L-Pack, Toto, and other Important Players.

So, I’ve been slacking. I sincerely apologize to you, my multitude of fans, as I know you’ve been waiting on bated breath for an update about my Costa Rican life. Let’s see, where did I leave off? Oh, two weeks ago. So the week was pretty normal and scheduled, like I said. Wednesday nights are half-off movie night in San Pedro so Katie and our three girlfriends and I headed to see “Valentine’s Day.” Seeing movies here is really fun because A) movies are really cheap (normally 4 dollars, 2 dollars on Wednesdays), and getting to do things that usually cost four times as much at home is exciting in and of itself, B) seeing a movie is a good activity here if you’ve simply become overwhelmed with the humid weather and want somewhere cold to sit for a couple of hours, and C) Watching them really helps me to learn Spanish, because the movies are in English with Spanish subtitles. I find that I learn or recollect a few new words upon each exit from the theater.


For the weekend, we chose to go to Tortuguero. Tortuguero is a small Island on the North East Side of Costa Rica, on the Caribbean coast. Tortuguero National Park is a rainforest, home to some really incredible wildlife, so the girls and I decided to have a rainforest safari adventure weekend! On Thursday night after our projects, we all went home to our separate houses to pack for the getaway. Katie and I tweak our packing habits often to try and reach maximum bus travel efficiency, so that night we made the executive decision to pack just my large hiking backpack for the two of us and to then share my smaller day backpack for on-the-bus items (books, snacks, wallets, cameras, napkins for the gross bus station bathrooms that don’t have toilet paper, etc.). This system allows for fewer bags altogether, less stuff in our hands while boarding and transferring buses, and generally less hassle. While packing our bag together in our room on Thursday night, Katie suggested that our cohabitation and simultaneous activities had led us to begin to seem like lesbian lovers, and that perhaps everyone around us (including the family we live with) may assume we are a couple. When I countered that this suggestion was insane, she responded, “Look at us! We’re packing our stuff into one big lesbian backpack!” And thus, my hiking backpack acquired the nickname ‘L-Pack.’ My small day backpack was soon thereafter dubbed ‘L-Pack Jr.’ L-Pack and L-Pack Jr. have now endured much with us, and they’ve become staples in our lives. Each of our friends are familiar with the names of our beloved satchels, and will forever address them accordingly. This past weekend, I had a moment of panic in my hostel with Katie and Kristy during which I screamed, “Where’s L-Pack Jr.?! Oh, its in the corner.”


So with L-Pack on one of our backs and L-Pack Jr. on the other, we piled into a taxi with Beth, Deanna and Kristy, and headed to the bus station on Friday morning for a 9 AM bus to Cariari- the first leg of our epic journey to the rainforest. Have I introduced these girls yet? Allow me to do so now. Deanna is from Rhode Island. She’s very small, yet eats like a 300-pound man. She enjoys dancing salsa, eating ice cream at all hours of the day, reading books about vampires on the bus until she gets too carsick and then complains about how unfair it is that she gets carsick, and a good laugh. Obviously there are other things she enjoys, but I can’t think of them right now. Beth is from Cape Cod. She has very white teeth and is always tan, which Katie and I see as a big unfair chiste, but we love her nonetheless. She enjoys planning really good weekend activities for all of us, chatting about all the gossip around Maximo (or settling for ‘hammock talk’ a new phrase we’ve coined which refers to when you simply come up with many various hypotheses for a situation or person when you truly have no idea whatsoever as to what’s going on), eating the small mini chocolate bars that they give you at the movie theaters here with your popcorn and soda, and laughing at Katie’s mean comments about me or my mean comments about Katie. Sometimes she enjoys going for a mean comment of her own. Kristy is from Salt Lake City, and yes, she’s a Morman. She has freckles and dark hair that always dries shiny and straight and perfect. The fact that Kristy is a Morman means that, indeed, she has to endure frequent questions about Mormanhood from us (mostly Katie and I), which she fields with grace and a smile on her face, even when these questions are really, REALLY dumb (i.e. ‘is it true there’s special Morman underwear?’ and ‘What exactly is meant by no sex…exactly?’) Kristy enjoys getting down on the dance floor. If there’s anyone out there who thinks that Mormans can’t seriously cut a rug, you have not yet encountered this girl in a Costa Rican bar. She also enjoys drinking Diet Cokes while the rest of us imbibe our Cervezas, eating Pringles on the long bus rides, and singing along with me when I belt out annoying songs from the 90’s during our walks around San Pedro.


