Stephen (From Rio Blanco):

We are in the B&B as planned, but the day did not go quite as foreseen. We were ready to go by 10 this morning, but when we got to the Email place, it had been totally dismantled and they were reconfiguring everything. So they were closed. We left from Santa Ana without a last Email. Going around San Jose, we got completely turned around and found ourselves headed for the airport, Northwest instead of Northeast. Our alternate route was slow and completely unsigned. There were some signs on some streets and some names on the lines on the map, but never for the same road. The compass came in handy. So, a one hour trip turned into a two and a half hour one, but we stayed in good spirits and got to the teleferrico by 2:30. They had a brochure there for a B&B fifteen minutes away and we headed for it. After the turn off the highway, we worked our way up their "road" and just about when we thought they were a hoax we got there and got their last room.

Except for the proprietor, Ron, who is from Boxboro Mass, and was a little more talkative than we were ready for, it was a very inviting place. It was in a secondary rain forest, with a nature trail down to the Rio Blanco where we stripped off our clothes and took a swim. Their dog came with us and took quite a shine to me. We had dinner there with some of the other guests, one of whom was a painter who had been hired by the tramway to make a painting that would be transferred to silk scarves to be sold at the place. She was quite interesting. The others were mostly interesting as Norte Americanos uncomfortable in the Centro Americano culture.

It began to rain at dinner, and continued through the next day. Our tram ride in a six-person open gondola was preceded by a video talk by the inventor and followed by a trail walk with our guide, Juan Carlos.
 

Juan Carlos, Stephen, Dawn	The Rain forest

It was as wonderful as a church. The wildlife stayed home but we saw one toucan and many beautiful plants. We rode with a young couple from Canada to whom we had given a ride from the B&B. Norm and Karen, who were on the same wave length as we were about the forest. The four of us stood out in a sea of silver hairs who came on a bus. Dawn spoke Spanish to everyone she could and by the time our tram ride was half way over Juan Carlos was explaining everything in English for us and in Spanish for her. Most of which I could understand. We got to the beginning of the tram ride by taking two separate rides from the highway on conveyances that look like farm machinery, walking across a suspension foot bridge to get from the first to the second. When we left the tram to return to our car, we went with some employees and they were hitting on Dawn before they asked if we were together. They were very friendly and we ended up chatting about this and that walking instead of riding for the last leg of the trip back to the highway. , I chimed in now and then but Dawn is out front with the speaking.

We spent the next couple of hours driving to a hill town on the continental divide called Zarcero. The roads are good if your expectations are not too high and you keep a constant look out for pot holes. For most of this route around the Northern tip of Brauillo Carillo the road was paved, but about 10 miles was not and that slowed us down quite a bit.

The country has very little if any European type charm. Those cute little hill towns in Europe are replaced by people who are very open and interested in communicating with us.

When we got to the town about 5 in the evening, there was no hotel to be seen or signs to it, so we did what I am sure we will do again. We drove to a high point in town and looked for it. We saw it but there seemed to be no one there. I asked some people but got no answer that I could understand. Next we went to the Bar/Restaurant Geranios and asked in there. They were busy but they did call the hotel and found that they were lleno, so they pointed around the corner (in a way that you can only do when you are speaking to a foreigner.) We found the hostel and, for $15 plus $2.50 for a locked place for our car, we got a place for the night. (Car theft seems to be the biggest crime in Costa Rica.) We took a walk around the square in a light drizzle. The square was filled with imaginative topiary depicting everything from elephants to helicopters, and then we returned to the restaurant for dinner.

Dinner is complicated because my digestive tract is quite a bit behind schedule and I want very little to eat beside a salad. We were taken under wing by the waiter whom we refer as El Jefe. We explained our situation and negotiated dinner and finally he said that he understood and that he would talk to the chef and we would like the dinner. We never knew until it came what it would be. The hearts of palm were delicious and the rest also.

The hostel was fine. The view not bad and the bed firm, but coffee was hard to find the next morning, brewed coffee that is.
 

Topiary	Inside the Church

We did meet the topiary artist and Dawn jumped in to congratulate him on the work, and ask him how long he had been working on it. He said thirty years. (Maybe nearly everyday.) We had not the courage to ask whether he was paid for the work. It was right in front of a rather ordinary church on the outside but wonderfully charming on the inside. Maybe it was for the greater glory.

After waiting around the baño at the hostel for a while we launched ourselves again toward Arenal, one of the world's most active volcanoes. We are now hanging out in an inn/motel above the lake, thinking that if the clouds lift we will see lava and sparks and whatever. It is a great place to write. Alas, it is now raining.

