Grumpy Travelers Make Nasty Bedfellows.

OK.  This post was written back on Dec. 25^th, but we didn’t manage to get the accompanying pictures in before we left San Jose, and so I didn’t post right away.  Then we stayed in three consecutive places (check the next post) with no passable internet (though they all claimed to have it), and so still no pictures (we need a better way of transferring pics since my computer is not compatible with our camera).  Finally, I can post.  The problem?  Our camera was stolen, and with it all of the hundreds of pictures from Cancun, then San Jose, then Mastatal, then Christmas back in San Jose, then Rio Celeste.  So no pics.  Sorry.  We’re bummed.  From now on, we transfer pictures to the computer every night, no exceptions.  The pictures I included of the “Hooch”, our treehouse in Mastatal, were just swiped from the internet.  The others were taken using the kids' cameras, which we are now even happier that we brought.

Steve: This post covers three weeks or so of trippin’, but I must warn the reader.  It will incorporate my need to bitch and moan a little more than usual.  Granted, I wouldn’t be me if there wasn’t a little bit of that anyway, as you all know, me being that unwavering ray of sunshine.  But in this post, I intend to grumble more than even is usual for me.  Got to get some good ‘ole-fashioned complaining out of my system.  So if you are not up to reading about half-is-glass-empty moments, by all means, wait for the next one.  But if you are on the fence about it, may I suggest that the stories that involve a wee bit of hardship are often far more entertaining than the ones that involve nothing but rainbows and butterflies.  Speaking of rainbows and butterflies, we just ended a trip into the mountains where we actually met a woman named Rainbow Butterfly, at least she was nicknamed that.  But she comes later. 

Remembering the Alamo…

First I need to relay a few experiences from our time in Playa del Carmen, a touristy beach resort near Cancun, Mexico.  Chloe already submitted a blogpost that relayed her experiences.  Mine were a bit different.  It begins with check-out from the hotel in Valladolid.  If you will recall from the last blogpost, that is the town we used as home base when visiting the Mayan ruins.  After paying for the broken lamp that Josh accidently bumped off the table, we got in the car psyched for a three hour drive on the toll road rather than the six hour drive on the “free” road.  Sadly, the Alamo rent-a-car was not as pumped up as we were.  No battery power.  Now if it were our fault and we’d left the lights on or something, then we would simply chalk this up to a bad day.  But the problem was not with us, it was with the car.  You see, it was an old beat-up Nissan Tsuru that was born no later than 1985, probably more like 1980.  American rent-a-cars last for two or three years tops due to high wear and tear.  Mexican rent-a-cars are only junked when the engine falls out the bottom of the car.  I’d offer the odometer reading if I had any idea how many times it had rolled over the 100,000 km maximum. 

In any case, the car was old and we thought we could just deal with it and roll with the punches.  Bad battery?  Fine. I called the 800 number that we were supposed to call if (when) something went wrong.  In broken Spanglish I relayed our problem, and the reply was “Huh, too bad.  See if you can find help.  We can’t help you.  Good luck!”  Well I paid the hotel clerk to find a taxi driver willing to give me a jump start, for yet another fee.  No worries, we were off!  But a bad battery is a bad battery and the next time we needed the car was when we were leaving Playa del Carmen and off to the airport.  Again, no juice.  Again, no help from the rental car company.  Well, I guess that is not quite fair.  Alamo, rather than sending jumper cables, did send a guy to us who offered to trade cars with us.  But his car was a Fiat and had no trunk, and we had four suitcases and four overstuffed backpacks.  No deal.  So again we paid some guys on the street.  This time, with no cables, they actually took their own battery out of their car and put it into our car.  Then, while the car was running, they exchanged batteries once again.  I didn’t even know that was possible without being electrocuted.  We made it to the airport and yes, I did write a letter to Alamo Rent-a-Car asking for compensation but have received nothing in reply.

Pick an orifice, any orifice…

While at Playa del Carmen, Josh and I got Montezuma’s revenge.  Now if you’ve never had that particular ailment, consider yourself blessed.  Picture every bit of liquid in your body exploding out every orifice simultaneously.  You can lose half your body weight in one afternoon.  For me, two days of the trip were entirely lost.  We were at an all-inclusive hotel biding time until we could fly back to Costa Rica, but the only included amenity I took advantage of was the porcelain throne in our room.  But at least we had one of those!  Read on to hear about the places where we didn’t!  I did brave the outdoors long enough to win a ping-pong tournament, but spent much of it running back and forth from the bathroom.  It seems impossible for me to visit Mexico and not get sick at some point.  The problem is that even if you avoid the water, you still have to eat food that has been washed in the water.  You would think that in a giant resort they could figure these things out.  I did finally get to go to the beach once and the water was a beautiful turquoise color.  No waves though, as Cozumel blocked all of those out nicely.  Still, no waves is better than the internal waves I was enduring in the days prior.

