Lima to Cuzco

I was kind of tired from the trip from San Jose Costa Rica to Lima Peru. All the drinks I downed and food I ate just made me want to go to bed early. After I got checked into my hotel I sent out some emails to my family and walked around the neighborhood of my hotel for a short while before going back and watching tv and killing the night in bed alone. The one thing I did notice though while walking around was all the grilled guinea pigs in the restaurants as I walked around town. Peru and Ecuador both eat a lot of guinea pigs. Like people always say, it tastes like chicken so why not just eat chicken. Myself I just ate some potato soup and had a beer.

The next morning I went on a city tour of Lima. A bus picked me up at my hotel and after we picked up all the passengers we went to the main square and walked around looking at the government buildings and the architecture around the square. I liked the balconies with all the woodwork that looked almost like lace. It reminded me of Indonesia. Then we all piled back in the bus and went down to the ocean. There were some fishing boats circling around a big school of tuna just offshore. They had the helicopters and the spotter planes working the school too. The planes are spotters that direct the boats to the general area then the helicopters direct the traffic close up. The boats circle the school with a big net and then pull it in. It is a big operation with high revenue coming from the end product. Usually the fish are further offshore so we were lucky to see them working so close to shore. We stopped at a few more local tourist highlights that I will skip over, sorry but city tours all are starting to look the same to me. I must be getting jaded from seeing too many of them. We saw the cathedral, museums, main suburbs and drove past the rich and the poor areas of town to get a good cross section of how people live here. We saw a lot of indigenous looking people compared to other countries I have been to. The colorful clothes the indigenous people wore made them stand out. Personally I like all the hats they tend to wear here in Peru, usually too small of a hat at that. The guide explained that different groups wore different colors and styles so that you could easily tell where someone was from by their dress. The tour was in Spanish but I had no problem with the guide's explanations of things in Spanish. He also spoke some English and we had a few short talks about this and that. We stopped for a lunch that was meant to be a typical lunch. There were lots of different potatoes of course, some of which were stuffed with various things like meat, some quinoa grain, lots of colored corn, creole dishes with hot and sweet chilis, rice, soups, chicharon, empanadas, tamales, ceviche, grilled fish, guinea pig, chicken, and of course lima beans in salads and soups or as a side dish alone and then more foods that I did not know the names of. We washed it all down with local beer and a shot or two of pisco sours. I think the lunch was the highlight of the tour for me. I hung out with a Columbian mother and her daughter during most of the tour. I think mom was trying to set her daughter, who was about mid twenties, up with me but I never bit on all the cues she was dropping at me. I played ignorant. We had a good time talking and tasting all the different foods though. I bought them some rounds of drinks and they started acting like they were loaded but I am pretty sure it was just an act.

The tour ended mid to late afternoon and I was dropped off at my hotel. My guide called me almost as soon as I got back to my room to make arrangements for the next day. I was flying to Cuzco in the morning with my guide. She told me that usually they would have just met me in Cuzco but that she wanted to go to Lima to see some family so they had her meet me at the airport. She was sweet and fun to hang out with. I had another early night. I have some mobility problems and high chronic pain that things like airports and tours just seem to make my pain problems even worse so I need to rest. I don't sleep much but I rest in my room. I had a nice shower and then a warm bath to help soothe my sore body. In the morning I was escorted to the airport and we flew to Cuzco. The flight was very easy with no problems. The visibility was great and we could see all the mountains as we flew over them. I had to think about the plane load of people that crashed up in these mountains and ended up eating each other to survive. I was going from sea level to over 11,000 feet or 3,400 meters. That can be quite a shock to the body. To ease the shock there is coca tea everywhere around the airport and in all the stores and hotels and restaurants. There are also coca leaves that can be chewed but they were kind of bitter tasting to me. I could and did drink a lot of the tea. I think it helped me adjust to the altitude like it was supposed to do. After checking into my hotel, the next morning was scheduled for another city tour of Cuzco and the surrounding area. My guide and I went out for a few drinks after checking into our hotel and cleaning up. Cuzco was much smaller of a city than Lima had been and almost everybody looked to be indigenous. I was getting kind of a speedy buzz from all the coca I was eating and drinking. I had no problems from the altitude so far. I was warned by my guide that some people suddenly get very sick after seeming to be unaffected by the altitude. She kept encouraging me to do more coca. I asked her about cocaine and she told me the authorities were very tough on all illegal drugs so she advised me to not even talk about them or I could get in serious trouble or end up in prison. The general attitude so far in Peru was that the people all seemed very straight and serious. I was not seeing very much fun and laughter around town, even in the bars we were hanging out in. The people seemed contented with life, they were just not laughing much. My guide and I were doing our share of having fun together, she could sure laugh and we did.

