Fast boat to Nicaragua: Just us, the crew, and a dead man

Everything goes by boat on the Rio Frio: sheep, travelers, and (read on) a coffin; photo by David W. Smith

After we’ve waiting 3 or 4 hours at the Los Chiles muelle (dock) for the boat the Nicaragua, not one but two boats arrive: the bote publico, and the lancha from Esquina del Lago lodge. A big group from the U.S. is being shuttled from the lodge to Los Chiles after a few days of tarpon fishing on the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua, and we’re catching a ride back to the lodge.

But first, the crew helps the returning clients through Costa Rica immigration (easy as pan dulce), gets something to eat, and has a good long smoke or two.

Finally, the captain saunters back to the boat.

“Hay un problemita,” he says. There’s a little problem.

How little? I wonder.

“Hay un difunto,” he says in a low voice. “There’s a deceased person.”

So that was a coffin in the back of the pickup that puttered by while we were waiting for the rain to stop. And it seems the difunto needs to go where we’re going. In our boat.

No hay problema, I say. “El es muerto. Somos vivos.” There’s no problem. He’s dead. We’re alive.

The captain cracks a smile.

“Pero espero que no tenemos que hablar con el,” I add. I just hope we don’t have to talk to him.

“Porque es dificil converser con los difuntos,” says David. It’s not so easy to converse with the dead.

“Son muy serios,” the captain agrees. They’re so serious.

Loading a coffin onto the fast boat to Nicaragua; photo by David W. Smith

It’s not quite as funny when they start to load the coffin into the boat. It takes up a whole row—six molded plastic seats and the aisle—at the back of the long and narrow lancha.  A young man accompanies the difunto, and his face shows fresh pain.

We later learn that the dead man, the young man’s uncle, was a Nicaraguan who crossed the border to work in Costa Rica, in Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui. He died of a puneleado—a knife wound—he’d suffered in a fight. The young man came down to Costa Rica to claim his uncle’s body, and to bring him home.

We start up the Rio Frio at dusk. Swallows swoop close to the water, picking off mosqitoes. A flock of parrots flies overhead. Herons and egrets stands sentinel along the river. Howler monkeys add their deep-throated call from the branches of dense trees.

Cormarants along the Rio Frio; photo by David W. Smith

David and I stand at the front of the boat, enjoying the cool wind as if dries our sweaty clothes. As we pass under a leafless tree full of black cormorants, it feels as if we’re part of a funeral procession.

The lights of San Carlos, Nicaragua, at the confluence of the Rio Frio, the Rio San Juan, and Lake Nicaragua; photo by David W. Smith

In less than an hour we see the lights of San Carlos across the water. We’ve arrived at the confluence of the Rio Frio, the Rio San Juan, and Lake Nicaragua (also known as Lake Colcibolco). The boat noses up to a rickety wooden building right on the water: immigration. We step out onto the wooden walkway and approach the lighted window.

Immigration office in San Carlos, Nicaragua

There’s no line to enter Nicaragua here, and the only other action is a policewoman, in heavy eyeliner and dangling earrings, asking the nephew of the dead man for his paperwork. No matter where you die, it seems, there’s paperwork before you can leave this world behind. We heard that most boat captains would have charged $150 to transport the body from Los Chiles to San Carlos, but since the Esquina del Lago boat was already making the trip, they charged only for gas.

As we present our passports, fill out forms in the dim light (where are my glasses?), and pay our $7 a piece entry fee, a tall pale man appears, floating over the heads of the smaller, darker Nicaraguans. It’s Phillipe Tisseaux, expat Frenchman, serial relocator (he’s lived in France, St. Martin and Costa Rica, to name a few places), and owner of the Esquina del Lago Lodge, where we’ll be based for a few days.

There’s silver stubble on his cheeks and his blue eyes are kind. “Do you understand what happened?” he says in English softened with French. He’s talking about our fellow passenger, el difunto.

Yes, yes, we assure him. We understand. People die. They need to be brought home. It was the least we could do, to share a ride with someone who needed it a lot more than we did.

