edwards block

After ten days of travel, I arrived back in Puerto Viejo on Monday afternoon.

My meditation retreat went well. It was a retreat organised by a local Brahma Kumaris group and took place in the small mountain town of San Cristobal Norte. The facility used was an old school building operated by a catholic church, which was next door. I don’t know about you, but I had this quaint notion that small-town churches have bells that toll with pastoral gentility on Sunday morning to summon believers to serene contemplation of the saviour. However, on Saturday morning at slightly past dawn, a cacaphony was launched that sounded like one of those new electronic fire alarms that save you from burning but deafen you for eternity. I leapt out of bed and shouted “Jesus Christ!”, but I was focussed only on the possibility of an air raid. I’m not sure if they do that every Saturday moning, or just when the school has been rented by misguided heathens who invoke images of Brahma Baba and burn incense in the collection basket.

Attending a retreat of this nature was a bit of challenge for me, as I have a pretty active anti-cult reaction to anything that mentions “god” in even the most innocuous manner. However, a wise friend had encouraged me to trust that turning down my “bullshit meter” would still protect me from being turned into a stark-raving moonie while allowing me to try out potentially mind expanding, soul-enriching activities. As it turned out, I had a great time. I met some really interesting, peaceful and kind people, and at the end I felt more relaxed and calm than I have felt in a number of years.

While I was away, I also meditated on my satisfaction with living in Puerto Viejo. I have been gradually becoming less enchanted with life here, and I needed to consider whether there is a future in it, without feeling like I am giving up on it too easily. In the end, I decided that I would move on to new opportunities elsewhere. I’m not sure what those are going to be, yet, but I’ve made plans to wrap up things here and depart.

On June 05, I will fly out of San Jose, and land in New York City. At the moment, my plans are to spend June and July on a cycling trip circling around the north-east United States (New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and maybe Vermont), and eastern Canada (Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick), but how much I will actually cover remains to be revealed through planning, chance, and budget. I’m not yet sure whether I will have my hybrid bike shipped out from Vancouver, or buy a new touring bike in New York or Boston. If anyone has any great economical shipping suggestions, I’d be happy to hear about them.

At the end of the cycling portion of the trip I’ll spend a week in retreat in upstate New York, check out the big city for a few days (to which I have never been), and then fly to Vancouver. After that? Who knows.

I am now back in San Jose again, after a few days in the cloud forests of Monteverde.

The Monteverde region is, I think, the best of Costa Rica. It is tropical, but rather temperate, and were I ever going to retire here with intended permanence, it would be a likely candidate for my new residence. It has several appealling characteristics: Cool and comfortable, fewer mosquitoes, and many varieties of interesting birds. As you travel on the bus from San Jose (a five hour journey on winding, cliffside gravel roads), you notice the gradual decrease in the use of residential razor wire and window bars the further you get, and in Monteverde, there is almost none of this, suggesting a lower degree of crime.

I was in Monteverde for two full days and spent most of the time hiking. There are a number of cloud forest reserves in the area, much of it created through private initiative, rather than government (including one that is funded through the contributions of schoolchildren around the world). On the first day, I hiked in the Santa Elena Reserve, a total of about 25km. The second day, I hiked in the Bosque Nuboso Reserve, another 15km or so. Today, my legs are stiff.

On this, my third trip to Costa Rica, I finally spotted not just one, but three of the Resplendant Quetzals that had eluded me on previous visits. This is a brightly-coloured bird with very long (two feet) tail covert feathers. I also managed to spot another bird that is very easy to hear – it has a call that sounds like an ear-splitting metallic ping followed by bell-like whistling or chiming noises – called the Three-wattled Bellbird. Other spottings included:

• Emerald Toucanet
• Violet Sabrewing
• Blue-crowned Motmot
• Gray-throated Leaftosser
• Black Guan
• American Swallow-tailed Kite
• Long-billed Starthroat
• Buff-throated Foliage Gleaner
• Slaty-backed Nightingale Thrush
• Yellow-faced Grassquit

I even managed some pictures (though not of high quality) of the Quetzals and Bellbird, but I won´t be able to post them until I am back in Puerto Viejo.

Hostels tend to have a reputation for being places to meet interesting people from around the world, often who are liberal in their worldviews. I suppose this is because one frequently meets a lot of Europeans. When one meets Americans, they are usually either of the progressive, justice-minded variety, or simply keep quiet.

On this occasion, however, there are a number of young Americans of noticeably different temperament. The first clue was the guy playing pool while wearing a t-shirt that says “Texans for Bush”. At first I thought this an adolescent colloquialism suggesting an erotic preference, but the presence of stripes and stars discouraged this theory. Then, I heard his friend, sitting at an internet terminal reading a letter from someone in Iraq, making jokes about the bombing of “ragheads”, and all doubt was removed. The hostel had been invaded by Republicans.

