Several years ago I visited an ancient Spanish missionary church in Orosi, Costa Rica that left me spellbound. Outside in the palm trees, there was a flicker of green wings as parrots exchanged mating calls. And inside the dark 17th century building (pictured here) there was the aromatic scent of someone who was no longer present. Only her floral perfume remained, though I kept thinking she must still be there, kneeling in the dark, whispering mysterious secrets.
Later, as I passed the church with my guide, he told me that the Spanish conquistadors had built such churches all through that area of Costa Rica. It's easy to see why; it's a lush tropical paradise in many respects. But the Spanish conquerers couldn't stay. The mosquitos drove them away. Or so said my guide, and it suits my fancy to believe him.
I thought of the conquistadors' experience a few times over the last month as I swatted away at mosquitos in San Ramon, a little bustling city in Costa Rica's central valley.
I was in a blissful state as I sat at my desk, looking out at an amazing tropical garden. Every molecule seemed intent on bursting into life as the humming birds swooped by. As the sun set everyday, the cement garden walls seemed phosphorescent with greenery.
But every night before I hit the pillow I became a deadly predator, intent on slaughtering every damned mosquito that was waiting in the crevices to feast on me. I'm talking nine dead mosquitos on an average night, and bites up and down my legs in the morning.
Yet Costa Rica was letting me off easy this time, or so it seemed in the first two weeks. It was easy for me to remind myself about the time my (now ex) husband and I were blithely winding our way down a mountain side going maybe 10 miles an hour when we swerved to avoid a washout, and the rental car went tumbling down the mountain. We were caught by a tree. The car was totaled, but we came through without a scratch. (My first thought as the world spun around me: "They do this so well in the movies!" My second thought: "Thank God I wasn't driving.")
There was the time we took my seventy-something mother up the same mountain to visit MonteVerde, home to a truly spectacular rain forest. All was going superbly well, until my mother became gravely ill. I started to panic when the MonteVerde intern at a clinic started pouring through a medical book trying to figure out was was wrong with her. A week later, back in the States, we learned she had shingles. (I guess I shouldn't have pointed out the scene of our accident on the way up the mountain; I think that pretty much shot her nerves.)
However, during my most recent trip ended earlier this week, it soon became clear that the mosquitos were but an appetizer prelude to a dinner plate of potential disaster.
Just before I came back to New York, I decided to give myself a little vacation from the novel/script writing and took a trip south to the Osa Peninsula. It's among the most untouched, wildly beautiful areas of the country, and I've always wanted to go there. Our tiny plane landed on an airstrip frequented by a brood of exotic looking chickens. The pilots hauled my luggage out of the tiny aircraft and told me to leap with it over a four-foot stream that ran between the plane and the airport (which looked like a fruit stand -- see photo).
The one guy "manning" the airport put me on the phone with my hotel host, who explained that usually he could drive his Jeep through another little stream to get to the airport, but there was so much rain, the stream was now a turbulent monster. After a two-hour wait, two trucks came careening up to the airport. Two men sprang out of the back of one and picked up several cartons of fresh vegetables sitting on the side of the airport. They stowed them in the back of the truck along with my luggage. I was taken by the other truck to the edge of the river, and then told to stand up on the back of a huge bulldozer. They chained the vegetable truck to the back of the bulldozer, which lugged it (and me) across the water.
I watched the water lapping up over the hood of the vegetable truck wondering how my poor computer was faring. But we arrived on the other shore no worse for wear, and my hotel host, Fred, carted me back to the hotel.
I spent three nights and four days there, the majority of the time without electricity due to felled trees and landslides obstructing the frail electric wiring. There was an intense quantity of water spilling down from the clouds almost the entire time I was there. And I wrote and wrote on the script and the novel, breathing in the lushness out there in the rain. I couldn't go back to San Ramon the way I'd come; apparently the river was too much for even the bulldozer then -- or the bulldozer people had better things to do.
So Fred the hotel host carted me down to a deserted beach on Drake Bay. And Fred, his wife and I waded out to a boat with our luggage, and it took us up a long river bordered by mangroves and herons. We landed at a little town called Sierpe and took a taxi to the Palma Sur airport.
The other passengers waiting for the plane looked so bored, so impatient with the whole Osa rainy experience. They'd come there to watch birds, to swim among the fish in the coral reefs, like me. And one of them grumbled that they'd been hoodwinked by overblown, hyped up promotions for Osa.
I hope they don't come back. The Costa Rica I know -- which is quite purposely not the world of big corporate resort hotels found in some beach areas -- would only be ruined by larger hoards of people looking for the niceties of life. I don't want any more of its raw edges to be smoothed by these sorts of suburban conquistadors.
So please don't go there, if that's what you're about.
I'll always get a little catch in my throat when I think about my mother's suffering, but as for the tumbling car, the mosquitos, the bulldozer ride, the lack of electricity, the cascading rain -- they're all part of the admission price I'm willing to pay. For reasons I don't entirely fathom, I so need to extricate myself from the controlled grid of America and plunge into that wild, wet, uncomfortable world.
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