We picked up a hitch hiker, Enrique, three times today. He was walking from Santa Ana to Teleran, about a three hour car trip. We never did get the whole story but it was fun to try. Somehow we both thought he was going home for a funeral, but no he was just leaving the church where he had been working. We kept stopping to look at hotels and saying good-bye and then after moving on, finding him at impossible distances ahead. We passed what I think was a coati mundi on the highway and he had us stop and he lured him almost back through the bushes for a photo. He had many things to say about the hotels, but he spoke very fast. We did correct his English pronunciation of the word "cow."

Tomorrow, if the weather does not improve, we head for the Nicoya Peninsula to see Ruth and Ed. We are realizing that we will have to plan the rest of our stay to be in one place longer to keep the traveling part to less of the total, so we can write and study Spanish some more and just be.

With Ruth & Ed

Dawn (and Stephen):

We managed to find our way to Ruth and Ed's lovely villa in Nosara just about by sunset, but after the famous "green flash." Apparently we turned off the main road a bit late so we had an extended version of the "road" -- that is dirt, rocks and ruts- to Nosara. It was a surreal drive, again with few signs to reassure us that we were going the right way. After about 15 minutes on this "road," we came to what looked like a wide and deep stream across the road. A bicyclist rode through it, and it looked too deep to me for our Toyota Tercel. (4-wheel drives are prohibitive to rent.) I asked the bicyclist if he thought our car could make it, and I thought he said, "No." We were sitting there wondering if we should turn back when an old truck full of a family of indigenous barged through the water. This time, the driver's response was (in Spanish, of course), "Sure, go ahead, no problem." They were beautiful people with stunning smiles. Their truck had a lot more clearance than our car, so I got out and waded across and Stephen plowed through with the car.

At one point, we rounded a corner to encounter four horses, one with rider galloping towards us. I just stopped the car and they galloped around us, two on each side without slowing. The handsome caballero flashed us one of those great smiles. Later, we came upon two riders with a Brahma bull roped between their two horses. The bull was stopped with one rider in front and one behind. This time no one looked too happy as they waved for us to go through. Once we did, I looked in the rear view mirror to see the bull bucking his way down road with the riders doing their best to keep him under control.

Although we missed the green flash, we were in time for a couple of Ed's martinis that went down mighty easily.
 

Ruth and Ed	View from their house

The house is fantastic. It is on a hill about four hundred feet above the ocean. We can see a couple of miles of beach as it curves out to a rocky point to the South of us and on the North disappears behind the intervening hills as it goes up toward the village of Nosara. The breeze is gentle and cooling.
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Part 7 - Dawn:

We have been entranced by the monos (howler monkeys) swinging in the trees. Ruth and I keep wishing we had tails because the tail is such a useful, articulate appendage for those monkeys! I am starting to fantasize about getting a costume/set designer to design a harness cum tail for my next bit of choreography...swinging from a tail sounds like more fun than standing on my head. Those monkeys have such manual dexterity, and their tails seem to telescope and stretch on command. Watching these beasts affirms my belief in evolution (not Stephen's though; he's a skeptic.) But instead of swinging from trees, Ruth and I go to a pool with a bunch of old ladies and do "agua aerobics" 3 times a week from 8 til 9 a.m.! It's not bad, though a bit boring. It's O.K. to be the "youngest" one at 51!!

The beach is stunning, broad and curved, great waves for surfing with a boogie board, warm water...(it's been in the 80's and low 90's here, but usually with a nice breeze-sorry, New Englanders: Adam Emailed us that it was 15 below in Vermont last weekend where they skiied!) Snorkeling in the tide pools is irresistible; I can see now why Martha likes to dive so much. We saw a school of vertically black and white striped fish with a blue ventral fin, a big yellow guy, a family of silver ones and one of those prehistoric-looking camouflaged "dogfish" types, about 18" long, hovering near the reef, perfectly disguised.

Those of you who have the pleasure of knowing the Ruth and Ed will understand that we rarely have a free moment here! Their social life is immense. We've had drinks and dinner with numerous gringo cronies as well as visiting the bar in "downtown" Nosara, that consists of a dusty soccer field, a small airstrip-the only paved one on this coast- A "super mercado" which redefines the word "super", a few bars, (the gringos start drinking early here...ourselves excepted) a "store" or two which sell a bit of everything, but mostly nothing you would want to buy! Everything happens pretty much "afuera"-outside- stores, restaurants, houses are often just covered by lean-tos of thatch or dried palm leaves. There is some poverty here, but if you have to be poor, this is the place to do it...you don't have to worry about heat or much about shelter. We all drove Cecilia, the young woman who cleans for Ruth and Ed, home one day. She lives in a veritable shack with her three children; apparently her husband is a not-so-nice guy who has disappeared. She's a lovely person who tolerates my Spanish very well. She said that some gringos have been here five to eight years and don't speak a word of Spanish, so she appreciated my efforts. Again, we are struck by the wealth they have here, that is the wealth of Nature and spirit...Living in a shack doesn't seem so bad, if most of the time you are living outdoors. It may get a little tough during the long, rainy season, though. Many roads become impassable then.

