Shower monkeys!
Even poor students need a little time away once in a while. With that indulgent bit of self-pity in mind, Rachel and I hitched a ride with an outbound classmate this Friday and wound up in Quepos, a largely unremarkable village on Costa Rica’s wondrous Southern Pacific Coast. Quepos is a tiny tourist hamlet replete with passable but extortionate restaurants, criminally mendacious hotel owners (argh), and more tour operators than residents. Yet it is affordable, and serves an indispensable purpose as the gateway to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, a minute collection of seashore, fertile estuary, and verdant rainforest that easily ranks as one of Costa Rica’s finest treasures.
Though truly tiny at a mere 1625 hectares, Manuel Antonio has one of the most vast and varied collections of wildlife in this extraordinarily diverse country. The trees teem with the fascinating white-faced capuchin, a preternaturally nimble and wonderfully expressive monkey with little interest in humans. We lurked gawking beneath a palm tree as one of the little beasties wrench palm fronds loose from the tree and dropped them dismissively, so to feast with obvious glee on the
immense ants, spiders, and associated bugs previously sheltered within. Fresh from their banquet, the monkeys observed us, ignored us, and only interacted with the tourist world when they leapt onto the head-high pipes feeding the freshwater showers off the beach. Naturally, this brought endless amusement as swimmers wandered up to rinse off the sea salt only to find thirsty monkeys wrapped around the showerheads.
We also met some aloof and nearly invisible three-toed sloths, rare in much of their former habitat but plentiful in Costa Rica’s many parks. They weren’t particular responsive to our requests for closer photos, but possibly we were too impatient. The park was absolutely littered with geckos and iguanas ranging from baby-finger-size to larger than my arm. A volleyball-sized turtle hid impassively while I tried and failed to photograph him. I reluctantly left him in peace and wandered throughout the park’s countless picturesque beaches and sweeping lookout trails, only marginally impaired by the merciless heat and tropical sun. Birds hollered in every imaginable fashion, but were nearly invisible in the thick brush; besides, I would have been unable to put names to them even if I could spot them. Brilliant blue butterflies larger than my hand periodically flickered from the bushes, stopped us in our tracks and mystified our cameras, and vanished abruptly. It’s a magical place, diminished only by the omnipresence of some…
other… wildlife.
Manuel Antonio National Park is also one of Costa Rica’s greatest refuges for a rather less rare but still amusing species: the Great-Bellied Gringo! I feel marginally guilty for noting this, but it’s astonishing to see the number and girth of the horde of American tourists who frequent the place. I am perpetually mortified whenever I glimpse the obvious poor health of most Americans… the dimensions (pun intended) of the national obesity epidemic there are immensely visible
Manuel Antonio is not the region’s only draw. The strip of luxury hotels and million-dollar condos that lines the road from Quepos to Manuel Antonio also hosts one of Costa Rica’s worst-kept secrets, a unique, erm… restaurant called El Avion. El Avion hosts Ollie’s Folly, a 50’s-era US military cargo plane built right into the middle level of a three-story open-air restaurant. The plane is (you guessed it) named for Colonel Oliver North, the charismatic thug who lent a veneer of deniability to Ronald Reagan’s attempt to finance an illegal gorilla war in Nicaragua by selling guns to Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. The plane was bound for the Nicaraguan Contras by way of Costa Rica when the US Congress got wind of the whole sordid affair in the mid-1980s and terminated the program. So El Avion simply lurked in a hangar in San Jose for fifteen years until some wily entrepreneurs bought her up, carted her piece by piece to the coast, and built a restaurant around the reassembled aircraft and a bar inside. I’m reasonably certain this is the only restaurant of its type anywhere. Food wasn’t bad, either; best fajitas I’ve had in the last six months.
That was Saturday… the very best was yet to come. The following morning, largely out of curiousity, I plunked down $60 dollars I really, really,
really don’t have, and asked the helpful American at a tiny tour kiosk for the most “extreme” experience available in Quepos. Not long thereafter, a pleasant Tico showed up in a battered SUV and whisked Rachel and I about fifty kilometres out of town and up a mountain, where one of the most genuinely exhilarating and foolish experiences of my life awaited me.
