Tourists Overtake a Pirate Town
In a movie, bearded pirates run amok through a town, plundering and pillaging with abandon. In Puerto Viejo, bearded tourists stumble amok through the streets, bent of plundering shops, markets and bars.
Our first campsite here was a sandy and secluded parking lot on the beach next to a restaurant run by a gruff Spaniard dressed exactly like a Hollywood pirate. One other overlander vehicle shared the space. We set up our kitchen kit on tables in his restaurant, which had already closed for the night. I promptly fired up our camp stove and fractured the glass table covering that it was resting on, turning our $10 campsite into a $30 campsite.
We decided to seek alternate accommodations the following night.
Beer!
This evolved into one of our better decisions, as the new campsite was the parking area of a brewery. Erin, the bartender managing the Bri Bri Springs Brewery that night didn’t charge us to camp, asking instead that we stop in and buy some beer. Easy deal and a clever tactic on her part, since we sampled (drank whole) one of each of their beers on tap.
Bri Bri Springs is a small operation, run by a Vermonter named JT. The brewery is set up inside a shipping container, which really is a great use of a shipping container. JT was away when we visited, leaving Erin’s boyfriend (Chris? I can’t remember, so I’ll call him Chris.) and apprentice brewer in charge of an upcoming bottling run. I just hope I don’t fuck this up, Chris said. Chris showed us around the brewery and I tried to offer my best advice on bottling.
Cute, Furry Animals
Our need for quality beer sated, we remained critically short on cute animals so we made a visit to the local sloth sanctuary. Sloths are basically fake animals. They barely move, their noses are clearly made of rubber and their only discernible defense is to look cute while sleeping.
But that’s not all. Sloths display several other astounding traits and behaviors. Sloths resolutely abstain from leaving their tree perches until they absolutely have to. The need to finally descend is governed largely by their bowels and bladders. Once a week, they cautiously de-tree themselves to unload approximately 2 liters of pee and a kilo of poop.
This is equivalent to the largest bottle of soda on a store’s shelf and a large pineapple. That amounts to 3 kilos of excrement for animals that rarely weigh over 6.5 kilos. If a human did that, there would be screaming involved. Screaming.
Jungle Story
Costa Rica’s natural wonders continued to astound on our last full day in country. Puerto Viejo neighbors the Refugio Nacional Gandoca-Manzanillo. This small coastal jungle houses lush foliage, scattered indigenous settlements and dense wildlife.
Birds and mammals hid from the rain that day, but other creatures remained undeterred. Chief among them were the leaf cutter ants. You don’t think leaf cutter ants sound very exotic, do you? We get it. They’re ants. Neither the sexiest nor most photogenic critters out there. We thought so, too, until we saw them in action.
Leaf cutter ants trample down paths through the forest floor that rival the paths made by the park service for human transit. Back home in Alaska, the odd hiker will occasionally follow a deer track, mistaking it for a human trail. Deer tracks have nothing on leaf cutter paths. The paths that criss-crossed our trail led to a massive hive. If excavated, I’m sure the average New Yorker would have felt comfortable in the space.
We kept our eyes on the ground as we hiked and were rewarded by poison dart frogs, crickets and millipedes that looked like creepy moving spinal columns. Fun fact: when threatened, these millipedes will secrete a cyanide “ooze” that coats their exoskeleton.
Here, you can see the slow and creepy movement of the millipedes:
The rain slackened as the tide came crashing in over blackened volcanic rocks. We sat back in our car, a couple of sodden travelers, and drove into town. The sun sank over the pirate town as tipsy tourists careened through the streets, followed by buccaneer locals offering weed, trinkets and other delicacies. We drifted to sleep in humid sheets and rivers of leaf cutter ants carried us into the next day.
