Today was our last day here. We were supposed to go for a final bit of surfing so went into town early for the usual Saturday brunch at Cafe Rico. It was even more delicious than usual, and I didn’t even mind the slim, quick lizards that would materialise on the branches around us, look at us carefully, turning their little diamond-shaped heads in quick flickers to eye us on either side of the table, and quite clearly weighing their options to leap onto its surface. After coffee we had about 20 minutes before our instructor was to collect us and a growing queue so we went for a quick walk around the town’s playing field and a little way along the steps going up the hill behind the field. A few flights up a pair of pointed ears appeared, very still, and as we went higher it turned out to be a very large and very vicious-looking dog, more a jackal, crouching in wait like Anubis.
It was nearly time to be collected from the cafe so we returned and lingered around the second-hand book tables. These are the typical kind one sees under bridges in London, at book stalls and laid out in library sales: endless rows of fading paperback novels with the odd hardcover or slightly startling work of non-fiction. Here I had what I must say was a stroke of genius, and I invented a new game which is, I think, my great contribution to human civilisation and perhaps the best use that has ever been made of decaying paperbacks. The game was to search through the rows of books and select and arrange as many as possible so that the titles read out a story.
This occupied us for a good half hour or so, and was very fun. My contribution was:
- Do not become alarmed – Maile Meloy
- Shady characters – Keith Houston
- Caught stealing – Charlie Huston
- Seeing red – Sandra Brown
- Shoot don’t shoot – JA Jance
- The devil to pay – Stephanie James
- Over the wall – John H Ritter
- Overhead in a balloon – Mavis Gallant
- The road home – Rose Tremain
- Death on a broomstick – GM Wilson
Then we realised that our instructor was quite late, more than half an hour in fact, so we gave up on him and strolled to the best cafe in town for coffee. Then a few errands: enough food for dinner and breakfast, and maybe a snack on the road, a gift for the person we’re staying with in the capital, San Jose, and a last-minute dash by me to buy a curious little wooden spatula. It is the sort that, I told the GF, will become indespensible, once it finds its purpose.
We arrived at the shack and rented a pair of bicycles to go off om the Playa Negra. The plan was to do a bit of exploring in the neighbourhood and then cycle along the sea road as far as we could go and then go on foot to where we were told a river met the sea and it was not possible to go further on food. The neighbourhood exploration was pleasant, lots of beautiful jungle bits and others, mostly former pastures, that were clearly marked off as residental plots. Some of the roads had those green US style street signs, all very suburban in tenor: Ginger Lane, Hibiscus WAy, Malinche Court, etc. I didn’t care for it, and I could imagine it becoming very suburban indeed, but it was certainly beautiful, especially the bits where grass had grown over the gravel so tehre was green in every direction except the blue sky above.
On the sea road, the track became progressively wilder, with empty beach and ever higher waves on one side, and on the other jungle fringing what I suspect were banana and pineapple plantations. Once we saw, overhead, the yellow plane we’d seen a couple of weeks ogo, spraying pesticide. The track started getting long patches that were too sandy to cycle over, and other bits with quite large roots, so eventually dismounted and continued on foot. The beack was entirely empty of people, but full of birds: pelicans and all sorts of waterfowl, and rings of vultures. There were also a couple of dead rays on the shore, and at one point we saw the vultures eating it very photogenically, delicately pulling out long intestinal tubes, while others waited politely for their turn.
At last we got to the river, which came out of thick jungle and was fringed with hundreds of birds. It truly felt untouched, unspoiled, quite edenic. We lingered for a while, and suddenly two people, a man and a woman, emerged from the jungle on the other side of the river. The man held a large bag and seemed to start to cross the river, but the water soon became shoulder high for him. Then a boat quietly puttered towards them and the GF nudged me to stop watching, in the unlikely event this was something we were not meant to see. (Later, on the way back, it became clear that they were a group of people camping here, as they’d all set up a tent toether and were swimming in the river in proper swimsuits and clearly here to enjoy a weekend).
We tried fording the river at its mouth and it turnd out to be quite easy: about halfway up my thigh but no more, and the gush of clear water and the waves balanced each other out at that point so it was easy to cross. We walked on another fifteen minutes, passing onto a little group of fishermen, and of course hundreds of birds. Then we turned back, found our cycles and at about the point the track became very wild indeed, stopped for a swim. There were strong waves here, and it was great fun diving through them and, sometimes, successfully body surfing them and feeling their force as they threw one onto the shore.
Another cycle ride to Banana Azul and another swim (my most successful body surf yet) and now we are back. We’ve had dinner, I’ve dealt with some work, and our time in Puerto Viejo is finished. With it, it feels like our travels are finished as well, though Canada is new at least to the GF, we are not really going there because we wanted to. Though I will like to be back in Montreal, I think, it’s my favourite North American city.