We did make it out of Mexico OK, thanks to fancy roadside automobile electricians.  We even managed to save Josh’s Harry Potter World wand that he left on the plane.  He discovered it after immigration, but before we left the airport.  Somebody actually boarded the plane and found it for him!  Accio, wand!  (Read the book…) We spent one day in San Jose that included crazy bus trips to a crazier mall to watch “The Hobbit”, where we discovered that the Spanish subtitles weren’t quite sufficient for us in translating elvish and orcish.  We even got to watch a fireworks display and a full-on parade celebrating the Festival of Lights, a local annual tradition.  But San Jose was mostly about home-schoolin’ and trip plannin’.

All you need is love…

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Soon enough we were off to a new adventure in the middle of nowhere.  We were going to stay in a tree-house!  Saaweeet!  First we took a taxi ride to a bus-stop, and then a bus ride to a taxi-stop, or something like that.  The first bus dropped us off after about an hour in a cute little town called Puriscal, where we needed to blow a few hours until the next bus came.  So we sat under a taxi-stall with all of our luggage, trying in vain to avoid the deluge around us.  Then we found our way to the next “bus-stop” ready to board a bus to Nowheresville, more commonly known as Rancho Mastatal.  The bus went up into the mountains along a ridiculously bumpy dirt road for over two hours and dumped us at an intersection with an equally bumpy dirt road and one house.  You’d think we would be the only people who would need such a bus!  Not so.  The pushing and shoving to get onto the bus in the first place was awe-inspiring.  I held the back door (it was a regular OLD school bus) open for my kids to climb in and no less than six people pushed in before them.  People were throwing their bags into the windows to save a seat!  The bus had a capacity of fifty passengers.  We had at least eighty.  I started the ride sitting on sacks of grain in the way back of the bus.  I quickly got to relocate to a seat next to a guy with a head bigger than your average globe, and then to another next to Josh an hour later.  We spent the whole ride worried that we were on the wrong bus and then worried that we wouldn’t know when to disembark.  We didn’t want to pass the time with our e-books because we didn’t want people eyeing our expensive gadgetry.  And reading would have been difficult anyway with the incessant bouncing of the vehicle down the road.

But we made it.  More or less in one piece, if not quite at peace.  I did manage to lose my only jacket for the trip, a nice fleece I had purchased just before we left in August.  Somebody was stoked to find that thing on the seat.  It would pay for twenty more of those bus-rides!  We were welcomed to our new home and we really did feel quite welcome, if not really in our element.  Little did we know we had stumbled upon the only kibbutz west of Tel Aviv.  It was a hippie commune of sorts.  Sort of a sustainable working farm with about fifteen to twenty volunteers who worked the farm and maintained the place and cooked the meals and plucked the chickens and fed the goats and sampled the shrooms and basically lived la pura vida.  It was awesome.  It was terrifying.  Our treehouse was unbelievably cool.  Two stories on a land footprint of maybe 30 square feet.  Open air “walls,” mosquito-net bedding and a view that was so good that I was jealous of myself for seeing it.  The workers, who were all American and Canadian twenty-somethings, made our delicious meals (breakfast at 7:00!) and we in turn helped them out by producing a methane derivative to cook the meals.  What a great symbiotic relationship!  Yes, you guessed it.  The toilets were pit-composting high-tech dealios that converted human waste into methane for the cooking stove.  T.P. went into a separate composting heap.  Talk about sustainability!  They called one of these gizmos the Meth-Lab.  But I’m pretty certain our hosts only used the nearby grass for their o-natural highs, not the nearby gas.

Welcome to Nowhereville, Costa Rica!

Vines abound in the rainforest. We do our best Tarzan impressions almost daily. 

Oh look, another waterfall to play in.

And another!

And another!

And here's the meth lab.

A side view of the Hooch where we lived for three nights.

A closeup of the floor in the hooch.

Here's a front view.

Beds in the hooch.

One final angle of our house in the sky.

The trees are right out of "Alice in Wonderland".  I hope Chloe doesn't fall through a rabbit hole! 

This little guy must have swallowed the pill labeled "eat me". 