Back on the road again

I had my reservations to South America now. There was still a month to wait until I left and I filled my time trying to get healthier than I was feeling after getting beat up by the meds. I tried to eat as healthy as I could with a good well balanced diet and only small amounts of alcohol. I started feeling better as the days went by. I even started going to the beach for short periods of time again. I was slowly losing the sun sensitivity. My skin still got a red rash like look every time I went out in the sun but it disappeared shortly after I got out of the sun and was always totally gone by the next morning. I kept reading a lot of novels. the books were piling up. I exhausted the supply of books at the book exchange in Quepos. I was begging books off of tourists I saw reading at the beach or where ever I saw somebody reading. I bought some of them and traded for some of them. The time was crawling slowly toward my departure date.

I found a ride up to San Jose with some tourists. We had a pleasant ride with a few stops here and there on the way to look at the crocodiles near the Tarcoles River and to see the coffee growing on some farms along the way. We saw a few sloths and monkeys too and caught a glimpse of a pair of scarlet macaws flying off in the distance but not close up. Once in San Jose I showed them the main tourist places in town and then I went over to my girlfriends house to spend the night before I flew out in the morning. She was always glad to see me. I had called her a couple of days earlier to tell her I would be coming over. She had a gourmet meal prepared for me when I arrived. The ticas sure know how to treat a guy to make them happy. We had a nice talk over dinner and then watched some tv together before I had an early night.

I was all packed up already for my trip. I was traveling very light with just a small packpack only half full. I figured I could buy some clothes once I got there since my clothes were getting kind of ratty anyways. I had my camera and my computer with me too but not much else. I arranged a taxi the night before to make sure I got to the airport on time. No problems with any of my plans so far and I hoped it kept going smoothly for the entire trip. I breezed through the airport check in and security then waited in the lounge for my flight to board. I met about a dozen people that I had hung out with in Manuel Antonio and Quepos over the last couple of months. We had a few drinks in the airport before my flight was called to board. I was flying Taca to Lima via Panama City stopover. I found my seat in the middle of coach and sat down to try to sleep a bit since I had almost a seven hour flight including the layover in Panama City.

As soon as the flight was in the air and the flight attendants could walk around one of the flight attendants came up to me and asked me to come with her. She did not tell me what she wanted but just asked me very nicely to go with her. She asked me where my luggage was and I pointed to the overhead. She opened it and took out my backpack. We walked up to the first class section in the front of the plane and she offered me a seat. There was nobody else in first class at all. Another flight attendant immediately offered me a big smile and a drink then handed me a menu to pick out some food. I took my drink and we started to talk. The two flight attendants spent the entire flight serving and entertaining me. I had a blast to say the least. We were flirting big time and eating and drinking. I was starting to get a bit drunk after a few hours. The flight attendants were both ticas from San Jose. I think if we had more privacy we would have had an even better time together. They doted on me to the extreme almost as if I was being punked somehow. I was almost suspicious of their over whelming hospitality but it was so much fun that I just went with the flow of things. We talked about ticas and about Costa Rica. They wanted to know if I had a tica girlfriend. When I told them I had several in different cities they told me that was the tico way. A tico saying is that they all have a wife, a couple of girlfriends and a boyfriend. The ticas should have the same expression for themselves since they all pretty much have a husband, a couple of boyfriends and a girlfriend or two also. We laughed about that and they asked me for details about my girlfriends. I refused to tell them any details. I told them I only offer details of my previous lovers if I am already naked in bed with someone not just sitting around flirting like we were doing. They liked that. They told me about how ticos and ticas gossip all the time about the love lives of others but that they never talk about their own experiences even if they are naked in bed with someone. I pointed out how unfair that could be but they did not care. The flight went way to quickly for me and needless to sy I did not get any of the sleep I had planned on getting on the flight down.

When we landed I got hugs to go from my friendly flight attendants and again went through customs with no problems whatsoever. As I walked out of the security area looking for my name on a card I saw my name being held up by another nice young woman. I smiled at her in my satiated state after my overindulgent flight and she told me she would be my guide for the next two weeks in Peru. I noted to myself that I would have to thank my travel agents when I got back to Quepos for setting up this wonderful experience so far. Even if everything went wrong from here on out I don't think I would have complained. She walked me to her car and she took me for a personal guided tour of Lima before taking me to my hotel and helping me check in. What a great start to my trip. Back on the road was being good to me, very good.

By the way the pics of Lima are from Wiki because I had camera problems again.

