A TAXI: to the border, an eventless crossing, and here we are. Costa Rica! Now a series of buses – to Liberia, to Cañas, to Tilarán, where there are no more buses and a taxi driver hauls us the rest of the way to La Fortuna, cheerfully singing the advertising jingle for Imperial Beer (“La cerveza / de Costa Rica / [eagle whistle!]”). Lake Arenal looks misty; the sky is deeply overcast and here, in the steamy central American jungle, it’s actually quite cold.
We have come to La Fortuna on our desperately unsuccessful quest to see real, red-hot magma on this trip. So far, no less than seven volcanoes have failed us, but we’re informed that Volcan Arenal is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupting almost daily. Outside the cab, a series of expensive hot spring resorts glide by, all subtle lighting and waterfalls gurgling over rocks. We peer at Arenal through the gloom but all is silent and we descend on the town, winding up in a hostel where we cook dinner, drink a beer, and are assaulted by the full-force of an incredibly loud British lout named Jimmy who shouts at us like a living, breathing Twitter post – “Aw shit yeah man there’s some FAHKING good beers comin’ out of the States y’know, fahking microbreweries and all that shite, but y’know, any fahkin’ PISS is good enough for me MATE HAHAHAHAHAHA!”.
Next day is overcast again, drizzling lightly, cold and miserable. This is not what we expected from Costa Rica. We amble about the hostel with confused looks on our faces. We had wanted to visit the volcano but it’s submerged under a thick wet blanket of cloud. Feeling the bite of the cold, we decide to hit the hot springs, our perennial niggardliness causing us to eschew the usual comfort and relaxation of such affairs to trudge down a muddy slope and through an open stormwater tunnel to a secret, free ‘hot spring’, which would actually be better described as ‘the runoff water from the more expensive hot spring resorts upstream that has been soaking the wrinkles, callouses and open sores of hundreds of elderly gringos for several hours’. We lie and chat and afterward find an oddly shaped rapid that, amazingly, sends one sliding at high speed down the moss-slickened floor of the concrete tunnel.
After a time the rain starts to fall in great thick globs that break and splatter across the face. Our gear gets saturated; we make our way up to the road. We are turned down for a beer at the expensive resort next door (“Our bar is for people who are… dry,” sniffs the man at reception, eyeing our dripping clothes as pale, chubby seniors shuffle past in dressing gowns), and stand in the rain until one of the resort’s drivers takes pity on us and carries us back to town.
Another day of buses, of overcast skies. La Fortuna to Ciudad Quebrada. Quebrada to San José. San José to Limón. Limón to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca as darkness falls. The whole day full of vibrant, breathing jungle crushed under the weight of the soggy grey sky.
In Puerto Viejo we have a slow night of chatting with dull Norwegians, of walking listlessly through the rain, of chasing a large crab off the road, pincers waving in fury, of going to sleep in our tents on the wooden floorboards of the hostel.
Next day the rain still pours. We sit in the mosaic-covered open area of the hostel and do a lot of very little. The waves crash loudly, less than fifty metres away, but we never even set foot in the sand.
Only two things come to mind for me about Costa Rica: rain and jungle. But mostly rain. We’d always planned to push through Costa Rica quickly, scared off by dozens of travelers bemoaning the high prices and Americanized culture. But we found quite a breathtaking country – an easy country, certainly, but none the worse for it – and one that was nowhere near as expensive as, say, Mexico or Cuba. But it rained. Across the entire country we saw not a glimpse of blue sky, and so things went to plan: we were in and out of Costa Rica in four days, and left feeling no more connected to the country than when we’d entered.
In the humid rainless heat of the next day the mediocrity of the Costa Rica / Panama border post is doubly depressing and frustrating, a long rail bridge poorly covered in uneven wooden planks leading to a scene we’ve played out half a dozen times already. Here is the fat man with a drawer full of loose cash, demanding a tax “for the city”, wiping his sweating face with a stained handkerchief. Here is the fat tout speaking in an American accent, wearing a Scarface t-shirt and trying to talk us into taking one of his minivans to Bocas. Here are the small children in rags trying to carry our luggage, open doors for us, give us polite directions, anything that may end with a couple of coins being pressed into their palm. We are tired of this. We are done with this.