Don´t they know that there is a Holiday Inn just up the street? It´s even next to a Denny´s, that all-American repository of plasticised, greasy ptomaine. After much beer swilling, burping, and lewd stares at decent, probably anti-Bush European lasses, they took their mountain of beer cans to their room and played country music on a a guitar. Lucky me – my room was right next to theirs. Fortunately, they weren´t IN my room, or I might have had to head off to the Holiday Inn myself. I, mercifully, had three lads from the US in my room, but one was a Nebraska democrat (a slight improvement), and the others were foreign students from India and Korea. The disapprobation was unanimous.

Today at 5:00, I am departing for San Cristobal for a couple of days of meditation in another cool, mountain area. Perhaps a little spiritual disengagement will make me feel more charitable toward the suffering fools that would lead us all to fascist damnation. But I hope not.

Well, here I am in beautiful downtown San Jose.

Today, I went to the Mueso del Oro (Museum of Gold) and looked at their collection of gold artifacts that had been made by the original indigenous inhabitants, before Columbus and his countrymen enslaved them all and stole their gold (fairly traded them for valued coloured beads, surely!). What’s on display is mainly what the conquerors didn’t find and melt into pretty baubles for Queen Isabella.

Tonight, I had a faint desire to see a film. My hostel deskperson recommended the ‘Mall San Pedro’ cinemas, where there are twelve screens, and therefore something for every taste. I took a ta_i to the mall. (Where you see “ta_i”, imagine a four letter word that means “a vehicle for hire” – the 24th letter of the English alphabet does not work on this hostel keyboard). Ta_is in San Jose are a bit like an amusement ride in North America. You pay your money and they spin you around until you either scream with delight or vomit. When they get to stop signs, they usually slow down to about 70. And of course, the seat belts rarely work. It would probably be safer to walk the streets late at night with a wad of bills sticking from your back pocket than to take a ta_i, but the distance to the mall is a bit far.

Anyway, I got to the mall to find seemingly thousands of people milling about the ticket booth. Sure enough, there were twelve screens, but as it turned out, every one of the twelve screens was playing the same film: El Hombre Araña Tres. The multilingual among you will have already interpreted that as Spiderman Three.

Now, I saw Spiderman One on a flight to somewhere, and if I didn’t think I would have been shot and disabled by an air marshall I would have pried open an emergency e_it and plunged 30,000 feet to escape it. What I should have immediately done is taken a ta_i back downtown to spend the evening curled up on a squeaky bunk bed with Jane Austen. But that would have been too predictable (and would have made for yet another dull blog entry).

No, I stood in line with hundreds of Tico boys with their Tico girlfriends to get a ticket, thinking that I need to stop being so rigid and unadventurous. “How bad can it be?” I asked myself (too bad I never answer myself). And, it’s only $3.50. A bargain. I don’t have to buy the Spidey Popcorn, after all. Once I got my ticket, I went looking for my assigned theatre, “Sal 5″. I followed the signs to discover a line that stretched so far down the mall that the people on the far end looked like tiny dots on the hori_on. (Apparently the 26th letter doesn’t work either).

In for a penny, in for a Colon. I found my place at the end of the line behind three young couples making kissy noises, with two young couples who had apparently spent the last hour trying all the samples at the cologne counter soon bringing up the rear. In between, there I stood, long hair, startlingly graying beard, frayed cutoff pants and hiking boots, looking like an indigent panhandler in their midsts.

Conveniently, my place in line was immediately adjacent to the mall arcade, and I was able to pass the time listening to bells, whistles, gunshots, sirens and an incredibly annoying kiddie ride. The ride is a mechanical see-saw with a kid’s seat on one side and a large plastic “Rocki the Clown” on the other side. Rocki was continuously singing, in a comical tone, “Oh, Susanna”. It was painful. And the line wasn’t moving, at all.

Determined not to give up too easily (“When in Rome…”), I managed to endure this for a full 23 minutes before I finally bolted from the line and fled for the nearest e_it. Five more minutes and Rocki would have been going back to Alabama with that fucking banjo sticking prominently from his gaping yap.

Now I’m back in the hostel, filling you in on my adventures before my date with Jane, whom I should never have abandoned in the first place.

My upcoming mountain meditation looms tantalisingly on the hori_on.