Note-- especially to dawn s. lane: The itinerary that we sent you initially was a copy of what we gave to my mom...so we are not really visiting all of you Email correspondents the first weekend in March; we are visiting my mom then, before we take off on our next adventure! We will try to respond individually to all of you who are replying. We do love to hear from you. Access is a bit tough here, though. The neighborhood communicates through CB radio so you hear what everyone says to everyone else. Beverly has a cell phone, but you don't want to use it much because she refuses to take any money and it costs her a pretty penny.
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Part 8 - Stephen:

We are finishing up our first week in Nosara with a boca party here at our Casa. We are serving sashime that we have just caught ourselves on today's excitement, a six hour fishing trip. We went in a 16 foot open boat that Tom had built and we had to launch it through the surf which is quite a bit of fun. We trolled with lures and caught some mackerel and a reef bass. We also got two other fish that we used as bait to go after some rooster fish. They run about forty pounds. We did not catch any but I caught a ten pound grouper and Dawn fought with something for a long time until it became caught in the reef and got itself free. The view from the ocean is quite wonderful. Most of the coast is uninhabited. Tom our fishing guide has already sold this boat and will turn it over to the new owner when he goes back to California to build some houses.

Dawn:

Well, there is trouble in Paradise...just like everywhere else. Sunday, when most of the gringos - including us - were at parties and the fiesta was in town, four houses were broken into, including our's. Together we lost a couple of hundred dollars. Stephen and I had just been talking about feeling uneasy with the high contrast between gringo life here in Nosara which seems very wealthy, compared to Tico life which is economically still poor in small towns like this. I believe that it was probably "out-of-towners" that came in with the fiesta, but who knows. Well, as my friend Stan used to say, "Material loss is spiritual gain."
 

The medicos are behind the red circle

Anyhow, the fiesta was a hoot. The Costa Rican form of "bullfighting" consists of riding bucking bulls with friends from the audience jumping into the ring with red flags to excite the bulls. The riders don't hold on with their hands but do a wild flapping motion with the arms to try to stay on the bull. If they stay on long enough, they jump off the bull and run like hell to avoid the animal's vengeance. The beautiful part is the roping that the caballeros do to lasso the bull afterwards and get him to go back to the pen. They ride the horses at full speed and rope the bulls behind their backs
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Part 9 - Dawn:

We had been here about 10 days before we were bitten by the bug...that is the surfing bug. Yes indeed, we've taken Deirdre's advice to be brave and wild, so I've started learning to surf...at 51! The beach here is a Mecca for surfers. Of course, the day we started, the waves were unusually large. I did great on day one, according to "Mouse," the old-time famous surfer here, but today, Stephen and I are both wrecked. It takes a lot of upper body strength to push up and bring both feet under you to stand up on the board. Too bad I'm not in shape as I was for doing "Memorial Day," when my upper body was really strong. We're just surfing in the whitewater now to learn, but you really have to fight those waves to get out far enough to ride in. When you get that wave and manage to get up on your feet and ride it in, it feels great....but I get worn out so fast. Every muscle aches, which I don't mind -- makes me feel like a dancer again -- but after an hour or so, I feel like I no longer have the strength to make it happen...another reminder of my chronological (not emotional) age! Anyhow, we both like a challenge. . and to learn new things, but we also like to be successful! I am not sure I have the time or stamina to really get to the point where I can do it well enough to go "afuera" which means outside in surfer lingo, way past the breakers, to wait for the big one."

There are folks here, from the states and from Europe, who kind of change their lives so they can spend 3 to 6 months here to surf every day. I have always loved the physical challenge of dancing, but for me making dances has "meaning" as well. I put myself though that physical agony to connect with other human beings, to get some idea or feeling across the footlights, to hear from the audience that they have thought about something new, or felt something familiar, or seen something beautiful. This surfing thing is an individual sport that for me, connects me with nature and all her power, taps some of my deepest fears (my writing group will understand), is very demanding and can be exhilarating...but I don't think it's something I could dedicate my life to. Also, surfing is a very male thing. There are 2 or 3 women here (Europeans) who do it, and about a hundred guys. So there's that thing about proving that my gender can do it, too!

Meanwhile, every time I go in the bathroom and catch a glimpse in the mirror, I don't know who that dark woman is! I put #15 on my face a couple of times a day and wear a shirt to surf, but all of me just darkens up fast. I love the way it feels and looks, but I know I'll just be more of a prune for it later. Oh well...

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