Did you notice the name of the boat in the photo? The Amen.

Waiting for the boat to Nicaragua

The muelle (dock) at Los Chiles, Costa Rica

After a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with all the gringo trimming (thanks to Christine at Desafio Adventure), we left  La Fortuna early for a half-day wildlife tour of Cano Negro in northern Costa Rica, in part to get a ride up to Los Chiles.

From Los Chiles the plan is take a boat up the Rio Frio into Nicaragua, where we’ll spend a week or so exploring the Rio San Juan (the watery border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua), an old Spanish fort called El Castillo, and the Solentiname Islands, where in the 1980s Sandinista poet-priest Ernesto Cardinal taught locals his own fiery brand of liberation theology and also encouraged them to paint pictures of their surroundings. They’re still painting, and I’ve also heard that they are some of the staunchest Sandinista supporters in the country.

But good things come, apparently, only to those who wait.

The afternoon started off deceptively easy. Immigration in Los Chiles is the fastest I’ve ever left a country. We filled out a short form (the clerk loaned us his pen), got our passports stamped (there was no line), and we were on our way…to the town dock, where we would wait, and wait, then wait some more.

It was around 1 pm, and there was a chance that a boat would come for us at 2. Or so Phillipe, the French expat owner of Esquina del Lago lodge in Nicaragua, had emailed me. But he’d also outlined other options involving the bote publico (the pubic boat) from Los Chiles, Costa Rica, to San Carlos, Nicaragua. This boat, which costs $10, leaves at 10:30 am, 1:30 pm, 2:30 pm, and 3:30 pm. Unless it doesn’t. Maybe there aren’t enough people to make it worth their while, or the captain needs to run some errands in town.  And even if the boat does go, as the 3:30 boat that day ended up running, it probably won’t leave until 4 pm or so. Unless, of course, it leaves early.

Waiting at Los Chiles for the boat to San Carlos, Nicaragua

Meanwhile, we wait. A group of boat captains lounges at one end of the cement pier. One half-heartedly tries to get us to take his boat to Nicaragua instead of waiting for the public ferry. Someone asks David where he got his sunglasses. Ebay, David answers.  At the other end of the pier teenagers with drooping pants act out some sort of antic scenario that is supposed to distract us from noticing that they’re eyeing our bags. When they slouch by and disappear upriver we’re relieved but soon miss having them to look at. A tarpon jumps out of the green-brown river and slaps back down, making a surprisingly loud noise. The locals barely look up, but one informs us, “Sabalo” (Tarpon).

Thirty minutes later, an aguacero (downpour) relieves the boredom for a few minutes. Even under a corrugated tin shelter, it feels as if we’re in the eye of storm. It’s coming down so hard it’s bouncing off the cement and onto our legs, and then a sudden wind blows the sheets of rain horizontal.  Water floods the slab that is the pier, and we have to move all out bags onto a narrow metal bench right on the water.  The corroded pole that serves as a backrest barely keeps the bags from toppling into the river.

A young man with a sweet face smiles and shrugs, as if to say, “Wadya gonna do?”

A man peddles by slowly, one hand on the bike’s handlebar, the other holding an umbrella.

Ten minutes later, an old pickup truck with wood plank sides drives by with an oblong  box in the back. It’s swaddled in plastic tarps so it’s hard to tell what it is, but I imagine it to be a casket.

Two o’clock, when the boat from lodge was supposed to come, is long past. It’s looking like we’ll take the 3:30 bote public.  But it’s nearing that time and there’s no sign of anyone boarding.

A diversion drives up—another plank-sided pickup with a tarp roof, this one full of sheep. Two muddy teenage boys hoist themselves out of the back, where they’d been riding with the livestock, and make a run for the river, yelling and laughing. They dive in fully clothed (the one with rubber boots pulls them off first), no doubt to rinse off the sheep dung and mud.