For the last two months, I have been keeping an eye on two gecko eggs that I keep in a jar on my bookshelf. I found the eggs in the deadbolt slot of the doorframe on my bodega, and brought them in with the intention of seeing them hatch. Gecko eggs, which are white and roundish and a little bigger than a Tic Tac (but probably don’t do much to freshen one’s breath), apparently take somewhere between 60 and 90 days to hatch after being laid (that’s after the egg is laid, not after the parent gets laid). I don’t know how long they were in the door fame before I found them, but I had them in the jar for at least 60 days before they finally hatched today.

I was out on my daily quest for a tolerable internet signal when the first egg hatched. When I got home, there was only the broken shell, and no sign of junior. The second egg looked as though it would hatch soon, as it had visibly darkened, and I resolved to see the hatchling. I had another errand to run – a jaunt to the local jungle bookstore. I had earlier in the day completed my Jane Austen novel and I needed to go and trade it in for something less modern – so I put a piece of screen over the jar and departed. By the time I returned, the egg had hatched and one tiny gecko was sitting in the jar awaiting its freedom. I was surprised at its size. It was only about an inch in length, but still seemed implausibly large to have been rolled up in a ball in that little shell. An interesting thing about geckos is that they have no eyelids. They are apparently unique in that they moisten and/or clean their eyes by wiping them with their tongues, a movement that happens so rapidly that it looks to the casual observer as if they blink.

I removed the screen and allowed him or her (it’s hard to sex a gecko without killing, it I suspect) its freedom, wishing it the best of luck in avoiding a premature death at the paws of my bloodlusting feline.

Such is the excitement of many of my evenings in Puerto Viejo.

Despite the miracles of biology, I am growing restless, irritable, discontent. I desire change. I am planning trips. Tomorrow morning, if my resolve, and circumstances, hold, I will board a bus for San Jose. My plans beyond that are unclear. I may spend some time in meditation; I may travel to the south-west to climb Mount Chirripo; or I may do something else.

I have also booked some summer travel. Sometime between the end of May and the end of July, I will fly to the US east coast. I am contemplating a bicycle trip in Massachusetts, a meditative retreat in the mountains in upstate New York, and some culture in Boston and New York City, followed by a visit to Vancouver to spend time with friends, and to attend the wedding of Michelle and Jim in September. I have to watch the budget, of course. The bike trip may not happen if the cash isn’t happening, but I will definitely be landing in Boston no later than July 23, and probably Vancouver on August 13.

I have yet to decide whether I will return to Costa Rica in September. There is a lot to enjoy, but I am finding that dissatisfaction is increasing with time. Unless I find the means to make it more satisfying, moving on seems likely. In the meantime, there is still more amateur biology.

My previously announced ambitious resolve to spice things up in this blog has, you may have noticed, failed to amount to anything other than unexplained silence. Despite some valiant attempts (my hard drive is full of half-finished screeds on related subjects), I tried to write something about the current political situation in Canada, but was sent into a state of depressed anxiety from which I am only now emerging. It’s only thanks to my concentrated avoidance of all sources of “news” for the past couple of weeks, as well as beach yoga, meditation and several milligrams of dexedrine that I can even broach the topic now.

After all this time, I still can’t get used to the phrase “Prime Minister Harper”. It sounds completely implausible, like “certified organic veal”, or “hamburger milkshake”. The fact that Canadians are now, if the published opinion polls are at all reliable, preparing to give Harper a majority (the Canadian equivalent to naming him a four-year Tsar) seems inconceivable. However, Harper’s rise from backwater knee-jerk to PM is hardly an isolated phenomenon. It all seems like just another piece of evidence that the free world is marching lock-step through something resembling democratic fascism, toward who-knows-where.

‘Fascism’ is one of those terms that often cause us to lump the speaker of the word into the category of “loony conspiracy theorist”. In fact, as soon as it appeared here, you may have rolled your eyes and clicked on your CNN bookmark to get the latest breaking news on Paris Hilton’s in vitro fertilisation using Julius Caesar’s sperm, reconstituted from a dried drop of blood found on a dagger in the Vatican by Pope Ratzinger while he was burning documents in the basement. (If white smoke comes from the chimney, the next pope will once have been a Pol Pot supporter). Fascism is now thought of as an archaism, a historical word, one that refers to forgotten and irrelevant historical incidents, such as the second world war. Look around, though. Retro is the new old, the old new. The lines blur between what is, what was, and what will be.

I can see that this is in danger of going off on another erratic tangent, so let’s get back to the important point to be made – the trouble with Harper. It’s his bloody hair. It looks like the sort of molded polyester rug favoured by midwest American preachers who run around complaining about fags, abortion and affirmative action by day but spend their nights snorting crystal meth while gang-banging transexxual teenagers in seedy motel rooms. The look isn’t alleviated at all by the way his face has apparently been waxed, like a cadaver that’s to be put on display. He has ‘Jim Bakker’ written all over him.