The people were unbelievably friendly. Even the wild animals were friendly.  It really was a love-in.  Josh’s favorite was a dude named Lump who played cards with us at night.  There was also a woman named Rainbow Butterfly who particularly enjoyed fungus.  Before dinner, they would turn out all of the lights, and we’d hold hands and people would take turns sharing what they were particularly grateful for that day.  Getting through the whole group could take up to half an hour.  Josh almost busted a gasket waiting for the “Buen Provecho!” signal that we could finally eat.  The showers had no hot water and were open to the world if anyone was interested in watching.  The food was delicious though often unidentifiable.  But the experience was unforgettable.  We went on three separate hikes that each took us through dense rainforest to gorgeous waterfalls and swimming holes.  One came complete with coconut water and bananas still on the vine at the end.  Would I recommend it to anyone?  Absolutely.  Would I go back and do it again?  Nope.  I like plumbing and meat and electricity.

Taxi!

The ride back to San Jose was interesting.  We arranged for a taxi to take us to a bus-stop about 10 km away from the Ranch.  The taxi was supposed to arrive at 2:00, giving us ample time to catch the bus at 3:00.  At 2:35, a guy went flying by the house until he saw us, and then screeched to a halt and backed up.  He had a pickup truck.  So our luggage went in the bed, and we piled into to the cab.  “To Puriscal?” he asked.  No, we explained, just to the bus stop.  We didn’t want to pay taxi rates when the buses are so cheap.  “No, I take you to Puriscal.”  Um, thanks, but no thanks.  “Where are you going, to San Jose?”   Yes, but the bus is just fine.  “I take you to San Jose.”  Um, really?  That’s a three-hour ride.  “Sixty bucks.”  Schwing!  Really?  Uh, OK.  So we’re off.  No crazy bus rides.  No abnormally large-headed seatmates.  At least three extra hours of spare time once we get to San Jose.  Life is good.

So I get ample practice with my Spanish as I am sitting in the front seat and the driver speaks less English than I do Spanish.  After about an hour of driving we discover that this isn’t the guy who we had arranged to drive with in the first place.  Now, understand that this wouldn’t be so weird if there lots of taxis in Mastatal.  But this was one of only two cars that went by the house in the hour that we were waiting for the guy to show up.  Like I said, Nowheresville central.  We had been certain this was the guy.  I wonder what the guy who was supposed to pick us up thought when he finally pulled up and we weren’t there.  Oh well.  His loss.  Our gain.  Well, our gain until it started to drizzle, and then rain pretty hard, and then come down in sheets.  You see, our luggage was still in the bed of the pickup truck.  Well, we hustled the electronic equipment into the cab with us, but everything else had to be left to the elements.  Needless to say, when we finally arrived at our hotel in San Jose, our stuff was a wee-bit damp.  And nothing dries in the daily 100% humidity in Costa Rica.  Seriously, my wrist watch has a permanent cloud of dew on the inside of the glass cover.  I need Josh’s eyes just to tell the time.  What time is it?  Time to give that hair dryer the work out of its life!  Them clothes ain’t gonna dry themselves!

Hot plate heaven

OK.  So we are back in San Jose.  The idea is to lay low for a week, save up some money and get some serious work done before all of our visitors descend upon us.  We know we’ll be doing activities day and night when friends are here, so we are going to stay in a cheap apartment with a kitchen to save on food costs as well.  Well you get what you pay for.  This place is a dump.  The “kitchen” has no oven, not even a toaster.  So much for cooking Christmas dinner or baking Christmas cookies.  There is a microwave and a hot plate.  But there are only those itty-bitty pots that fit a can of soup.  So spaghetti is a challenge as well.  Doing dishes is even more difficult than cooking.  No hot water anywhere in the apartment except the luke warm stuff that comes out of the shower.  No dish towels or sponges or dish soap.  Washing the laundry in the shower stall is hard enough.  Doing the dishes?  Sheesh.  Now I know, people used to endure much more than this.  But it was expected.  It was the only way to do it.  We are paying good money for a hotel room in a metropolitan city in the 21^st century.  Is a dish towel too much to ask for?

The walls are concrete, no plaster, no drywall.  The floors are linoleum and cold!  The windows have no screens, so we can’t open them, and there is no heating or air conditioning to control the temperature.  There are no hooks or pegs or anything to hang up our wet stuff, which we have in abundance.   And this is where we chose to spend Christmas.  Oops. I have a cold that won’t go away and keeps me in bed and so I have not been very good at cheering up the kids who are home-sick for the holidays.  They built a virtual Christmas tree by taping mardi-gras beads to the wall.  We’re trying!

Who says my family is all about science and lacking in artistic ability?

Ah well, Mark and Michelle and family are coming to visit us in a few days and all the joy will come rushing back into the world.  We leave this place in two days for greener pastures…