Sheep about to head upriver on the Rio Frio

The driver gets out, stretches, calls mocking greetings to some of the boat captains, then motions for a kid captaining a lancha, a narrow wooden boat with ten or so rows of plastic seats in its hull, to take all the seats out. He does, and the man starts loading sheep, one by one, into the boat. They’re worth $150 each, we later learn, and they’re destined for a ranch upriver. The man knows just how hold the sheep so they don’t squirm out of his grasp or kick, but one unruly one gets in a pretty good kick.
When the boat takes off, he yells out, “Bon voyage, hijueputa!”

Have a good trip, you son of a bitch!

Photos (except of David) by David Webster Smith

‘Wireless internet throughout the facility’ Hahahahahaha

Flor, Sandy and Roger's dog, can't find reliable internet either.

Blogging from the road is pretty challenging when you can’t find internet. The last three places we’ve stayed have promised wireless internet, which in practice meant that if you were at a certain place at a certain time (the stairway of one place, the bar of another) you MIGHT get a weak signal. And we’re in Arenal, a fairly developed area, tourist-wise.

Today we head up to Nicaragua, through Los Chiles, over water to San Carlos, and then to Isla Solentiname, in the enormous Lake Nicaragua. We might be completely internet free for over a week.

Of treehouses, sloths, and the mighty mot-mot

Treehouses Hotel in Costa Rica; photo by David Webster Smith

“There’s still enough light to walk down to the waterfall, says Mark, who, with his wife Lucy, manages the Treehouses Hotel in Costa Rica’s evergreen-and-wet Arenal area.

We’d arrived at 4 in the afternoon on a misty afternoon, and the sun sets here promptly at 6pm. “Look for the arrow made of sticks. It points to the tree where we saw a sloth yesterday.”

Mark, on sabbatical from his job as copy editor at the Honolulu Advertiser, is checking us in. His shorts reveal a tattoo on his calf: Dennis the Menace wielding a tennis racquet. “I played tennis in college,”” he explains. His wife Lucy, who quit her social worker job in Hawaii to make the move to Costa Rica, went to the same college I did in California.

“Are you a slug?” she asks me. I’m  not sure what to make of her query until  I remember that UC Santa Cruz’s mascot is the yellow banana slug.

Bejuca, the lab/Rottweiler mix, and Little B, a Chihuahua meets miniature schnauzer, weave between our legs as Mark tells us breakfast is served between 8 and 9 and that yes, the treehouses do move. “But don’t worry,’ he says.  “They’re secure.”

Treehouse Number 1

I’ll take him at his word. And later, as we climb the 25 steps to tonight’s lodging, each step a piece of a small tree sawed in half lengthwise, it does feel secure. In fact it reminds me of a fire lookout tower bolted to one tree and surrounded by dozens more. It feels secure, yes, but when I later try to put lipstick on before we go out for dinner, the intermittent swaying makes me wonder if I’m going to smear it across my face. Until I get used to the movement I feel a little seasick up in our treetop boat.

We’re in Treehouse 1, the highest off the ground at about 25 feet and also the most compact, with the main room dominated by a full-sized bed made up with clean white sheets that set off a bouquet of pink and red heliconia. Good thing we’re slim, because we have to squeeze by each other to get to the toilet, a little room off to the side with screens for windows and a pint-sized sink. A room off to the other side houses what’s known in Costa Rica as a suicide shower, with wires sprouting from the showerhead, which warms the water as it comes out. It’s tricky—you need to have just the right flow coming for the apparatus for the heating element to kick in. (We get hot water, but in the morning the water gives out. But hey, we’re in a treehouse. In Costa Rica.)

There’s also a loft, up a ladder, with a thin foam full-sized mattress. Kids would love it up there. The treehouses have a/c (which we didn’t need), a fan, a mini-fridge, a coffeemaker (with coffee), a small place to hang clothes, and framed photos on the hardwood paneled walls of local fauna—sloths, howler monkeys, butterflies.

