t seem to be a huge quantity of them here, but people tell me the ones here are big. The size of these little sparks can sometimes be about the size of a caper.

Also, in the past couple day, I went on my first real tour. Along with some of the folks staying at the Flutterby House, I went on a horseback riding tour. There were 5 of us and 2 guides, and for $25 we went on a ride through secondary jungle, then primary jungle, and back a nice waterfall, where we swam and explored before riding back. We saw monkeys, and large iguanas, and a poison dart frog, as well a the usual beauty of the jungle. A very nice trip, and afterwards I got to stick around and help take off saddles and wash the horses, while working on my spanish.

With the little bit of spanish I know, it´s always exciting when I put together a new sentence. So I was pretty happy when I explained to my non-English-speaking guide that, ¨Necessito tomer photographias para mi madre!¨ Who knows how good the grammar is on this one, but he seemed to understand. Anywho, that´s my way of saying, ¨Yeah, mum--I´m taking pictures!¨ I´d love to be sharing them, but I´m not succeeding in getting them from my camera onto the interweb. Hopefully, before I get back, but if not, I´ll get them on there in a few weeks all at once.

OK, back to swimming in the air. I´m pretty sure it´s time for me to eat fish somewhere, too... Mmmmm, pescado... Love yáll!

Down to the Ocean

Apparently, here´s how a fair in small-town Costa Rica goes: the signs mysteriously vanish and there is no fair. This, however, is OK, because then it will start to rain in torrents, and on your way home from the market, you´ll find a group of teenagers playing soccer in the street, and you´ll join them for a fun, wet, several hour game, before eventually trodding back to a small shack in the persistent rain that will continue for the next 36 hours. At least, that´s how a small-town Costa Rican fair goes in my experience.

Anywho, I spent a few more days in El Silencio, before Aaron and his daughter, Velvet, and I went south to the Uvita beach. Aaron´s brother-in-law has a container there with a door cut out of it, and the inside decked out like a house. Only the last guy who rented there stole everything out of it, so while it has running water and a nice bathroom and such, there is no longer a bed, or a fridge, or, well, a chair. Not a lot of clutter. Oh, and the power bill hasn´t been paid, so no light. But--BUT--it´s 5 minutes walk from the beach, and did I mention the place is mine as long as I want it?

It was a fun adventure getting there, as Aaron rode his bike there, while Velvet and I went on 2 buses that added up to 2 hours of travel, and then wandered Uvita on foot until we found the hostel where we were to meet Aaron, and then waited there for a couple hours while he finished his epic bike ride, which involved 3 flats, and him actually tying a knot in the tube to tie out the giant nail puncture that was the final flat. Good thing he´s a bike mechanic with a mind for problem-solving! Our bus ride wasn´t quite so epic, though a mite challenging. Velvet, at 5 years old and having lived in the country for over 6 months now, speaks the language quite well and with a Costa Rican accent. This should have been a great help, however, she was uncharacteristically quite shy about to talking to anyone for me, so I was left to my own devices, and with a kid in tow. Those who have seen my around kids know that, while I can certainly play with them, I occasionally have near-panic-attacks when in a position of responsibility with them. And those of you who know this will be proud to know that I had no such thing this time around, even when the bus driver was commenting to me how she was a beautiful girl with a beautiful mother. Apparently, I now no how to say,¨I´m not her mother,¨ thought not how to say, ¨Nor am I a kidnapper.¨ However, there were no problems.

Once in Uvita, we cleaned up the container, moved in, and made contact with the fun little hostel nearby, owned by a friend of the brother-in-law, and a good haven for English speakers, located between the container and the beach. The next few days, we ate fruit, surfed, napped, played on the beach, and lazed about, until yesterday it was time for Aaron and Velvet to bus back home to Silencio, leaving me with the keys to the container. Having made some friends at the nearby hostel, it´s like I´m totally alone, but there´s definitely a heightened sense of freedom--no time obligation to anyone at all--and this strange blurriness of time is only enhanced by the fact that I don´t have a watch.

I suspect this will make things interesting. For example, I planned to meet up with my new friend India at the hostel today to go watch the World Cup finals together. I figured the game was at noon, so I´d go over maybe around 10. Anywho, I woke up and went back to sleep several times, sleeping in as long as I could. Then got up, sat in the open door, and finished reading Stranger in a Strange Land (perhaps appropriate?). Then I ate a banana. Then I wrote for a while. Then I slowly gathered my things to go out. Then I swept some of the beach back out of the container. Then I rode the bike over to the hostel. Where I found the gates curiously closed. When I knocked and was let into the Flutterby House hostel (check it out at FlutterbyHouse.com) (and yeah, that was an imbedded ad) Pam, the owner, looked a little hazy. I said good morning and asked her the time. Yeah, it was 8am. So I´m a little off. By like, at least 2 hours. Huh.

