Stupid Gringos – Part 4

Steve:

We had to say good-bye to Laura and Jim in Manuel Antonio.  It was fun chasing monkeys with them!

OK.  If you’ve read the title for this blog-post I do have to confess right off the bat that I’m not absolutely certain that this is only the fourth time that we have pulled a bonehead gringo maneuver on this trip. It does sound about right though.  You see, I try to forget as quickly as possible when I have displayed a traveler’s IQ somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line.  So perhaps there have been more than three other instances when I/we have managed less than top-notch higher-order thinking, but I’m sticking with that as my count.  So let it be known that today’s was officially gringo-dufus-move number four.  What did we do?  Have patience grasshopper.  As always, before we get to the juicy part of our story, we have to set the stage.

Back in Manuel Antonio we left until the very last moment the deliberation about where to stay next.  We had three days to blow after Laura and Jim left until my mom stormed the castle and we had no idea where to spend those three days.  So Carol did some of her usual magic and booked us a cottage inland from nowhere and just a bit south of somewhere.  I originally balked at the booking.  The byline was “it’s all about the horses”, and if you are keeping up, you know how I feel about horses.  Plus, it was an extra hour and a half in the wrong direction from where we were going next.  But Carol is the boss, and she was through with looking for places after being rejected by the first dozen or so spots that she attempted to reserve.  So either I was going to suck it up and agree to truly make it all about the horses or I was going to spend the next few hours on the internet myself.  We all know how that turned out.

For Carol and I, the new place was really about the hammock and the view, rather than the horses.

The first hour of driving was cake.  The second was a bit tougher.  Dirt roads in Costa Rica aren’t really dirt (they are more a succession of large boulders mixed in with other smaller boulders) and they absolutely shouldn’t qualify as roads (more like wide deer paths).  We had just decided that indeed we were once again officially lost on one of these “roads” and about to turn around, when, ten meters ahead, appeared the sign that we had been seeking for the last ten minutes (it read, “No Pasar”, loosely translated, by Gandalf among others, as “You shall not pass!”).  Just beyond that was a sign that said “4x4 only”, mocking us as if we could have made it through the last five miles/half hour without four-wheel drive.  There should be a sign reading “persons who are pregnant or have chronic neck or back pain should not attempt to use these roads.” Just beyond that second sign was home, at least for the next two nights, combined with an almost instantaneous drop in blood pressure. 

Our first sight of our new "home" looked like this.

The first evening was quite enjoyable, despite the hundreds (no hyperbole) of bugs in the house whose only goal, it seemed, was to dive-bomb my face.  The view of the rolling hills and yes, even of the horses, was idyllic and ideal.  The next day and night were relatively uneventful other than the drive down to yet another gorgeous swimming hole in yet another pristine mountain river.  The cabin was comfy.  We could have stayed there contentedly for weeks.  It easily felt the most like home of any place we’d stayed since Samara (well, not including Gail’s place in North Carolina.) The kitchen was very well stocked for once, and the actual presence of dish soap and a sponge left me so giddy that I refused to let anyone help me do the dishes after each meal.  We were well-relaxed and quite refreshed; ready if not actually willing to pack up the next morning and head back to the coast.

Just chillin' at the local mountain river.

There was only one problem.  At about eleven o’clock at night, Carol jumped out of bed like a bat out of hell in search of her computer.  I was afraid we’d missed our flight to Japan or something.  Not quite so.  In the moments before dozing off for the night, her brain had decided finally to make a connection it hadn’t found the need to bother with until that very moment.  It turns out that my mother wasn’t indeed due for another day.  Carol had subtracted incorrectly or taken a square root when she should have taken a natural logarithm or some such issue with mathematics that escapes me.  But new math or old, we were suddenly the proud owners of one extra day in paradise!  It is a good thing the mistake hadn’t been the other way around, or my mother would have been waiting an awfully long time for us to show up at the designated rendezvous point. 

To make a long story short, or at least less long, we were granted our wish to stay one extra day in the cabin in the mountains.  What to do with such a gift?  Why, naturally, we would check out the local waterfall.  Every Costa Rican town has got one.  And everybody’s doin’ it…  So why not?