The hotel has three treehouses. Number 3 is closest to the road (you can’t see it but sometimes you can hear the trucks changing gears), but it’s bigger than number 1 and has a wraparound deck. If I return I’ll ask for Treehouse #3, further from the road than #2, bigger that our ‘honeymoon suite” unit and with floor-to-ceiling windows that make you feel  like you’re in the open air but still protected from bugs. There’s also a family of fruit bats that hang out by day on the front porch overhang (they don’t come inside unless you invite them). The lofts in Treehouses 2 and 3 are also more spacious and have two twin mattresses instead of the thin piece of foam in Treehouse 1.

Sloth sighting

The walk down to waterfall is just 3 km round-trip, on a wide path that would accommodate a 4 x 4—the usual Costa Rica backcountry road—two concrete strips for the tires, nearly overwhelmed by the growth around and between them. Grey skies, with late afternoon sun edging some of the clouds with orange and gold.

We spot the stick arrow and follow where it’s pointing to a cecropia tree. And yes, there’s the sloth! A big ball of fur with a strange little face.  We watch it for a while but it doesn’t oblige with any tricks. Now don’t get me wrong– sloths are very cool little creatures, but watching one is like studying a mangy fur rug on a plank floor.

Further on, the path swings by a stand of giant bamboo, the hollow trucks arcing over the path a good thirty feet above us. Soon we could hear the rush of a river swollen with rain, and then we see it:  a  muddy torrent that doesn’t invite a swim but instead a gasp of appreciation for the force of nature that water is in this zona.

Up the hill from the river are a series of small waterfalls, cascading into man-made pools that might have invited soaking had they been a little clearer (rainy season makes all the waterways cloud up) and if either the air or the water had been warmer.

Mural at Treehouses Hotel; photo by David Webster Smith

Breakfast with the birds

The next morning, there’s a full Tico breakfast: egg, gallo pinto (rice & beans), a tortilla, yucca fried up in a delicious latticework, juice, fruit, and cup after cup of coffee. We sit outside under the overhang of the common building (not a treehouse) and are entertained by a fiesta of birdlife that has come to feed on the sugar water and platanos.

We see brilliantly colored hummingbirds, red-headed woodpeckers, wren-like birds with bright blue feathers, regal mot-mots (“No one messes with the mot-mot,” says David after watching bird interactions for a while), and the dun-colored robin, which is, ironically, Costa Rica’s national bird.

From Heredia to Arenal, stopping for hot beignets in San Ramon

One thing I like about renting a car in Costa Rica is that they’ll deliver it to your door, even if your door is way the hell up the mountain.

We headed past the airport and towards the road to San Ramon, taking only two or three wrong turns before we got it right. At one point I pulled into a gas station and asked a taxi driver the way. Follow me, he said, I’ll show you where to turn. He did, pointing out his window to an unmarked onramp that did indeed lead us to the San Ramon road (which is also the road to Puntarenas).

Driving the main arteries around the capital city of San Jose is a bit nerve wracking but once you’re on your way things settle down a bit. Just keep an eye out for big trucks edging into your lane or yahoos passing on a curve and coming straight at you. Forget rappelling down waterfalls or surfing croc-infested rivermouths. Driving is by far the most extreme sport in Costa Rica.

Stephen and Kathleen Duplantier; photo by David Webster Smith

Around noon we stopped at Stephen and Kathleen Duplantier’s house near the village of Los Angeles de Sur, above San Ramon and on the road to Arenal. I’ve profiled the Duplantiers in my book and on my site, and we’ve kept in touch. In fact I’d seen them just days earlier in San Francisco when we met at the café in the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Both their daughters live in the Bay Area.

The Duplantiers are originally from Albita Springs, near New Orleans, and Steve is quite a cook. I’d told him not to go to any trouble, that we’d just stop in for a cafecito, but I’m glad he ignored my instructions.

He served us arugula from his own organic garden, garnished with strips of seared tuna. Homemade bread on the side, and then for dessert he presented us with a bowl a piping-hot beignets, the better-than-a-donut from New Orleans, with vanilla-infused cream for dipping.