Anywho, India caught a bus up to Dominical, where we found a crowded little place to have a beer and watch the game. Awesome game, might I say! And then the afternoon rain started, and I went out and swam in the ocean, of course just 100 yards away from the open-air bar. So gorgeous. Pouring fresh water on my shoulders and face, and warm churning salt water tugging back and forth at my waist. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

So that brings us up to now. I´m soaked, sitting at a rented computer, trying not to drip on the keyboard, while India plays on her own laptop, and we pass the time before the bus takes up back to Uvita. And what then? I´ve noticed that since I´ve come to Uvita, there are so many people to speak English with that I haven´t worked on Spanish at all. However, this is a wonderful place to learn to surf, which, as you know, is another major goal of this trip. I´ve been out a couple of times on the long-board, and I´m standing up on a lot of small waves, in what is called white water (meaning it´s the surf after the waves has broken--not the¨green water¨ half-pipes you see good surfers in). It seems like a lot of fun, but I´m feeling out just how much of it I want to do. I´m definitely not hooked--not yet, anyways. So I´m seeing a trade off. My time can either be spent in locations where I can really focus on Spanish, or in Uvita where I can surf. My thought are, I´ll stay here for at least another week, and play in the water, and see if I can´t work on Spanish here too. And then maybe after that, if I´ve had enough surf, I´ll wander inland to some smaller areas.

So that´s that for now. Got twenty minutes before the last bus to Uvita comes, and yeah, it´s still raining. About the rain, I´ve learned to say, ¨Que fresca!¨(How fresh, or How refreshing!) It really is beautiful. Oh, and the other phrase that I couldn´t help thinking now--a startlingly common Costa Rican phrase-- ¨Pura Vida!¨(pure life! or the good life!) Like I said, there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Pura vida!

Silencio

I'm sitting on the permawet ground outside the gate of the local school in Coope Silencio, with a layer of sweat (or settling air?) on my skin, my friend's laptop in my lap, and a plastic bag between me and the laptop. Yup, that's sweat trickling down the small of my bag. Have I mentioned it's humid? And kind of warm? Also, a little wet?

This tiny pueblo is snuggled against the rolling jungle only about 8 miles from the Pacific coast, but the lack of transportation makes it feel much farther inland. I've been staying with my friends, Aaron and Celeste, and their 5-year-old daughter, Velvet, in their little rented house in what is basically the suburbs of Coope Silencio. What this means is a see-through though stable shack divided into a few rooms. No washing machine, fridge, or phone, but they do have electricity and running water, and I'm feeling quite at home. I've claimed the front porch for the time being, with a foam pad and a sheet, and I go to bed hearing the neighbors in their homes, 10 to 20 feet in any direction, conversing in Spanish, and I wake up to roosters howling everywhere from what must be 3am to 7am, some of them wandering right up next to our porch perhaps just to mess with me.

When Aaron and I first got in to San Jose, on our midnight to 5am flight, we were tired and wired, and Aaron, remembering his Spanish amazingly well, navigated us into a taxi to the notorious Coca Cola bus station, apparently a very sketchy place where things just seem to disappear, expecially from tourists' pockets. Once there, we found a tiny diner, had a wonderful breakfast, watched some futbol, and took turns sitting with the packs while one of us would investigate the market. Next, we hopped on a bus to Quepos, the intermediate bus-stop on our way to Aaron's town. From there, we paid to ditch our things at the bus station, and took a 50 cent bus ride to the coast north of Manual Antonio National Park, where we played in the luke-warm ocean until my head was spinning from being pummeled by too many waves--a good intro to the power of the ocean, on account that I've never played too much in one as an adult.

When we finally got back to Quepos, we caught the last bus to the turn towards Aaron's town, and then hitched a ride from their into Silencio, where we stumbled onto his porch from waning light and a light shower, and into the squealing greetings of Velvet.

Since then, I haven't been doing a whole lot. Just hanging out here feels good though. And it's nice that "not doing much" can include studying a lot of Spanish, going hiking in the jungle to see waterfalls, and a lot of helados and playing in heavy rain. And, by the way, hiking into the jungle to see waterfalls, swimming in the rain in the waterfalls, and then watching those falls flash-flood into a swelling rust-colored beast is astounding. The thing is, you're always wet here, whether it's sunny or raining, or whether you're swimming or walking. A far cry from the desert, but comparatively it feels a lot like Missouri. Maybe an exaggeration of Missouri, but it feels a lot more like Missouri than Moab. And I'm liking it.

Aside from playing, I've been taking opportunities to walk to the store in town by myself, and to try and communicate. I'm getting along OK, I think, and I get absolutely delighted when I communicate more than I thought I could. It's lots of fun, and I can't believe I took until now to immerse myself in another language.

Next up on the list, I'll be heading over to the coast. I have plans to leave for there in a couple of days to stay at Celeste's brother's empty place there, and to learn to surf. Perhaps Aaron and maybe his family too will come with me for a few days, but then I intend to stay for a while. I feel like I have enough of a language base, or maybe just enough confidence now, to get by on my own for a bit, and I'm excited by the language develolpment I assume it will spur.

So that's the update. Nothing too exciting or shocking, but it's just gorgeous. Green, lush, thick. About how you might imagine a jungle. Minus the scary things, as far as I can tell... I dig it.

Well, it's a little after 1 here, and there's a fair at two, so I'm off to see what a very small town fair is all about. More later. Hasta luego!