Punta Uva
It’s quite a long drive but amazingly there seems to be very little visible Hurricane damage on the way. As we pass around San Jose and head towards the Caribbean, the landscape becomes more and more lush.
To the right of much of the drive is densely forested national park. This is the main banana growing area of Costa Rica, with the port of Limon, being the main point of export.
The Caribbean coast has a very different feel to the Pacific Coast. We play our reggae playlist to get into the swing of things. Playa Cocles which is the closest town to where we are staying, is full of chilled out looking Rastafarians and hippies on bicycles. Our accomodation, at a less populated beach nearby is a simple open air house on the beachfront.
It promises sloths, iguanas and birds ( and comes with a fairly wide variety of bugs I’d wager).
There’s a lovely caretaker called Gustavo who lives next door. It’s not long before he is introducing us to Violeta, the two toed sloth who lives around the property. The next morning we meet Mikario, a three toed sloth, making his way down a tree. It seems that we have caught him going about his once weekly pooh trip. Sloths don’t pooh from trees, they come down to the ground especially.
The sea gets a little clearer and calmer every day, having been fairly high and murky straight after the hurricane.
The place is paradise, although it’s close proximity to the sea and the rainy season, make it quite damp. Costa Rica is the most humid place we’ve been on our travels. It means that we live with the smell of clothes that have been too slow to dry on the line; like sweaty socks. I dedicate an entire day to washing everything and hanging it in the sun. I spend an increasing amount of time thinking about owning a washing machine again. Funny, because I thought that travel would broaden the mind!
The days are generally sunny and hot and we spend our days on the beach or reading on the deck which is just about on the beach anyway. Louie looks for ways to use his machete and has started harvesting coconuts and preparing fire wood for fires on the beach at night.
There is a pair of large iguana who live in the trees in front of the house. Their foreplay seems to be slowly following each other from tree to tree. We never see them in the same tree but they’ve obviously produced a beautiful bright green baby who sits in a papaya tree.
In our own family, there is some pretty extreme behaviour going on and the managing of this is becoming quite harrowing. Having a machete in the mix is not helping. Jasper is very adept at finding the object that Louie is most attached to and running away with it. Whilst we are mostly happy to spend our days writing, reading and swimming, Jasper spends his days trying to get Louie’s attention in what ever way possible.
There’s definitely an increasing focus on home and we decide to change our flights to leave Costa Rica a few days earlier. We had planned to stay in LA on the way through, but our experience in US customs put us off. Now we will transit through LA for three hours before flying home.
We all really want to see a toucan but they are quite elusive. Roger, who is always up early in the morning, has seen two, high up in the trees and wakes us all up to have a look. Somewhere in the distance is a roaring, which we think might be a jaguar.
Costa Rica is very cool!
It gets quite wet during our last night and we are ready to move on from our damp beds and wet towels.
I try to keep at the front of my mind that our time away is all about choice; and at least we have beautiful things to look at whilst we’re being driven to total distraction. It has certainly been true of our time here in the Caribbean. It’s a bit like a holiday we had once in a remote Island in Fiji, when Jasper had an OCD issue and washed his hands every two minutes and threatened to punch us all in the face repeatedly. He had only just started school at the time. It was a very strange time and what I still remember most about that holiday was looking out to sea, trying to appreciate the beauty, but hearing the sound of the kids in a perpetual struggle.
It is always good to move somewhere new when things start getting a little crazy. Soon we won’t be able to do that anymore because we’ll be back home. I wonder what will happen when we’ve stopped running?
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