Back in Quepos taking chemo

Back in Costa Rica from Miami I went straight back home and tried to hook up my new internet. It did not work. I called the telephone company and they told me that they would have to send someone out to get it working. Remember it took me four years to get them to come out the last time so this time I just gave up. I ended up paying another guy to use his wireless network that he already had working. The signal was not real strong in my house but it worked as long as it wasn't raining real hard. Telecommunications in Costa Rica are controlled by the socialist government and it is terrible in every which way. They are always talking about how they are going to improve it but it is all talk all the time. Funny though, the telecommunications in the president's town are state of the art, go figure. Telecom employees also buy all the new phone lines up as soon as thy are available then they sell them at a premium.

I went back to my beach routine after I got my new house all set up. I will always love a nice tropical beach. There was only one problem. I started to take some meds for my cancer problems. The meds made me sensitive to the sun. At first I thought I could just use sunscreen and I would be fine. A few attempts quickly showed me that I was too sensitive even slathered in sunscreen. I tried going in street clothes but besides looking like a perve at the beach dressed like that, it was just too hot and humid to wear so many clothes. I stopped going to the beach. I started to read books instead.

I am a read-a-holic. I take reading a day at a time and one urge at a time. Once I start reading I have a hard time stopping. I will read for thirty or forty hours without stopping, novel after novel only stopping to eat and drink. I was borrowing books from some of my friends that were also readers. I found mostly books that were vacation reads like mysteries and action adventure or sifi type books. I found one friend from Berkeley California that had an outstanding diverse book collection and I borrowed heavily from him. My favorite books were Tim Dorsey books about a serial killer in Florida. They are mindless entertaining reads. You actually cheer the serial killer sometimes when he kills some of his victims that really deserved it. I also read all of Carl Hiaasen's books and several other Florida writers along the same vein. I could only rarely find any books that had any real merit other than fun reads.

I started to get weaker and sicker the longer I took my meds. I had a hard time just getting out to buy groceries. I had no energy at all, tired all the time. I zoned out in front of the TV if I didn't have a book to read. I had to quit drinking so going to the bars was not much fun. Hanging out with drunks when you are not drinking too just makes them look stupid. They were my friends I didn't want them to look stupid. What would that say about me? My tica friend came over pretty often. I tried to have her do my shopping when I was too tired but she was a terrible shopper. She came home with a bag full of candy and other totally unhealthy foods. She was like a kid sometimes. I still cooked almost all of my own food. I had a fairly healthy diet of oatmeal in the morning with fresh fruits and vegies for lunch and dinner with fresh fish and chicken for proteins. I made a lot of rice and bean dishes but I tended to make it Mexican American style not Central American style. I made a mean chili or two or three.

After a few months of this routine I called up my doctor and told him I didn't want to be treated anymore. He told me to just stop taking the meds and I would recover quickly. I quit taking them but it took me almost a month to get some energy back and to be able to go out in the sun without getting a rash and sunburn. My hair never fell out but I kept it shaved real short anyway so it would not have been a big deal if I had lost it.

I did one short trip down to Panama to renew my visa. We drove down to the border and took a taxi into David from the border. We ate and drank in the nice hotels and restaurants around David. They had a more diverse international range of restaurants than Quepos/Manuel Antonio had so we indulged in the treats we could find. I went to the casino to watch the people but I did not play the games.

On the way back to Quepos the police stopped us for speeding. My friend was driving and he was not real experienced in dealing with crooked cops and bribes. We let him handle the stop himself. One Passenger did have some joints rolled in his pocket and he negotiated his own on the spot fine with one of the cops while the driver dealt with his. We got back in the car when he was done and he showed us the ticket he got. Then he told us he paid an on the spot fine of $65.00. We laughed at him because the ticket only costs under ten dollars to pay at the bank. He also still had the ticket after paying the fine. He decided to go back and get his original ticket back from the cop. He jumped out and came back about fifteen minutes later. He had paid another thirty bucks for the original ticket. We laughed our asses off at him when he got back in the car. This time the cops saw us roaring at him and they joined in too at the humor of the situation. They made a fortune off of him for a ten dollar ticket. If you are going to be paying corrupt cops off at least learn the going rates. Five dollars or up to twenty dollars for a major crime would be enough to cover the "on the spot fines."

When I got home I was getting my energy back again and I wanted to do some more traveling. I went down to my friendly travel agent and ended up booking a trip to Peru and Ecuador. I was leaving in a month. I started to get excited. I was going back on the road again.

Side trip to Miami

So my Costa Rica visa needed renewing again and I also wanted to buy some electronics for my house. Imported goods in Costa Rica are taxed at a ridiculously high rate. The effect of the high taxes is that people shop outside of the country and then bring the goods into the country to avoid paying the taxes. The government gets nothing out of the deal. The high taxes don't work the way they were intended to work. I decided to fly to Miami to kill both birds with one stone. There were also roundtrip flights to Miami for well under two hundred dollars. I booked a flight.