In Nicaragua in October, I tried something called a “zip-line” tour, where helpful guides attached me to cables 15 metres above the ground and sent me gleefully gliding among the immense shade trees that dotted a hillside coffee plantation. Silly me; in my ignorance, I failed to see that my Nicaraguan experience wasn’t even worthy of the zip-line name. Now I know better.
Where once I zipped from tree to tree, Quepos’ Sky Mountain experience sent me careening literally from mountaintop to mountaintop, again and again, along half-kilometre steel cables anchored to enormous alpine platforms. Attached only by a waist harness, I clamped my hands onto a simple but sturdy pulley and zoomed, cheering and only occasionally terrified, through the trees and sometimes hundreds of metres over them. The kinetic view from the cable was indescribable; the glories of the Pacific coast, the distant green parks, the vast palm and pineapple plantations, and the impossibly lush rainforest mountains created a panorama like virtually nothing I’ve ever seen. Photos were impossible - survival was a rather more pressing concern. Before the tour, I whined about the $60 fee; now I think I’d go hungry for a month just to try it again with a camera in hand.
Now I’m back at school in Ciudad Colon, more’s the pity, but I’m cheerfully proselytizing the whole experience to everyone in sight. That includes everyone reading this… and if you’re not willing to bet your life on an implausibly thin piece of nylon, will you at least wire me the money to do it again myself?
Ok, hugs to all, to my readings and thesis I flee. Next up – photos on Thursday!!!
In which all bodes ill...
I just wanted to rant, briefly, that it seems awfully bloody likely that the destruction of the Al-Askariya Mosque in Iraq is a portent of profoundly ugly things to come, and the last nail in the coffin of the comprehensive American failure there. Damn it... there's no way this can end well.
The symbolism of destroying this, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam and closely associated with the Imam Mehdi, the Shia saviour of humanity, will almost certainly be too vicious for Shia Iraqis to eventually forgive. Sunni mosques are burning all over Iraq after reprisal attacks. Though it's tempting to think this is just another round of the periodic spasms of violence in Iraq, I suspect this is in fact the final straw that finally drives Iraq into all-out civil war.
Happy Hug Day!
In keeping with my huggy traditions, I've been attempting to earn the title "Huggiest Person in Central America", which has turned out to be considerably more difficult than being the huggiest person in Africa, inasmuch as the UPeace crowd are a pretty huggy bunch.
But it's a worthwhile effort all the same, and given a few more months, I'm certain I'll persevere - wish me luck!
In keeping with my tradition...
...of pirating post ideas from
Bree, I'm hereby briefly blogging about the movies I've seen in the last couple months. One of Costa Rica's oddities is that most movies arrive in the video stores before they hit the theatres, but between them I've been able to catch a solid selection of films in the New Year.
January to Mid-Frebruaryish
MunichComplex, a touch overlong, and occasionally absent-minded, Steven Spielberg's rumination on the moral costs of counter-terrorism is still profoundly moving and expertly forged. The performances are uniformly excellent, Kaminski's cinematography is better than anything else of the last year, and the violence is excruciating - as it should be. Spielberg seems to have turfed his endless need to redeem his characters in the final frame - no one ends the story any safer, any wiser, or any happier than when they started. It left me pondering for days afterwards, and worthy of another viewing as soon as I can stomach it. Five stars out of five.
SyrianaI'm wrapping up a Master's degree in international politics, writing a thesis about the psychology of religious terrorism. So when I watch Syriana and fail to grasp what links Character X to Character Y, or exactly how the requisite evil corporation manipulates the US government into installing a puppet emir in a fictional Arab oil state, I comfortably blame my confusion on sloppy storytelling rather than my own inability to follow the film. Really, did it have to be
this convoluted? Though a carbon-copy of Traffic (with oil substituted for drugs), Syriana is often sharply-written, with fine performances from a vast ensemble cast, and enjoys glorious desert photography. But it suffers from the apparently irresistible need of any self-professed
Important Film to warp international politics into a set of crude cliches, with brazen evil lurking in every boardroom and cabinet office. What little I know of the real world of oil, money and power suggests a stage far more intricate, greyer, and ultimately much more frightening than this disappointing film. Three stars (barely) out of five.
