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

The dread back-up camera

In the epic battle of camera vs. tile floor in a La Fortuna soda, the Sigma suffered a decisive loss. And though David drove back to San Jose to find the only repair place we could get wind of (Jaido at Desafio Adventure in La Fortuna suggested Giovani, near Parque Morazan), the dude couldn”t fix it, and in fact added another problem to the mix–now the view screen is half white.

We thought about ordering a camera on Ebay and having it sent down here, but there were problems getting PayPal and Ebay to list a Costa Rica address as the main address, and some vendors on Ebay refuse to ship internationally.

Pals at Desafio said they were heading back to the States and we could ship something to them in California, but by the time they got back we’d be far from Fortuna, and there was also no guarantee that the shipment would get to them in time.  A friend in Arenal offered to let us ship something to his address, but then we were on our way to Nicaragua and had no internet access.

And of course shipping anything to Costa Rica is a tricky business. It might take a week or a month or it might never arrive. Customs could ignore the package or turn unwanted attention on it, and retrieving it from customs can be expensive and time-consuming. Plus you have to know who to bribe and how much to offer. I’ve always been an unskilled briber.

So now we’re stuck with the back-up camera for the rest of the trip. It’s a perfectly fine Canon Powershot SD 750 point-and-shoot, but it doesn’t cut it if you were expecting to be able to shoot raw and tweak to your heart’s content.

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.

In the fight between camera & floor, the Sigma suffered a decisive loss.

There are travel days when nothing goes right. On Friday afternoon, we sat at a table under the eaves at a little soda (a modest restaurant or cafe) in La Fortuna, a muddy one-horse town that is also the tourist epicenter for all things Arenal-esque, from river rafting to volcano-spotting (it hasn’t shown its sloped face in days).

Rain came down in sheets, bouncing off the sidewalk and misting our ankles even as we sat a few feet under the overhang. We’d ordered jugos de mora (blackberry) and guanabana just to rent time at a table, and I was trying to navigate Lonely Planet Costa Rica on the Kindle to figure out a place to stay that night.

David swept his backpack off the table to accommodate the glasses of juice, and one of the straps pulled his camera off the tabletop and onto the hard tile floor.

Craaaak! It didn’t sound good, and as he scooped his Sigma off the floor, his face told me that it didn’t look good, either. He spent the next several minutes checking all the camera functions, and I watched as his face became cloudier and cloudier.

Volcan Arenal is usually shrouded in clouds.

We were 2 days into a 2-month trip whose primary purpose was to do research and take photos for the 3^rd edition of my guide, Living Abroad in Costa Rica. David was the trip photographer. I’d left my piddly little Nikon at home, relieved that I could concentrate on research and writing and leave the visuals to someone more inclined in that direction.

But now  it seemed that David’s camera had fallen and couldn’t get up.  The lens was the problem. It had been so traumatized it now wouldn’t venture out of its shell.

He had a small back-up camera, but the files wouldn’t be big enough to reproduce high-quality color photos.

Here was the trip’s first major snafu.

We’ve spent the last few days figuring out what to do next. On the emotional front, David was seriously bummed, and I had to let him be bummed until he wasn’t bummed anymore–a lesson in non-attachment.

On the practical front, David bought a set of tiny screwdrivers at the local ferreterria, took the back off the camera and poked around, but had no luck in getting the lens to work.

We asked everyone we knew if there was a good camera repairman in town. No, but someone knew a guy in San Jose who came highly recommended. He didn’t answer his cell phone and wasn’t getting back to us. Should we drive back to the capital (4-5 hours on bad roads) to see if we could find this guy?

How about if David bought another Sigma on eBay and had it shipped down here? One acquaintance had a mail service (Aero Casillas) that has stuff sent to Miami and then brings it down to Costa Rica. But it can take from 10 days to 2 weeks to get a package. Other friends said they had small packages sent directly to their address in a nearby small town, with the same time frame—1 or 2 weeks in transit. Some vendors would ship internationally, some wouldn’t. And if customs got ahold of the package, well, you’d have to go to Calderas and know who to bribe.

Stay tuned for more in the camera-meets-floor drama. This experience is reminding me that nothing is easy, or fast, in Costa Rica. The country looks at our agenda and our bag full of high-tech gadgets, and it laughs. A big, rumbling lava-burbling-out-of-a-volcano laugh. All you can do is stand clear, and smile ruefully at how little control you actually have.