I flew from San Jose Costa Rica's nice new terminal into Miami international airport's crazy mess. The airport in Miami is one of the worst airports I have ever been in. The signs were terrible in the airport. Due to remodeling that was very messy, most of the signs were giving wrong information about where to go and things. There was nobody anywhere that spoke any English. I had to speak Spanish to get information. I felt like Miami was the foreign country and San Jose Costa Rica was the more American feeling airport with way more English speakers available. Despite the poor airport I did find my way to my hotel shuttle and made it to my room. The hotel was having a bed bug problem. Yikes! Not what I wanted to hear. There were exterminators working only a few doors away from mine. I talked to them and they told me that they had inspected the room I was in and they were sure there were no pests in it. I wasn't sure I should believe them but I was too lazy to go find a different hotel so I took the chance.

I went down to the hotel bar after a nice hot shower. There were a few people there. I ordered my drink and a hostess came up to me a few minutes later to introduce the guests to each other. I was not used to this type of thing in a hotel bar but I enjoyed meeting the other guests. We talked for a while and had a pretty good time in the end. I was tired though and I went back to my room early and watched tv for an early night.

The next morning I did all my shopping. I wanted to walk and use public transit. The hotel workers did not seem to know anything at all about using public transit and they told me that walking in Miami is very dangerous. I asked why and they told me I will get robbed or hit by a car. I kind of laughed at their attitude and walked out of the hotel with a map in hand. I started to walk to a mall about a mile away from the hotel. The first street I came to I found out what being a pedestrian in Miami was like. The road was a six lane road with a crosswalk painted in the intersection I was crossing. Not one car would stop for a pedestrian. I waited and waited but there was no way to cross the busy street. I asked another young kid walking along how to get across the street and he told me I had to walk up two long blocks to a light and I would be able to get across there. I took his advice and made it across. All the street crossings were like that. There had to be a light to get across the street and even with the light a pedestrian had to be super vigilant and quick footed or the cars would hit you. I was very careful and made it safely. The hotel was half right already. Was I going to get mugged next?

I bought all my items I needed at the mall and when I was done I thought about walking back to the hotel. I had a bunch of bags from electronics stores and I would have looked like an easy target for thieves so I broke down and took a taxi back to the hotel. I put my stuff in my room and went down for lunch in the hotel bar restaurant. I met a Chinese guy there and we talked a while. He asked me if I knew anything about real estate in Miami. I told him all I knew is that the market had fallen flat recently in Miami. Prices had been falling for some time now and there were some good deals available if he was buying. He told me he was buying. I told him how to find a real estate agent before I left. He called one and arranged to go meet them the next morning. He seemed happy for my help. I had nothing else to do in Miami so I decided to make a tour around town. I booked a tour through the hotel desk for all day the next day.

When I went down to the hotel restaurant to eat breakfast, the Chinese guy was there trying to figure out how to get to his real estate agent's office. I helped him get a taxi and then sat down to wait for my bus. It came right on time. I jumped on board the empty bus and we took off to pick up more passengers at other hotels. The bus started to fill up. When we got to the Four Seasons hotel an English woman stepped up the stairs of the bus and scanned the passengers already onboard. When her eyes met mine she immediately walked over and sat down next to me. She said hello in a thick Wales accent. I recognized the accent and she was surprised that I knew where she was from. She told me her experience with Americans so far had been that they knew nothing about geography. I laughed and we started to talk. Her hand started to rub my thigh within two minutes. I had to think about it for a minute to make sure that she was rubbing my thigh on purpose and not just by accident. Sure enough she was hitting on me. I laughed to myself and went right on talking to her.

We stopped at one more hotel before we were starting the tour. As soon as the bus stopped she ran up to the driver and talked to him for a second then ran off the bus. She came back a few minutes later with two drinks in her hands. She handed me a margarita. Eight fifteen in the morning and we were drinking tokillya already. I took it and shook my head. We went right back to our conversation. She was a very fun loving and witty woman. I had more fun with her than I have had with almost anybody in years. We talked about world traveling. She invited me to come along with her and travel the world again. She offered to pay for everything and go first class. She was leaving on a cruise the next day and told me I could start right there. Everytime the opportunity came along she bought some more drinks. I was getting drunk quickly and so was she. She started asking me to come back to her hotel with me so we could have some fun after the tour was over. I told her we would see when we were done with the tour.

We drove around Miami in the bus and stopped at all the typical tourist spots. Then we boarded a boat to go see how the rich live on the islands in the bay. We got a picture taken of the two of us before we boarded the boat. She bought several copies to send pics home to her family she told me. I just laughed. We laughed together all day long. But by the time the tour was over I was really really drunk. She wanted me to get off with her at the Four Seasons and go to an Irish pub somewhere. I ended up backing out of the sure thing. I don't do that very often but I was so drunk I wasn't sure I could even stay awake to say nothing of going out drinking some more and then getting raped by her. She clearly had that in her mind. She made it very clear. I was not misreading her intentions. She was very graphic in her description of what she wanted to do to me. I hugged her and told her goodbye. I was so drunk she could have just grabbed me by the hand and taken me with her, I would not have been able to fight her off.