The five of us get along swimmingly. On our Tortuguero weekend, we discovered the advantage of getting the entire back row of a bus. The back rows of buses here consist of about six seats all in a row, elevated, providing the seated with maximum legroom. This is key, as bus rides tend to take…well, forever. So we occupied the back row on the bus ride to Cariari, and proceeded to enjoy our little section to ourselves by taking a thousand dumb pictures of each other, eating various forms of Costa Rican junk food, telling each other about our home lives and our childhoods, and of course, interrogating Kristy about being a Morman. In Cariari, we switched to another bus that took us deep into what seemed like was already the rainforest. During a torrential downpour, we stared out the windows at miles of lush greenery, fields of banana trees, and donkeys standing out in empty fields. It became a little nerve-wracking when we realized that our bus wasn’t exactly driving anymore, but rather floating through huge puddles of muddy water, partially submerged. At one point, remembering that we had put it in storage beneath the bus, Katie said, “Oh no! Do you think L-Pack’s getting wet?” It turned out that L-Pack was fine. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and we arrived at the river where we were to pile onto a long banana-boat type vessel filled with a bunch of other people looking just as confused as we probably did. We then embarked on the hour long trip to Tortuguero.


It was amazing! I felt like I was really on some sort of African safari. We powered through narrow muddy water canals, greenery hanging above our heads. The boat went ridiculously fast, turning swiftly around corners, and L-Pack, resting on the top of a large pile of bags, was again in danger of becoming soaked should it fall off and into the water, but it survived. When we made it to the dock of our hotel, we had been driving for an hour, had made a transfer from our boat to another and then back onto the original boat so it could make it over a tree that had fallen across the river, and had stopped to drop a woman off at her house on the side of the river, where young children in jean shorts, along with their dogs, swam out of their front doors and into the murky water.


Our hotel was very very cool. It had a dock looking out over the water, and was run by a really amazing Canadian scientist man, who knew all about the wildlife at Tortuguero. Tortuguero, not being a popular destination for young partiers in Costa Rica, was populated that weekend mostly by locals and older couple tourists, many of whom became our old people friends at the hotel. We explored the Island (which takes about 20 minutes because its so small), then enjoyed some cocktails on the dock before going to dinner together at one of the oldest and most staple restaurants in Tortuguero, where the food was good, but the waiter was a bit of a creep. He pretty much wouldn’t let us leave without promising to dance and sing with him at the bar later. Then he called me “arrogante,” to which I obviously took offense, prompting him to try and explain to me that arrogant has a different, more positive connotation in Spanish than in English. This I didn’t buy. Finally he gave us our check, and we went to one of the two bars on Tortuguero, a strange cement-floored big open dock space, where the main attraction was a projector playing music videos from the late 90’s…or Shaggy music videos circa now. Does everyone remember Shaggy? Evidently he is HUGE in Costa Rica. Here I was thinking he had died after “Mr. Boombastic,” but apparently I was mistaken.


Have I mentioned Toto yet? Toto is my Tortugueron dog. He is a mangy T-Bone hound. He has completely matted gray hair, though I’m not sure if gray was its original color, and he seems to be sort of like the type of dog as Toto from The Wizard of Oz. He is in love with me. The thing about dogs in Costa Rican beach towns is that they just roam free all the time. The dogs that do have homes and owners roam free, and the homeless mangy dogs roam free, all the time. They are happy and dirty and loved by all. My guess is that Toto was one of those homeless ones. He fell instantly in love with me, greeting me at the dock upon my arrival and hardly leaving my side throughout the entire time we were in Tortuguero. If he did disappear for some time to take care of canine business, he would reappear not too much later, as if out of mid-air. So Toto found us outside the restaurant and walked beside me to the bar, where he proceeded to lay at my feet under the table, and follow me to the bar for every new Cerveza. When we finally returned to the hotel, Toto slept outside our door. It broke my heart, and if I could have, I would have washed him and shipped him home to my Aunt Suzanne, who would not have been able to say no to giving him a nice home.