Casa Amanecer B & B near San Ramon

The company was as good as the food. Besides Stephen and Kathleen, Christopher Panzer and Luisa Valdez were at the table. Chris and Luisa met while building houses for Habitat for Humanity here in Costa Rica. Stephen pointed out that just as Costa Rica has historically been a meeting place of animal species and cultures from both North and South America, Luisa, who is Peruvian, and Chris, who is from the U.S., met in the middle and their two kids were born here  on the isthmus, the land bridge between two continents.

This year they opened a B&B in the hills above San Ramon that’s already been featured in a glossy Costa Rican magazine for its architecture, a little bit modern, a touch of Costa Rica traditional, as sustainably constructed as possible. Next time I’m in the area I’ll be checking out Casa Amanecer (House of dawn) to see what this bi-continental and bi-cultural couple has created.

Two more bridges shut down yesterday

Heavy rains swelled the Rio Nandayure near Route 902 in Guanacaste, damaging the base of the bridge. Photo by Julio Pena, La Nacion

Yesterday, reports La Nacion, two other bridges were shut down due to structural damages, stranding townspeople who rely on the bridges to get them to the main highways.

One of the bridges is over the Burro River, on the road between San Ramon and Tres Esquinas de La Fortuna. The other bridge is over the Nandayure River in Guanacaste province, resulting in the inhabitants of Zapotal and Bejuco being cut off from the larger nearby town of Carmona. Apparently there is a rough alternative route between the towns that requires a 4 x 4 vehicle. No one was hurt when these bridge collapsed.

Bridge collapses on Osa Peninsula—and it’s not the first

Many of Costa Rica's bridges make you wonder if it'd be better to swim. Photo from emmacarson.com

Just when I thought it was safe to get back on the road, a bridge over the Río Rincón in Puerto Jiménez, on the Osa Peninsula, collapsed on Friday (11/6) when a 95-ton crane attempted to cross it.

The Osa Peninsula, home to Corcovado National Park and deemed by National Geographic Magazine “the most biologically intense place on earth,” is a popular tourist destination for intrepid travelers.

According to La Nación (the country’s Spanish-language daily), the 50-year-old bridge was only meant to support only 35 tons.

Luckily, no one was hurt. But Dios mio! How’m I gonna get to Puerto Jimenez?

Or around the rest of the country, for that matter.

School bus plummets into river

About two weeks ago, on October 22, a bridge in Turrubares (a canton in the province of San José) collapsed and a school bus carrying 38 passengers plunged into the Tárcoles River. Five people were killed. The Turrubares collapse lead to serious questions about the Public Works and Transport Ministry’s competence to maintain bridges and forced the resignation of ministry head Karla González.

The National Emergency Commission (CNE) has declared a “red alert” over the state of bridges in Costa Rica, but engineers have an uphill battle figuring out which bridges to repair first.

Necessary tools for  bridge repair: Google and YouTube

An article in the November 6 issue of the Tico Times reports that “engineers tasked with identifying dangerous bridges in order to prevent another fatal collapse are resorting to Internet images of Costa Rican bridges uploaded by tourists, such is the inadequacy of the government’s own infrastructure file.

Engineer Guillermo Santana of the University of Costa Rica’s National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models (LANAMME), says there is no complete record of the country’s bridges and the maintenance they have (or haven’t) received. So the engineers have been “getting help from tourists who have uploaded holiday pictures of Costa Rican bridges onto Google and YouTube.”

LANAMME’s research on 418 of the country’s 1,450 bridges shows that half of the structures are more than 50 years old, while the remaining 40 percent have been in use for more than 30 years. Ninety percent of the bridges were thus considered close to or past their recommended life span.

The 10  bridges deemed “high risk” and which will be repaired first are located above the Río Aranjuez, Río Abangares, Río Azufrado, Río Puerto Nuevo, Río Nuevo, Río Chirripó on Route 32 and Route 4, Río  Sarapiquí, Río Sucio and Río Torre.

This Tico Times map was drawn before the Puerto Jimenez bridge collapsed on Nov 6.