When I got back to my hotel I said something to the Cuban driver and he laughed his ass off. He told me I should have gone with the Wales woman because she was really rich. I laughed with him and told him I was no puto. I crawled back to my room and took a bath then conked out for the night. I had a hangover in the morning.

The Chinese guy was there for breakfast again. I asked him how his real estate hunt went and he told me he had bought 12 condos. I was impressed. I asked him how big they were and how much they cost and he started to babble about how many units each building had. He bought twelve entire highrise buildings full of condos not twelve individual units. He spent millions of dollars in one day. I was kind of taken aback by the scope of his purchases. I asked him if he needed a taxi to get to his real estate agent's office and he told me they were picking him up shortly. Sure enough a few minutes later a big limo pulled up and they came over to help him to the limo. I had to laugh at that too. The day before the real estate agent could not be bothered to pick him up but spend a few million dollars and all of a sudden he was getting rock star treatment. Money makes the world go round.

I spent the day at the pool recovering from my tour partying. There were several messages for me but I told the hotel to throw them away without looking at them. I made it back to Costa Rica the next day.

another short break

Sorry but I am having some health issues and won't be writing for a bit. Enjoy life and come back later.

Fishing in the mangroves

I spent the next couple of months after breaking my arm taking it easy at the beach and not doing much fishing or anything else too physical. I was getting a bit bored and wanted some action. I was invited to go fishing out in the mangroves with an expat friend of mine. I quickly took him up on his offer. My cast was off and my arm felt good but I wasn't ready to be fighting big huge fish yet. The mangroves would be just right.

I met my friend and we stocked up at the store on some snacks and drinks before stopping at a local fisherman's place to buy some bait from him. We bought some shrimp and some fresh sardines from him. I watched his workers baiting up long line rigs that they were going to drop out later that day. The longliners are everywhere in Costa Rica. The government lies to the world telling them that there is no longlining going on in Costa Rica. I don't know why they do that. They lie about a lot of things. The whole Costa Rica is a green country is a total lie. The government spins a good yarn about how green they are while turning a blind eye to all the non green things going on. Like the lack of sewer treatment. They dump almost all the sewage into the rivers making all the rivers polluted messes. They have been chopping down the rain forest (that the Government tells the world they are protecting) at an astonishing rate. They are just replacing it with a concrete jungle of Florida style developments. It is a very sad state of affairs.

We went over to launch his boat with our snacks and bait loaded into the cooler. We were using a small boston whaler with a little 15 horse motor. It was small but plenty big for the two of us in the flat and shallow waters of the mangrove swamps. The target species in the mangroves were, smallish pargo, triple tails, snook and various other small fish that I don't know the names of. After launching the boat we had to walk and swim the boat through some shallow water until we were in water deep enough to float in. Then we paddled until it was deep enough to use the motor. Finally we were motoring along the canals heading to the mouth of the mangroves and river that flowed through them. After about a twenty minute ride through winding ever widening canals we were near the mouth of the river where it widened out to a fairly good sized lagoon before it broke through the beach and flowed into the Pacific. We started fishing by trolling some broken back rebels along the shores on either side. We did not find fast action but there was a steady pick of small pargos. Some of the littler ones we threw back and if they were larger we threw them into the cooler. There was a mix of pargos and triple tails in the cooler. It was fun catching them on our light tackle. There was always the chance that a world record snook could be taken here as several world record snook have been caught here. We stopped and talked to the tico fishermen working along the shores. They had some nice snook in their boats but we didn't get a single snook. The locals were catching the snook on live bait and we were using dead bait and lures. Nobody had pargos much bigger than what we were catching. It was all good. We could have purchased snook to take home but we did not bother. The pargo and triple tails we were keeping would be enough table fare for us to share.

After tiring of trolling we dropped the anchor near a deep hole along the shore and we bait fished for a while. We still were only catching pargo. I caught some live bait and put out a rod with the live bait on but it was only catching pargo also. As the afternoon sun fell and the heat started to cool down the mosquitoes started to bother us so we pulled up the anchor and headed back up the river canals to the launching ramp. The tide was high enough to allow us to motor all the way to the ramp. We washed the boat down, cleaned the fish we kept and headed to the bar for a few beers. It was a nice fun day on the water with enough fish to have a great fish dinner cooked up for us at the restaurant. I looked forward to many more days fishing in the mangroves.

