Costa Rica 1992: The Caribbean Coast

      We hung around for half an hour at the bus shelter on the side of the highway, passing time by talking to two black women who spoke English.  The Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica is populated with a lot of Blacks who speak English.  It was always a relief after trying communicate using Spanish, to be able to converse in English again.

    We then boarded a very crowded local bus, with passengers already standing the full length of the aisle.  Fortunately, the number of passengers eventually thinned out enough for us to get seats.  At one stop, a young girl got on the bus with a little green parrot perched on her shoulder.  The bus trip was cheap, the fare was only 80 cents to get us the 50 kms to the city of Limon on the Caribbean.

    My wife felt as if she was getting sick with a sore throat and headache by the time we got to Limon.   Limon didn’t really look like a place we wanted to spend any time in, but we couldn’t find a bus going to Cahuita, a fishing town with two beaches and National Park, which was our next destination.  We needed to get there, since we had already made reservations to stay there for three nights.

    Mario a cab driver, noticed our frustration, and asked us if we wanted a ride to Cahuita, and so we paid him $30 US for the 42 km trip.  The road was pockmarked with potholes, so Mario spent a lot of time weaving from one side of the road to the other, to avoid the bumps.

    He dropped us off at the Cabinas Atlantida, our accommodation at Cahuita.  We got one of the cabins, nicely spaced among the trees.  It was quite nice, but we discovered it had one drawback; there was no place for us to eat, so we had to satisfy our hunger with a Coke and some caramels for supper.

    Because my wife was feeling rocky, she when right to bed.  I wasn’t that tired so I went outside to read under the porch light.  As I sat there on one of the porch chairs under the porch light, surrounded by the darkness of the forest, with my book in hand, I could hear the sounds of crickets and other night creatures.  After reading for a while, I glanced up from my book and noticed something tootling across the cement porch floor.  When I looked more closely, I discovered it was a scorpion, complete with outstretched claws and a curled up tail with a stinger on its tip—yet another new critter, I had never seen before, that I could add to the wildlife list.

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