Well, let me digress by describing in some detail, the proud owner of our vacation getaway cabin, Linda.  She is a single, independent gringo woman of about sixty or sixty-five years that makes me almost weak in the knees with R E S P E C T.  She came to Costa Rica about ten years ago on a whim and decided to stay.  So she bought a couple hundred acres of unsettled land for a song and proceeded to settle it.  She had THE road bulldozed out to it.  She had the local authorities run otherwise non-existent power lines and plumbing the mile and a half that was necessary to the property.  She built three houses and a barn from the ground up.  She started three separate businesses and she bought over a dozen horses to populate the land and help pay for it.  She did all this alone (well, she had workers help, but the vision was all hers) without knowing much Spanish.  Impressed yet?  Really, I just had to write about her because she offered me free cocktails just because she wanted a drinking buddy one afternoon.

From the initial description you would think she was loaded.  Only she wasn’t, and isn’t, it appears.  She is just a whip-smart, hard-working, no-nonsense cowgirl with seemingly unending stores of energy and guts.  She is a very down-to-earth nature lover who has no idea whatever that she has more chutzpah in her little toe than most people have in their entire body.  Why do I bring this up at this point in the story, you ask?  Well because this day was a case in point.  She flippantly offered to “quickly” take us down to see the local waterfall since it was difficult to describe the route as none of the roads are named and the trails are not marked.  “No big deal.  It’s just a short easy walk after a quick drive.  I’ve got a few minutes to spare.”  So she jumped on her four-wheelin’ ATV and sped off without a backward glance and with me trying desperately to keep up in our city-boy’s 4x4.  At one non-descript point on the dirt “road” she stops and says we ought to park here because she is worried about us getting stuck if we drive any farther.  So we pull over to the side of the road and park perilously close to a ditch, just as she asks, leaving room for any locals who may need to pass by.  Then we hike, and hike, and hike a little more up and then down, down, down the road until we finally reach the tiny beginnings of an unassuming unmarked trail, which we then proceed to hike, and hike some more. In all it was over half an hour of downhill-all-the-way trekking.  After much pathway, that is sometimes so steep that we need to hold on to trees as we descend, we finally make it to the pool at the bottom of our waterfall.  Linda is jumping around on the rocks like she has too much energy pent up.  I’m sweating like a pig just thinking about that hike back up in my near future.

How many photos do we have of us in different water falls?  There can never be enough!

We jump in the water.  Linda starts back up the steep trail almost immediately to head back home.  Did I mention that she is at least twenty years older than I am?  In any case, we have made it to the falls.  Linda had said they were stunning, but we had seen dozens of other world-class “cataratas” in the past few months, and so we were skeptical that we would actually be "stunned".  The lower half was maybe fifty feet high, and the upper half closer to a hundred.  It was an absolutely gorgeous scene.  We tried to capture it with our cameras, but since the good camera was stolen (What, you didn’t read the last blog post?  Shame on you.) the kids’ cheapo cameras really couldn’t do the canyon justice.

Best shot we have of the two different tiers.  We swam at the bottom of the lower one.

Another angle of the bottom half.

About an hour of frolicking under the falls and behind the falls and off the rocks into the falls and we were steeled for the inevitable sweat-fest back up the mountain.  Knowing we were stopping for lunch before driving all the way home, I decided to do the hike barebacked so as to save my shirt from death by perspiration.  So I dripped and slogged and basically swam my way back up the hill to our car.  Have I mentioned that it is really humid in Costa Rica?  The kids were “dying of thirst” after having downed the last of the water quite early on.  We were all tired and hungry and tempers were a bit short, but we finally reached our vehicle and were ready to drive to lunch. 

Our car, on the other hand, was not so ready.  Sound familiar?  Remember the Alamo? (That’s a reference to an earlier post too.  Get with the program!)  Well this time the problem wasn’t the car battery.  This time the problem was with the operator.  You see, the four by four wasn’t able to go up the ruddy, muddy hill starting from a dead-stop where we had parked.  So we tried the next thing that would cross any gringo’s mind.  It was simply boneheaded gringo logic 101.  Why not let gravity help us out of the mud?  Let’s back it up!  And finally we have arrived at the point to which the title of our story referred. You guessed it.  Into the ditch we went.

