WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION, PART TWO
Costa Rica: Lake Arenal

Our first day in Nuevo Arenal was a wet one. As our visit was during the rainy season, we realized that they would all be wet. On the advice of Bill, one of the proprietors of the Villa Decary, we walked the “two km” into town to buy groceries. (We did not meet Bill’s partner, Jeff, until the next morning at breakfast.)

It was a longer walk than I expected, and I got the idea that “two km” is the local standard measure of any distance under ten miles. Still, it was as gorgeous a two kilometers as you will find anywhere. The road is narrow, muddy, and potholed, but it overlooks the manmade Lake Arenal, which reflected the churning clouds overhead.

The only bank machine in town did not accept our ATM cards, but we got along fine with dollars. First, a proper lunch (our meal on the bus consisted solely of Chips, Ahoy!), then a whirl around the miniature grocery store, which was not much different than the ones in New York. They even accepted credit cards out there in the middle of nowhere.

We emerged from the store into a monsoon. Keeping under the overhang, we went to the restaurant next door, where Bill had said the local taxi drivers congregated. There were none to be seen, nor any cars that were obviously cabs. Rafael had said, when I asked him if there were many taxis in the area, that, in Lake Arenal, “todo el mundo es un taxi,” and we only had to negotiate the rate with anyone who had a car. An old man volunteered to drive us back to the hotel when the rain abated, which it promptly did.

We all squeezed into the cab of his pickup truck, and we were off. Only, the rain came back in force, and the front window was so foggy that the old man and I had to take turns wiping it clean. Visibility was zero, and the driver’s head shook as if in a palsy. He almost ran over some pedestrians and came close to sideswiping several approaching cars. When we had traversed the “two km” ten minutes later, his truck couldn’t even make it up the hotel’s driveway. Rob and I gladly hopped out into the deluge, gave the man a thousand colones (he had only asked for six hundred), grabbed the grocery bags, and ran inside.

It rained all night, sounding like a waterfall on the roof. It was beautiful.

*

“Life finds a way.”

That is a line from Jurassic Park, a film set quite near here, on the fictional Costa Rican island of Isla Nublar.

One has to journey to the wilds of Costa Rica to recognize the truth to that statement.

Life finds a way.

In this case, life (an exotic bunch of assorted insects and spiders) found a way to cling to every square inch of our bodies.

On our first morning at the Villa Decary, Rob and I arose obscenely early and decided to hike around the grounds. The land, once a coffee plantation, is currently, except for a civilized patch around the main buildings, a jungle. We needed walking sticks to splash across a stream, climb up and down muddy hills, and beat our way through the dense, spider-webby foliage.

A troop of howler monkeys saw us off from the branches overhead (the delightful creatures tried to urinate on us—or were at least motivated, en masse, to urinate as we passed underneath). I saw no other wildlife on that trek, although my enjoyment of it was slightly curtailed at every turn by the thought of just what might be waiting to bite me or crawl down my shirt.

Later, we walked a mile down the road to a botanical garden and butterfly preserve, which entailed another hike through the jungle, this one populated with flora from all over the world. We did see several butterflies and even more lizards; even a few snakes in cages and tanks. It was lovely, but I was ready to go when I saw that a large, orange spider had built a fully formed web from the brim of Rob’s cap to the outside rim of his glasses and down to his shoulder, all within the span of a few minutes. We passed two massive clumps of bamboo on the way out, each stalk over a hundred feet tall and almost as thick around as I am; they creaked in the breeze like the masts of an armada.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a restaurant. It was more of a tourist trap, actually, with its racks of gaudy souvenirs, but the food was good. They advertised an Internet café, but we were told that their connection was down.

It was then that I realized that we were truly in the third world.

*

Our lodgings in the Villa Decary were a one-room bungalow with a full kitchen. Two glorious windows overlooked the lake and the mountains on the other side. There was no air conditioning, and though the overhead fan was cool enough, everything was damp in the humidity. Our clothes took a full day to dry.

On his way out to the clothesline, Rob beckoned me to come out and look. A wild coati was eating a piece of fruit on the nearby slope. I ran inside and grabbed my camera; a German (or Dutch) couple from the other building joined us with theirs. The coati fussed over its fruit and did not pay heed to its eager audience.

A coati is a strange little animal, like a cross between a raccoon and a lemur. This one chomped on his snack as if he were Goblin Foo Uvula. Rob and I have delighted each other with stories of Goblin on this trip, as if our little Boston terrier had stowed away in our luggage and disguised herself in various native costumes to keep an eye on us. The coati was Goblin. The howler monkeys were Goblin, her imaginary friend Beetriss (we believe Beetriss is also a Boston terrier, although it is difficult to acertain given her invisibility), and her nighttime-squirrel friend Pashmina.

We invented a game called “Tienes una perra . . . ” in which we accused each other of having a dog with any number of unlikely occupations (astronaut, factory worker, pornographer) and preoccupations (living in an underground house, liking cake, singing).

*

Three days without the Internet. One would not think that would be so horrible, and yet, somehow it was. Each day we inquired at the “Internet café,” and each day we were told the same thing: “Not working, try tomorrow.” The absence of television, on the other hand, was acceptable, even welcome; without that infernal machine to regulate the passage of time, we fell into an unfamiliar pattern of falling asleep before nine o’clock at night and awakening as the birds and tree frogs shrieked in the dawn.

During the days, we read or looked out the window at the wildlife. Within a span of a few minutes, we could see Mr. Coati, exotic squirrels, hummingbirds and other tropical birds, gigantic ants. Supposedly, there were toucans in the area, and I was the first to spot a gigantic lizard in middle of the road (apparently dead, but Rob, accustomed to the ways of lizards from his desert upbringing, said it might just be absorbing the heat).

With nothing else to do, we took to experimentation. Rob put a blob of strawberry marmalade outside on a leaf and watched to see how long it would take the ants to devour it (two days). We also killed time comparing our respective skin tones. The strong sun turned Rob’s skin an alarming red and, with the same amount of exposure, left my vampiric pallor intact. Seen side by side, it was almost as if we were not of the same species. “But we can still love,” Rob said.

Scroll down to see some photos.