In Bocas Town on Isla Colon it pours all afternoon, all through dinner, all through the night, through the next day. We drink on a covered pier with starfish under our feet; we lie on our beds staring at the ceiling; we get cabin fever; we bicker; we stand outside with a cigarette and gaze blankly at the dreary weather. The hostel plays a constantly regurgitated reggaeton soundtrack featuring such thoughtful lyrics as “Fuck poonani! / I want fuck poonani-nani!” repeated ad nauseum.
On the third day, when the rain finally ceases and the weather settles back into a muggy grey, we hire a tiny white boat to the island of Bastimentos that putters unsurely over the clear waters. Behind the island, great black clouds swell dramatically. Waves break on reefs off the coast. Five minutes after finding a bed the rain falls again in great sheets, pausing only intermittently throughout the rest of the day. We play cards, make up some pasta, share a couple of bottles of wine, pray for sunshine and head to bed.
Our prayers receive a mumbled half-answer: we get a dry morning and take advantage of it by heading to the beach. The track is long and muddy, the kind of thick brown mud that, just by looking at it, doesn’t reveal whether it’s going to support your foot or swallow it whole. A great blue crab scuttles into the jungle as we approach. The water at the beach is roiling and frothing. It pulls desperately in all directions like a bunch of cats in a bag. It’s difficult swimming but, starved of sunshine for a week, we proceed to force-feed ourselves. Out at sea, one of the local surfers paddles in grinning – he’s snapped his board clean in half.
We walk back in the sort of heat we’d expected but not yet experienced in Panama, a humidity that reaches for the neck and strangles, that doesn’t even allow you to dry from a cold shower before you are sweating once more. Along the path shy boys in school uniforms smile cautiously from beneath their umbrellas. A dog with great fat tumors on her legs shuffles uncomfortably to the side of the road. A man holding a bottle of rum on his balcony shouts to me over his blaring reggae – “Hey there white man! Gimme some love! Gimme some love white man!”
Over lunch we realize the extent of our sunburn, and head back to the hostel to pass out, as the rain starts to pour again.
A small boat, a big boat, and a van relay us south over winding humid jungle roads. Outside David traffic stops dead in its tracks. Ambulances drive by, police, military. Cars are turning back, frustrated. Beside our car is a long line of leafcutter ants, each triumphantly holding aloft its postage stamp-sized load. Above them, a large sign decries the 131 Panamanian road fatalities in the last ninety-nine days. Nobody knows why we are all stopped; theories abound. A traffic cop idly swings his shotgun while talking on the phone. “Water,” announces the older British guy on the bus triumphantly after speaking in halting Spanish to a passing cop. “I couldn’t understand much, but I know it has to do with water. I heard him say ‘agua’.”
“Though he might have been saying ‘Nicaragua’,” he admits after a thoughtful pause.
The skyline of Panama City looms large and bright after the long bus ride; it’s been a long time since we were in a modern city and I feel a slight comfort, a small sense of retreating to the familiar. That feeling dissipates when we step onto a forty-year old city bus driven in frenzied fits and starts by a boy no older than fourteen. Like most things in Panama City, the veneer of modernity crumbles under the lightest touch.
In the light of a new day we walk to the new part of town along the seawall, pressed up against a ten-lane highway into the city. The smell of the fish markets as we approach is intense. Offshore, pelicans plunge into the water for fish. A crane, helping to build some sort of offshore platform, dangles a man in a small cage, trying to put cement blocks in the right place. The sea of boats looks old and slightly decrepit, an odd juxtaposition against the brilliant skyline of huge glass towers.
But that, too, is deceiving. From a distance these skyscrapers are impressive, but up close it becomes clear that they are mere shells, all either under construction or abandoned before completion. The much-hyped and very gaudy Revolution Tower, a Dubai-style spiral monstrosity, lies half-finished after more than a decade. Many buildings have cranes on top, temporary construction lifts going up and down slowly.
Back in the old part of town, Kuna women in bright orange and pink shawls sell cloth masks to middle aged tourists, wandering about in herds while a diminutive guide shouts “And if you look straight in front of you, you can see the skyline of Panama City” and they all murmur appreciatively as if it were a small detail they might otherwise have missed.