The thing is, I don’t really think Harper is anything at all like Bakker or his ilk in real life. Oh, he’s probably got that rake-up-ass uptightness typical of someone accustomed to living in the wealthy, sterile part of suburbia. If he had any election-losing skeletons in his closet, he wouldn’t have gotten this far. No, I think the hair is a well-crafted campaign technique that some advisors from the Republican National Committee – hired by his forward-thinking handlers from the oil industry elite long ago, well before his National Citizens Coalition days – in order to seduce a certain segment of the Canadian population, establishing a base from which to snatch power from the the industrial elite back east. Sounds conspiratorial, doesn’t it? Don’t be too quick to discard conspiracy theories, though. They can’t all be wrong. Most of them probably are wrong, of course. I don’t think a Jewish conspiracy blew up the World Trade Centre, I don’t think those jet streams in the skies above are the fluoride of the 21st century (though they may ultimately prove to be the DDT of it, in environmental terms), and I doubt that the moon thing was faked (though perhaps overmilked for mysteriously spent trillions in tax dollars since). Just think of past conspiracies that effected some sort of change: Caesar, the Putsch, Trotsky. ‘Beware the ides of March’ probably sounded a little kooky at one time too. If there is a likely conspiracy today, I suspect it is a conspiracy to instill automatic doubt about conspiracies in the minds of the population. Manufactured doubt is perhaps the most successful political ploy in modern times.

Well, that’s enough politics for now. It’s simply too hard on my nerves to acknowledge the reality of this world in which I was cursed to have been deposited. Perhaps I should join the Raelians. At least I hear they get a lot of sex while they’re waiting for the mother ship to arrive.

Let’s talk about more mundane annoyances, like pets. On Monday evening I came home to find that my cat had been treed by two dogs. The dogs are owned by a one-eyed crazy gringo up the street. There’s a joke that this town attracts “the most wanted and the least wanted”. The word is that this guy’s a dual citizen. Anyway, apparently the cat had wandered beyond the fence and been pursued by these two hell-hounds. It was dusk and my cat was in a neighbour’s yard, way up in a palm tree, sitting on a clump of coconuts. I threw rocks at the dogs and got rid of them, but the cat wasn’t coming down. I retrieved its food dish and shook it below the tree, but despite its efforts, the cat could not get below the coconuts to grasp the trunk and climb down. It then sat there crying pitifully. Assuming it would find a way down when it got hungry enough, I went back in the house to make dinner. By the time I’d eaten, the cat was still in the tree crying. Right below the coconuts was a palm frond that arched past the cat and then down to me. In an effort to get the cat to walk down it, I grabbed then end and pulled, which snapped the base of the frond, without it breaking off, and made a nice little ladder down. The cat walked two feet along the frond toward me, then stopped and started crying again.

It was dark by now and I was getting strange looks from locals cycling home from the salt mines. Apparently a man wearing a headlamp and a pair of underwear who is holding a palm frond and talking to a tree in a strange tongue is worth gawking at. The sight grew even more absurd when, finally fed up, I started jumping up and down, shaking the palm until the damn cat fell off of the branch, sending it tumbling into a patch of hibiscus below. It couldn’t have been too shaken up, as it was back at the food dish in the house before I even had the gate closed. Of course, it was dark and the cat is black, so my audience never saw that cat. Just another crazy gringo. (For all I know, I’ve been dubbed a dual citizen too).

Eventually, I went to bed and left the cat outside, as I always do, to avoid having it climbing all over my head while I try to sleep. In the morning when I open the door, the cat always comes running, expecting to be fed. Not this time. I looked around, but couldn’t see it, and for one exciting moment I thought perhaps it had been eaten by a boa constrictor, until I heard a noise in the lavatory. I looked in to see that the cat had caught a large rat. The rat was apparently dead and the cat was sitting beside it contentedly. Still half asleep and unprepared to deal with this, I went off to make my tea. A short time later I returned to find the cat tossing the rat into the air, and a bit of rat blood was now making an appearance. Somewhat queasily, I went off to find the hose and an appropriate carcass removal implement. When I got back with my tools, the cat was sitting outside the door licking its paws. Inside, the shower looked like Charles Manson had dropped by. The shower floor and walls were covered with blood, and around the toilet was strewn various organs and entrails and the decapitated abdomen. I found the head behind. Much hosing and cursing ensued.

You may think this a bit repulsive, but given the choice of Harper’s hair or the rat, I’ll take the rat. At least I know I won’t be looking at it for four more years.