Trouble in Paradise

After my girlfriend went back to California I settled into my usual routine of going to the beach and enjoying myself the rest of the day and night. I had an easy, healthy life going on. I ate mostly fresh fruit and vegies that I bought at the farmer's market on Saturdays. I caught mahi mahi for fresh fish or sometimes tuna or sierra mackeral. Once in a while I would roast a chicken or something too. I was feeling healthier and healthier as my weight was down and my high chronic pain was under control for the most part.

One night around July 4th we had a party with a bunch of expats. All the typical American holidays are celebrated by expats with get togethers for bbqs and the traditional foods or whatever, like turkey and all the fixings for Thanksgiving or hot dogs and hamburgers for the fourth of July. After the bbq I had a date but she went home to her kids around midnight so I was going to go over to the Casino nearby for a drink before I went to sleep. As I was walking to the casino I had a little incident where I fell down and landed hard before rolling into the ditch along the side of the road. I could not get up for almost ten minutes. When I was able to get back up I was hurting. I stumbled back to my house and jumped in the shower to see if I was alright. I washed off the dirt and cleaned the scrapes but my arm felt like it was broken. Sure enough within a half hour it was very swollen and was getting very black and blue. I tried to sleep but the pain was too much for me to sleep.

When the sun came up I got dressed and went down to the street to flag down a taxi to take me the the hospital. I was lucky that there was no long line when I arrived at the emergency room. The doctor saw me almost right away. She did an Xray and told me my arm was broken but that the break was back in position already so all I would need is a cast for 6 to 8 weeks. She grabbed the plaster to start making a cast.

I started to think about my previous experiences with casts and I began to panic a bit. I was in a tropical rain forest with extremely high humidity and high temperatures on a daily basis. A big thick plaster cast would get really rank under the plaster very quickly and to leave it on for as much as two months would be too much for me with the itchy smelly heavy plaster cast.

I asked her if she would do a fiberglass cast. I knew whe could because I could see the fiberglass in her case of materials. She told me she had to do a plaster cast and we started to argue over it. We went at it for at least twenty minutes going back and forth about the cast material. Finally I boiled down her reason to being the extra cost of the fiberglass over the cheap cost of plaster. I offered to pay the higher costs for the fiberglass and after a little more argument she agreed to make a fiberglass cast for me. I was relieved to have convinced her to use the fiberglass regardless of how much extra I had to pay.

She put the glass cast on in only a few minutes and I was ready to go home. I just had to go pay at the office for my emergency room visit, the Xrays and the cost of the cast. I wasn't sure how much I was in for. Back in the States a broken arm emergency room visit typically runs into thousands of dollars by the time you get out the door. I went to the hospital records office and sat down to wait for my bill. My arm felt better already with the bright blue fiberglass cast holding it nicely in place. At least it was my left arm not my right one.

The woman asked me how I was going to pay and I told her cash. She acted surprised and asked if I had enough cash on me to cover it. I told her to give me the total amount of the bill before I could answer her and if it was more than I had with me I would take a taxi to the bank and get the balance. She agreed to that and started to add up the costs for me. After about a half hour of figuring and record keeping she gave me the bill. I looked down at it and asked her if this was the complete bill and she told me yes it was the total amount. I pulled the $22.75 out of my pocket and paid the woman. The fiberglass cast over the plaster cast cost me the additional $6 or I would have had a bill for only $16 instead of the outrageous $22.75 I had to pay.

I grabbed a taxi and headed home. My arm was in a cast for the next seven weeks. After two weeks I split the fiberglass into a clamshell by myself so that I could wash underneath it. I was very careful not to let the arm move while I rinsed off the grunge every time I opened the clamshell. In the end it healed nicely. I never had any more trouble with it and never even went back to the doctor for the final checkup and Xrays that she told me to come back for.

The medical care in Costa Rica is very good and the cost is more than reasonable. Why does the American medical community cost so much? It is criminal that they charge such outrageous rates in the States. President Obama's new medical overhaul is long overdue in the States but it will not go far enough I am sure. The AMA will mess it up and assure themselves of high costs as long as they exist. I will fly to Costa Rica if I need any medical care in the future.