An old toothless man in a yellow roadworker vest pulls us up on a street corner further into town and says in blurry Spanish – “You shouldn’t go any further this way. It’s very dangerous. Many thieves who will take your things. Please, go up this way. Don’t go any further down this street.”
We thank him and take the side street, finding ourselves at a department store stuffed with acres of cheap, shitty clothes. We buy replacements for everything we have that is broken or barely holding together. The tag on my new jacket says: “This garment may stain other garments with which it comes into contact. Repeated washing may improve this.”
In the afternoon we all make our mandatory visit to the Panama Canal. In the interminable drizzle a huge cargo ship is lumbering through the locks, assisted by four small locomotives attached to rails on the side of the canal. “It’s like a leetle rolla-coaster,” explains the heavily-accented guide across the loudspeakers. The ship has less than twenty inches leeway on either side. Going to the Panama Canal sounds interesting – and don’t get me wrong, it is – but it also is basically just watching cargo ships moving very slowly while a guide reads scripted facts over a loudspeaker.
We watch a couple of ships go past, the gates of the lock groaning as they open and close, the guide’s facts and trivia crackling across the speaker system.
“It’s like a leetle rolla-coaster,” he says again. There are, apparently, not enough interesting facts and trivia about the Panama Canal to last thirty minutes.
Back at our hostel’s courtyard bar, the stage is being stacked with amps. A young Panamanian guy in muscle shirt, cargo shorts and sunglasses approaches us, speaking English.
“Hey guys, I’m having a party tonight, big party, fuckin’ rad man, you should come down. We’re having a band playing, like, prog rock, they’re just gonna jam all night long man, they’ve got two drums -”
“Sounds awesome,” I say in a dead voice.
“Dude! Right? And they’re gonna play heaps of hip-hop and shit -”
“Wow. Sounds radical,” says Adam, in the same voice.
Eventually he leaves, but his douchebag spiel has already worked its magic – sleep is overcoming me, and I head to bed. We have to be up at 4am anyway, for our four-wheel drive to the coast, and the exciting, terrifying journey onward to Colombia. It’s our last night on the mainland – an ideal time to think back on our winding odyssey through the troubled and beautiful republics of central America, to remember steaming hot waterfalls, topless divers, coconut-tossing devotees of Jah, gangsters on beach vacation, sexually predatory surf instructors, slimy sewers doubling as hot spring waterslides, caged toucans, drunken Vikings, cheap plywood boards doing fifty kilometres an hour down a volcano, and all that sun, all that water, all that jungle, all that sun, all that sun.
But it’s too late; we’re rocked quickly into sleep by the twin-drum attack of jammy hip-hop-prog-rock screaming at us from the bar on the other side of our wall.
-
Trip Details: We crossed from Nicaragua to Costa Rica at Peñas Blancas. We had heard of people being asked for proof of onward travel but we were not. Companies at the border sell bus tickets back to Managua for (from memory) around US$20. In La Fortuna we stayed at Gringo Pete’s for $5 per person. Nice place, lovely owner, though it has some strict rules about noise curfews. Ask at the hostel for the location of the secret hot spring. In Puerto Viejo de la Talamanca we stayed at the massive Rocking J’s, in tents for $5. Despite its size, it had a good atmosphere. We crossed into Panama at Sixaola – we were asked to pay $2 ‘city tax’ and had to provide proof of onward travel (a bus ticket back to San Jose, costing $7). I no longer have the details for accommodation in Bocas, but it wasn’t cheap – there’s little under $15, and nothing under $10. Standards are reasonably high, though. On Bastamentos there is a Thai restaurant called Thai Time, which we highly recommend despite the long hot climb needed to reach it. In Panama City we went with the throbbing Luna’s Castle, which is big and crazy and loud, with a great bar. It was $13 for a dorm.
Music on this clip comes courtesy of Las Robertas, with “History is Done”, Alfredo Escudero y Su Salsa Montañera, with “La Escoba”, and Los Mozambiques’ “Llegamos Ya” to finish things off. Squeezed in the middle is the already much-used “Mrs Love” by Disco Ruido.
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Within the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dynamics of the Planet Kapow team, Lachlan considers himself the Donatello - nerdy, condescending, vaguely wimpy and widely disliked by children. He also looks good in purple.
Lachlan can be contacted at lachieprior@gmail.com 