I was attacked by a caterpillar today. The Gentleman Friend was attacked before me, and more badly. We were supposed to meet on Playa Negra and to stroll up north towards the houses and scope out the area. I waited for about 15 minutes, watching some boys play football in the wet sand where the sea spread across black sand then, thinking he had a meeting perhaps and was unable to reach me whilst I was in my class, started walking towards the shack. He arrived, running, and it turned out that the hairy black caterpillar not only like to hide from the sun in fabric (such as the t-shirt hanging on the line), but that brushing against them (say when you put on the t-shirt) is immensely painful. He had not one but two brushes with the caterpillar and was clearly in some pain.
We walked north along the beach where though the sand was no long fine black sand, the curve of the bay and the roaring of the waves made it immensely pretty. It became weirdly suburban for a while with large well-kept houses and even a street sign saying Puerto Viejo heights. Eventually, however, the jungle dominated again. We were looking for a house that was on the market here, to get a sense of what it might be like. As we crossed a bridge, a young woman called out to ask if we needed help. She was thin, fragile, blond and very much of the type that flourish in Puerto Viejo, a hippy of sorts, and very friendly and helpful. She had lived here for a year now, she said, and loved it and could only recommend it. You do have to be careful, she said, and pointed towards a red open sore on her cheek: “Leishmaniasis,” she said. Then she pointed to a large plaster, about four centimetres square, on her foot. ‘A different insect,’ she said. She continued to describe how wonderful it was. The wildlife was wonderful, she said; you could see eyes in the dark all around you at night, and when it rained you had to be careful of your dog because the rivers have caimans in them. Not this river, she assured us. When it rains the wildlife is incredible. The river floods and you can’t tell the difference between its brown water and the mud on the land, because there is too much water for the soil to absorb, so you have tortoises everywhere. Also you can’t leave the house for more than 2 days because ‘you know, these Ticos,’ she said in an undertone. But it was wonderful and the people were wonderful and the lifestyle was wonderful and she made her own toothpaste.
This left me rather double-minded about Puerto Viejo – not so much the mud and the insects and the caimans, as she seemed very pleasant but also the sort of Western hippy who is happy to live in squalor, but the natural toothpaste (and the very large number of houses with signs saying ‘namaste’, offering yoga classes and using a weird Devanagri style script for house names) made me blench. I loathed Ubud and this does feel like a proto-Ubud, complete with a wealthy expat community in a weird symbiotic relationship with the far poorer locals.
The GF stayed to swim on the beach and I walked back and decided to shake out the other clothes hanging outside to rid them of caterpillars. As I did so, I brushed against what felt like hard bristles, looked down and realised that there was a caterpillar on my t-shirt. I now knew not to flick it off with my fingers, so found a stick to brush it away, and then inspected my dark clothing in the dark in case there were more black creatures there. My wrist was very painful for a while, and there is still an itchy and occasionally stinging welt there.
Today was not a good advertisement for the beach bum life. Undoubtedly, a corrective was needed after the weekend.