Going crazy from Mosquitoes

We were in our hotel room under the mosquito net but there were still mosquitoes biting my girlfriend. She was going crazy from so many bites. She asked me to go sleep in the other bed so that she could cover up under the blanket and hide from the mosquitoes. So I went over to the other bed and fell asleep. A couple of hours later I heard her screaming about the mosquitoes again and I got up to check on her. She looked terrible. She had bites all over her. She was scratching them and pretty much had already lost it mentally over all the bites. Some of the places she had been scratching were bleeding already. She was crying like a baby. I got her some more benadryl to take and closed up her netting better than she had it and after a little bit of calming, soothing talk I got her to calm down a bit. She wanted to go home right away. She told me she never wanted to go to a jungle again. I wasn't very bit up at all and that pissed her off like I was holding out some secret that I hadn't told her about. I stayed with her to try to keep her from going totally insane over the bites but I wasn't very helpful. The sun finally came up and the mosquitoes seemed to slow down their assault on her--or maybe there just wasn't any blood left in her for them to suck out. She was so covered in bites it looked like she had a rash like the measles or something like that. She was not a happy camper. We showered and I went down to eat breakfast but she stayed in the room to try to catch up on some sleep. I brought some food back for her but she didn't want to eat. After a short discussion we decided that I would go out on the boat ride and she would stay in the room and try to get some sleep.

I went down and joined my friends and we took off to see some dolphins and to do a little bit of fishing. I had seen dolphins many times in all the fishing I had done in my lifetime. This trip was booked more for my girlfriend than for me and here I was out doing it without her. Such is life. We saw a huge school of spinner dolphins. The spinner dolphins are fun to watch. they jump out of the water with gleeful abandon and spin in tight circles end over end or just spinning as they arc up out of the water. They looked to be jumping about twenty feet high on a lot of their jumps. It looked like they just flat out loved life. We put some trolling rods out and only caught some needlefish and a couple of small pargos. It was ok by me. I just love being out on the ocean whether I catch fish, look at dolphins or just ride around.

When we got back to the hotel my girlfriend was feeling better. She came down for dinner and we listened to the other guests tell us about their trip out to Cano island. It was a long boat ride but they saw spinner dolphins too and climbed up to the top of the island. They enjoyed it. They saw lots of the large round stone balls that I had heard about. Some of them are six feet or more in diameter and perfectly round. Nobody knows for sure how they were made or why but there is some speculation that they were grave markers and the bigger ones were for more important people. That could be totally wrong though. They also snorkeled a little and saw some sharks, rays and eels along with some colorful fish. We spent a long time talking and drinking after dinner. It was enjoyable to us all and my girlfriend was recovering somewhat from her bug phobia.

We went to the hotel room eventually, a bit drunk and happy. After a nice long hot shower we crawled into bed. I made sure to kill as many mosquitoes as I could find and I very carefully tucked the netting in all around the bed before we went to sleep. It was much better than the night before. Lots of benadryl didn't hurt either. In the morning we had breakfast and jumped back into a water taxi for the ride back up the river to the airport. I enjoyed the Osa and my girlfriend will never forget the place. The flight back to Quepos was quick and painless. We even had some time to go to the beach for a little bit in the afternoon. The beach in Manuel Antonio is very nice and my girlfriend likes it as much as I do. I also think the salt water was helping her mosquito bites feel better because she was finally happy again.

More Corcovado Park

We were having a great time in Corcovado National Park hunting for animals and birds. There was only one problem with the hike. Bugs. Lots of bugs. Big Bugs, little bugs, biting bugs, crawling bugs, slithering bugs, flying bugs and bugs on bugs. My girlfriend was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and the biting flies. She was not having a very good time because of all the bugs. Survivor man did a stint in these same jungles and in an interview someone asked him where the worst place he was ever dropped off to survive in and he answered the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. My girlfriend was agreeing with him. Surprisingly the bugs were not bothering me at all. I did not even use any bug spray like everyone else was using. I did get bit by one ant that hurt like a son of a bitch but that was about it. My friend though was almost crying. She wanted to go back and get out of this place. Around midday we entered a clearing and there was a building where we ate our lunch. The bugs were not so bad inside the building so we rehydrated our blood drained bodies and then headed back out for the last part of our hike and to then back to the beach where our boat was coming back to pick us up.

This time we saw a large bairds tapir which was interesting to see. We also saw footprints of a big cat stalking around us as we hiked along the trail. We never saw the big cat but the foot prints were only a few seconds old on the path so it was watching us. I wish we would have spotted it but try as we might the big cat was too elusive for us.

When we got back to the beach the breeze was blowing and it kept the bugs away. There were some biting sand fleas but they were not as bad as the bugs in the jungles. We waited for our boat to come and pick us up. While we waited we saw some coatis eating eggs in the sand. They were probably sea turtle eggs that they were finding. I went up to look and sure enough the tell tale half a ping pong ball like egg shells were scattered where the coatis had been feeding. A coati is kind of like a redish raccoon. The coastline was gorgeous except for one thing, even in a place that was as out of the way as we were in, the beach was littered with plastic bags and other debris, mostly plastic that had been washed ashore with the tides. Pollution is everywhere compliments of humankind.