The Constant GardenerThis fine flick deserves many of the same naggy criticisms I hurled at Syriana, but boasts even better photography, a sharply-winding but ultimately comprehensible script, and truly extraordinary performances from both Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. Sadder than a box full of three-legged kittens, but worth the emotional battery. Four stars out of five.
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-RabbitI've never seen Citizen Kane, but even absent that comparison, I'm almost certain that Wallace and Gromit is the finest film ever made, anywhere, by anyone. To try to describe it would be a crime. A masterpiece on every imaginable and unimaginable level. Five stars out of five (duh).
CrashYet another Important Film (too many of these this year), this exploration of American racial tension starts out by hobbling itself with cliches, and almost had me reaching for the remote in teh first ten minutes. But then Crash smartened up, picked up the pace, and became a surprisingly insightful, nuanced discussion of all the things Americans think about but go to great lengths to avoid talking about. A huge and talented cast, an increasingly engrossing script, and steady-but-not-too-showy direction made this a very pleasant surprise. Four and a half stars.
Lord of WarPossibly the most cynical film I've ever seen, and a surprisingly successful guilty pleasure. Andrew Niccol's exploration of the moral promiscuity of the global arms trade is incisive, over-the-top, and tons of fun until it becomes depressing as hell. It's a nice thing to see any movie these days that's so reliant on quiet conversation, with nary a gunfight to be found. Occasionally too self-referential for its own good, and the subject matter eventually (and inevitably) drives the viewer into a moral abyss, but a great ride while it lasts.
Transporter 2I'm not hard to please when it comes to brainless beat-em-ups. But I don't comprehend how a movie this astonishingly stupid ever got made - and with only one worthwhile fight scene in the entire miserable mix. Ugh. One and a half stars.
I think that's it for now. Still looking forward to Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, Night Watch, and, above all, Ice Age 2. Good times lie ahead.
The greatest injustice in all human history...
I have no Canadian news access...
In the middle of the Winter Olympics...
While, this being Latin America, ESPN and Fox Sports are only covering soccer...
and even NBC only spends 20 minutes a day covering the (exclusively American) Olympic results...
For someone who usually goes without sleep for two weeks every four years, this is a difficult thing to handle.
Anybody want to volunteer to keep me posted via this blog?
In which I relate the details which no one else really wants to hear...
Well, the election's all done with, I almost kinda-sorta met Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias, the vote's too close to call, and it'll be two weeks or so before this ship of state has a captain. It's time for me to get back to my schoolwork.
Having finished my fascinating three-week course on terrorism and the mass media, I've now moved on to Conflict Management, the year's flagship course and apparently a great primer on how to conduct peace negotiations. I'm looking forward to it, particularly since my first assignment is to head a simulation, in which I play the leader of a small Southeast Asian country deciding whether or not to get all snippy with the United States. Good times.
I've also been forced, by deadline more than common sense, to get my all-important thesis under way. After two or three topic changes, I seem to have settled on "The Evolutionary Psychology of Religious Violence", a slightly amateurish exploration of the ways a few universal evolutionary quirks can be manipulated in weird ways to produce a religious terrorist. Interesting stuff, though it grows more complicated every time I look at it and it's starting to hurt my noggin'.
More notably, the fact that I've started my thesis marks the just-past-halfway point in my year in Costa Rica. I've been here almost 6 months, and I'm done in another five or so. Still not a clue what the next step is, but if history guides me, something funky will come up.
If only I spoke Spanish...
Very busy today, all through Monday. I'm an official international observer for the Costa Rican elections. Yay me! Today that consisted of lounging in the auditorium at the San Jose Radisson, struggling desperately to understand the arcane tongue spoken by the candidates. Maybe it will percolate through my brainmeats by tomorrow, when I resume such stimulating activities.
Back for a minute...
Some obscure tropical illness has rendered me useless for the last couple of days, but I've summoned the energy to not post about the State of the Union address.
Once upon a time, I blogged in sardonic detail about the inanity and vicious falsehood of King George's yearly blather. But this one just didn't seem worth the trouble, nor would it have had I not been fighting off this unfathomable Costa Rican dizzy-flu (don't ask). This speech was neither offensive enough nor detailed enough nor sufficiently hilarious to warrant even this brief post. Which I why I'll stop writing now.