You see, we were inches from peril on the left side of the car.  If I turned the wheel to the right, the left front wheel would go into the ditch upon backing up.  But if I turned the steering wheel to the left at all, the left back wheel would fall in.  Carol got out and checked out the situation.  Her assessment was that if I backed straight out the road would widen a bit and I’d be able to avoid catastrophe.  I think she was using that new math again. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her.  Well, not any more than I blame myself.  It was my fault for parking so close to the edge of the Grand Canyon in the first place.  But I trusted her judgment and let fly.

So, now we are really down in Sh*& Creek without a paddle and with a severe case of embarrassed outrage with ourselves.  We try piling rocks under each of the wheels.  We try pushing the car whilst flooring it.  Add back wrenching to my list of ailments.  Carol has become so covered in muck that we can’t find her shoes despite the fact that we know they are still on her feet. We try praying to the gods of stupid gringos in need.  We try yelling at the kids, crying and simultaneously laughing at our peril.  Surprisingly none of these approaches helped us to clear the ditch. 

OK.  So do we hike all the way back down to the waterfall and find someone to be our angel of mercy?  The Ticos down there had all come from a different trail in a different direction entirely and weren’t likely to be able to help.  No good.  Do we walk up the road, all the way up the mountain until we encounter civilization in a few hours?  Not likely.  Do we dial random numbers on our cell phone and plead with whoever answers to send the cavalry to us even though we have absolutely no way of describing where the hell we are?  Maybe.  I’m not sure our AAA membership is going to work so well here.  Oh, we let that lapse anyway, didn’t we?  How about we just sit down and pout and sweat it out until Linda possibly discovers this evening that we have never returned?  Tempting.

Just as panic begins to well up and morph into a general acceptance that we will never survive this and live to blog about it, Chloe takes a few steps around a corner and announces that there is a house with a truck not thirty feet from our position.  I knew that.  I was just waiting to see if she could be resourceful.  This was just a home-schooling test of her street-smarts.  Yeah, that’s it.  Nice work, Coco.  You pass.  This time.  The next test will include some of Mama’s new math.

We walk up the long driveway and are met halfway by a man who is looking at us like we are surely lost puppies in need of something that he wasn’t sure he was going to want to provide.  I’m still shirtless and sweating so much that it looks as if I had just emerged from the waterfall.  Carol looks like she has just finished lubing up for a mud-wrestling match.  “Can you help us out?,” I offer meekly in my best formal Spanish.  “Our car… it is in a big ditch”.  He laughs on the inside.  I see it in his eyes.  But the rest of his face betrays nothing.  He calls his wife.  The two of them shake their heads when they think I’m not looking and they secretly wonder how the United States ever became a super-power.  They then proceed to spend less than ten minutes with their oh-so handy-dandy truck and their suspiciously convenient fifty-foot heavy-duty rope to pull us out.  We are free to go.  I give him twenty bucks, thanking him profusely and bowing to his superior manliness, but knowing full well that I am only reinforcing the stereotype that we gringos think money will fix anything.  I turn the car around and drive off into the afternoon with my tail securely between my legs and my masculinity securely back in that ditch. 

Safely out of the ditch and at the local restaurant which had panoramic views of its own.

But my glass is not half-full, it is overflowing. This is not just a story about travelers who really need to stick to resort hotels and all-you-can-eat buffets.  Nay, it is surely more than that.  It is also a story that emphasizes the triumph of human will-power over the elements.   It is man versus nature!  Indeed, it is also a testament to the capacity of the human spirit. One human being can and will assist another in times of dire need, strangers no more.  Bring on global warming, mother nature!  We shall overcome! 

OK.  I exaggerate a tad.  But the Ticos ARE unfailingly friendly and always willing to help.  This country is absolutely spectacular in terms of its vistas and its terrain.  But is even more so when considering its people.  We will surely miss them when we continue on to our next adventure.  From what I’ve heard, the Japanese are not quite as forthcoming with their magnanimity in dealing with outsiders.  I hope to find that to be an unfounded criticism, but yeah or nay, it won’t detract from my appreciation of the generosity of the Costa Ricans.  Heaven knows, we’ve needed every bit of that.