Our boat arrived to pick us up and we waded out to get in it. All of a sudden my foot was on fire. I yelled and ran to the boat and jumped in to see what the hell was the problem. The boat captain quickly opened a bottle of ammonia and poured it over my burning foot. He laughed and told me it was just a jellyfish sting. The ammonia helped to get rid of the jellyfish toxin. It did help but my foot still hurt. It looked like a burn. Over the next two weeks the area where I was stung basically rotted away and fell off leaving a big hole in my foot that took about a month to heal. Such is life.

Back at the hotel we ate another great dinner of mahi mahi and pargo with all the Tico sidedishes like beans and rice, salad, fried plantain, pickled vegies and some bread and of course dessert of cake and ice cream. We all rehashed our day and passed our cameras around looking at each other's pictures. The owner operator of the hotel was a single Costa Rican woman or Tica. She was very entertaining. She kept inviting me back sometime in the future without my girlfriend. That got a few smiles out of my girlfriend. The mosquitoes were thick all through the dinner and my girlfriend wanted to go back to the hotel room and hide out under the mosquito net over the bed. The hotel owner offered her some benadryl for the itching. She took some and we went to the room. The next day was we were planning on a boat trip to go see dolphins and stuff on the ocean and a short fishing time. No bugs out on the ocean I told my girlfriend and she was very happy to hear that. We were heading back to Quepos the next day after that. We crawled in bed and covered up with the mosquito net.

Corcovado National Park, Osa, Costa Rica

My girlfriend from California wanted to come down to Costa Rica for a visit again. I told her to come on down and I would meet her at the airport. I could hardly parade her around Quepos with all my flavor of the days we would run into so I decided to go on a trip to the Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula to the South of Quepos/Manuel Antonio. The Osa is a much less developed area and it has a large National Park where you can see scarlet macaws, big cats like jaguars or pumas, lots of monkeys, tropical birds and many other interesting tropical rainforest things.

I met her at the airport and we spent the night at my house. We went to Cafe Aqua Azul because she always liked sitting up on the hill watching the monkeys and birds. Then we flew to Osa the next day. I had booked the trip with a travel agent so everything was planned already. We were met at the airport by a taxi that took us over to the river where we boarded a small boat for a ride to our hotel. There were four other people in our group. One older couple from North Carolina and a couple from the midwest in the States. On the ride down the river we saw lots of birds and some snakes. Of course there were crocodiles along the shore and some swimming out in the current of the river too. I was hoping to see a manatee but we were not lucky enough to find one.

The ride down the river was about an hour long and then we came to the mouth of the river and there were large waves breaking ahead of us. Our boat captain deftly drove our small boat over around and through the crashing waves. It was a bit on the dicey side. One mistake in waves this size and we would have capsized and we would have been swimming in the water with all the crocodiles. He made it look easy the way he slid through this dangerous area. I asked him about it and he told me he has been driving this route for over thirty five years so he was quite familiar with the method to the madness. We followed the coast south for another forty five minutes or so. We could see dolphins playing further offshore. There were fish following in our wake that were jumping out of the water. Our guide told us they were needlefish. Then we motored into a very small bay and he ran the boat straight into the shallows and grounded the boat on the rocky shore. We got out and walked through ankle deep water to get the rest of the way to the beach and they carried our bags for us. We climbed up the hillside to our hotel and checked in. There was one other couple at the hotel already so there was a total of eight guests.

We cleaned up in our rooms and got ready to go eat dinner since the hotel was all inclusive. There were lots of tropical plants growing on the grounds of the hotel and we stopped to look at the chocolate growing on the trunk of its tree. There were also bananas, mangos, papayas, coconuts and tons of flowers growing around us. The dinner was very entertaining as we all got to know a little bit about each other through small talk while we ate. The host explained our options for activities while we were there. All of us wanted to go to the park to hike around and see animals and birds. We booked an all day excursion for the next morning to the park. A boat would pick us up right after breakfast. We spent the night talking and drinking with our new friends before hitting the sack fairly early.

The next morning after a very good filling breakfast we again walked through the ankle deep water to get on the water taxi and we were off to the park. After about an hour we rode the waves into the shore and beached the boat again. We got out and walked to shore with absolutely nothing but jungle everywhere we looked. We were assured that our guide would meet up with us there. While we were there I spotted some scarlet macaws and we all ran up the beach to look at the beautiful scarlet colored parrots playing and eating in a tree right on the beach. Our guide showed up and after the macaws flew off we headed into the jungles for our hike. I was quietly saying, lions and tigers and bears oh my....In the morning we saw lots of monkeys and a few birds. Our guide was getting a little miffed at me because I was finding more things to look at then he was. I have a talent for seeing wildlife that I have had my entire life no matter where I am. I am just observant and I use my ears as much as my eyes to find things. We saw toucans, mot mots, parrots, hummingbirds, deer, sloths, birds birds and more birds, crocodiles, camens, snakes and more. I loved the hike.