At 5:30 AM, we awoke. That’s right, 5:30 AM. Apparently, this is the best time to see wildlife. So we piled onto a small motorboat with Daryl, the aforementioned Canadian genius hotel-owner, and a large mass of old people (AKA our best friends). The sun wasn’t even fully up yet, and I had only had a chance to get a couple of sips of coffee in before boarding the boat. Needless to say, I was tired. Katie and I have realized that each and every morning here in Costa Rica, one of us is always really tired and cranky and the other is quite lively and extremely capable of irritating the tired one with her upbeat demeanor. On the morning of the boat tour, Katie was lively. So, as she sat behind my large dredlocked mane looking out over the water, something else caught her eye: a sort of bright green goo on the side of the boat. Being the mature adult that she is, she decided it would be funny, in light of my mood, to grab the goo and put it in my hair. So she went for it. And as she did she realized it was not, in fact, green goo, but rather a very rare and endangered Costa Rican tree frog, bright green with red markings, and incidentally the animal that is on the front of most Costa Rican travel books. She screamed and Daryl turned to see the creature, shouting, “Oh my goodness, this is amazing! What a great way to start the tour. Everyone, gather!” So Katie sat there stunned, and most likely relieved that she hadn’t smooshed an important endangered species onto my skull during a wildlife tour. The tour was amazing. We saw three different types of monkeys, a sloth, a few very pretty birds, and a dangerous snake. I looooved seeing monkeys in their natural habitat. It was seriously an amazing experience to be able to see a monkey sitting on a tree not ten feet away from us, without being surrounded by a bunch of obnoxious, loud teenagers on a high school field trip to the Bronx Zoo. It down poured a couple of times throughout the tour, so we all got the awesome opportunity to don special Casa Marabella Hotel rain ponchos. They were sweet.


Upon returning to the hotel, we promptly fell asleep. Seeing as Katie and I have known each other since the age of eleven, when a sleeping situation presents itself wherein two people in the group must share a bed, we are always the default choice; yet another reason Katie believes we may be misconstrued as a lesbian couple. So Katie and I sprawled on our lover’s bed, and the other three girls on their single beds, and we napped until the afternoon. At around 1, we donned high rubber boots and walked our way to the entrance of the National Park so we could try and see some more wildlife all on our own. Walking through the rainforest was incredible. I have never seen so much green in my life. The trees were gigantic, reminding me of the Banyan trees I saw in the Bahamas. I was so in awe of the plants around me that I didn’t even care if I saw any more animals, but then we stumbled across a bunch of spider monkeys hanging out in the trees above us. Moms and their babies were lounging, eating and running around on the branches. One of them was carrying her baby on her back!


At some point along the walk, Deanna got seriously attacked by a pack of wild mosquitoes. I’d say twenty to thirty mosquitoes were swarming all around her head and body. We realized then that she was the only person who had decided to make herself smell like a girl the night before by putting on perfume, and that she’d yet to shower. The bugs were definitely digging her scent. When the attacks became unbearable, she ran to the Caribbean ocean about ten yards away while I screamed, “Just jump in! Jump in with all your clothes on!” She flung her gigantic rubber boots and all her belongings into the sand and hurled herself into the really tumultuous stormy ocean. I decided to do the same, and then the others followed suit. So five fully clothed girls swam in the ocean during a rainstorm and then trudged back to the village, soaking wet, barefoot and carrying large rubber boots.


Dinner that night was fantastic, complete with TONS of food (sometimes we just forget to eat here until we are absolutely starving), a few Rum and Cokes (the official cocktail of Costa Rica—they even come pre-prepared in cans here!), and of course, Toto at my feet. We spent the rest of the evening playing cards on the porch of our hotel and looking at the pictures of the wildlife tour that the old couples had already uploaded onto their computer. I spent much of the evening telling Deanna that she had most likely contracted malaria from one or more of the evil mosquitoes and that whatever she was experiencing at the time was probably a symptom of malaria. “I keep getting such shitty cards!” she’d yell. “I’ve heard that’s an early sign of malaria,” I’d counter. The jury is still out on whether or not she has it, as with further research we found out that it can be about seven weeks before the onset of symptoms. I’ll keep you posted.


The next day it was another loooong trip home, and we stepped off the bus in San Jose into one of the hottest afternoons I’ve experienced here yet. So naturally we trudged our sweaty, tired L-Packed bodies to the movie theater and enjoyed a couple of blissful air-conditioned hours watching a movie. This time it was “The Hurt Locker,” a movie I’ve already seen but thoroughly enjoyed seeing again, especially with the Spanish subtitles, because they were so inaccurate or incomplete that it was comical. A movie like “The Hurt Locker,” which consists almost entirely of profanities and strange military slang is very difficult to subtitle in Spanish.

All in all, a fabulous girl’s weekend. I’m still about a week behind, but I will catch you up, don’t fret. Love from the land of sunshine and stray dogs,

X-Tine.