As you probably all read in Bill’s post, yesterday did not go our way. The AC is still broken and I doubt it will be fixed before we leave. We got stopped by the tourist police and now have to figure out how to pay a $200 ticket for not wearing helmets even though half the other people weren’t wearing helmets either. That was a total shakedown. The hook holding the hammock broke and dumped Bill on the floor – at least he had a pillow under his head. I also finished reading a book that I had enjoyed until it ended really badly with all the main characters ending up dead, unhappy, or unhappy and then dead.
On the bright side, I did go for a nice walk yesterday afternoon along the beach. There is a huge coastline here and there is a path along it. Some of the path is on the beach and some in the wooded area along the beach. You can walk to all the beaches here and I might have been able to walk to Panama, I’m not sure, I didn’t go that far. It was a very pretty walk, and I saw some monkeys. I also stopped to talk to an elderly fisherman. On my way past him the first time, he had caught a tiny fish. I asked him if that was for supper and he said yes. On my way back, he stopped to tell me he had two little fish so he had enough for supper and lunch the next day. I hope he had some beans and rice to go with it because they were tiny fish!
Today went much better. We did a Magic Chocolate Waterfall tour. We were close enough to the Panamanian border to see it. It was a tour to an indigenous community to learn how to make chocolate and use medicinal plants. It was a pretty good tour. There are a lot of medicinal plants here that we got to taste and smell. Our guide had is try quinine, which tastes terrible and a bunch of other plants that I don’t remember. If I get lost in the jungle, I’ll probably still die but at least I’ll die knowing that there were plants that might have saved me. One of the elders of the community also showed us how to make natural fingernail polish and lipstick, which we got to try, and we made some chocolate.
Chocolate is surprisingly easy to make. The beans have to be fermented, then dried, then roasted, rough ground with a stone, then ground to a paste in a meat grinder. The newly ground chocolate is bitter but if you add a little sugar and milk it’s magically transformed. Our guide made us fire-roasted bananas with homemade chocolate and some chocolate milk. I bought three balls of 100% dark chocolate to bring home.
We were on the tour with a Swiss family and a French couple. The Swiss family had two kids, a boy who was probably 12 and a girl who was around 10. Both of them had fun with the interactive parts of the trip and their mom translated everything from English to German. The French couple were interesting to talk to. He was a travel agent who organizes trips in Scandinavia and she is a language teacher, French and English.
After the chocolate tour, we went to swim at a waterfall. The water was cold but it was fun and really pretty. It started to rain while we were there but we were already in the water so it didn’t matter that much. We got fantastic pineapples and coconuts with straws so we could drink the coconut water when the swim was over.
This afternoon, we tried to take our boards to the beach but the water was too rough and red flags were up. It didn’t seem that bad to me, but no one else was in the water, which I took as a bad sign. About 1 person drowns here each month, and I decided to try to live another day, so we went to our crappy pool instead. Our hotel is okay, but not one I’d be enthusiastic about coming back to. There are lots of ways they could make it more comfortable.
Tomorrow will be our last full day here. We are going back to San Jose a day early because it’s a long drive and we don’t want to miss our flight. I’m going to look for a hotel with a good pool. I have a Zoom meeting all morning. Work keeps sending me messages reminding me that I have to go back to my real life soon. People have booked next week with meetings and apparently we are getting a blizzard tomorrow in Iowa. We have to figure out how to pay this stupid traffic ticket tomorrow. The officer who stopped us told me I could pay it at the bank, but that sounds sketchy and I’m skeptical about whether that works. Hopefully we can make it to the beach or find something fun to do. I want a new tea cup, so I’ll look for one of those when we go to the bank.
Traveling with Emily! 