Siesta-Time By The Seashore

Juan Pablo walks the beach at Pavones at low tide

No doubt some of you have realized, my posts have been sparse in here of late.  Plain and simple, it´s a law of physics applied to human endeavor:  what goes up must come down.

Perhaps call this the two-month lull.  Whatever you call it, after about two months on these journeys I deflate as far as writing or picture-taking or just plain traveling.  It becomes an effort just to pick up the camera and compose a shot, much less stow my duffel on another bus or dig out the passport and check into another hostel  Yes, the dreaded globe-trekker burn-out had set in.

After two months, your humble correspondent in yet another bus station

Give me a wracked up back, a tropical cold, a rumbling and phizzing in the intestines (all of which I had in the pic above) but don´t give me that!  The onslaught of burn-out takes the mind, you understand, and that´s the main reason for going through it all anyhow. 

This time it hit me on the Pan-American Highway, approaching the Panama/Costa Rica border.  Juan Pablo, the olive oil farmer and country gentlemen from Italy who I had been traveling with, much more of a world traveler than I, knew the treatment immediately -- one week at the seashore.

By coincidence, he had a friend who lived along the Pacific Ocean relatively close by.  We got our passports stamped at Paso Canoes border crossing, sailing right through for once, and hopped the next bus for the coast.

Endless banana plantations en route to Pavones

What Juan Pablo didn´t tell me was that it would practically be a marathon getting in there -- three changes of buses, all of them jammed, with hours of waiting involved.

The route itself wound over dirt roads with protruding rocks and huge potholes.  My back took a pounding and I was yelping with pain and muttering at him by the time we got there, well after dark.

However, the isolated and quiet little town by the sea was just what we needed.  Both of us slept and slept...Besides eating and gabbing our main activity was taking long walks in the evening along beaches strewn with black volcanic formations.  This is why so many sunset pics accompany this post -- that was about the only time I picked up the camera!

Pavones, the name of the little beach town, was just what the doctor ordered, in other words, for weary travelers.

After such a time getting in there, this seems a good place to insert my patented Five Rules For World Travel.  By popular demand and all that.  Count this as a bonus to my faithful readers because someday these only will be available in my book, The Consummate World Traveler, and you´ll have to pay big for them.

At any rate, in abbreviated form, here they are:

1. Prepare
2. Get There
3. Execute
4. Record
5. Reflect         

For example, the arduous bus journey into Pavones was a clear exercise of rule Number Two.  No matter how tired you are or how you feel, sometimes you have to draw upon whatever resources you can, inner or otherwise, and get there.  Suck in the gut, in other words, and do it.

Dare I say it, faith plays a role...Get there and things will work out.  Or at least that´s the way it works for me.

Carol of Carol´s Cabinas

This time, after getting there, I landed at a place called Carol´s Cabinas.  Its owner is a New Zealander, a "kiwi" as they call them.

In general Carol was pleasant of personality, but with mouth that´d make a First Mate on a tramp steamer blush.  She had a knack for working the f-word into sentences two and three times, and often that was in addition to obscenities already interspersed.

A bottle of liquor was centered on the table when she and her girlfriend had lunch, and with good reason.  It was dolloped at intervals into their tropical juice drinks.  

Despite her saltiness, she made available the little things, the mark of a good hostess.  A huge bunch of bananas, for example, hung in the communal kitchen area, available for the plucking to anyone wanting smoothies or a snack.  Mosquito netting, fine-meshed and treated with insecticide, was draped over the beds and her personal laptop was available to guests wanting to use the Internet.

She was a little lax on the pruning, so the jungle had grown in upon the entrance walk to my room.  I had to part huge waxy leaves, usually dripping with water, to get inside.  Maroon flowers festooned the lushness here and there, and in the morning you didn´t have to go far to get a show with the wildlife.

I´d wake up and shuffle out through shafts of sunlight to the kitchen area to the distant calls of monkeys.  Huge red parrots, called scarlet macaws, would hop from branch to branch, reminding me of cardinals back in Penna., only with tail plumage longer than their entire bodies.

Most spectacular were the butterflies.  Some are called mariposa azul.  Their brilliant blue made us gasp with delight every time we saw them. This image -- of these sapphire-like jewels flapping erratically through that vegetation -- remains one of the most vivid of the whole trip.

Pavones itself was a surfer town with almost no surfers.  The big breaks don´t materialize until spring, so the guest houses and restaurantes were almost deserted.  This was good for us because the prices were down, especially for lodging.  My room at Carol´s with private bath and hammocks out front, and all the goodies thrown in, was $10 U.S. per night.  For most of the week, there was only two guests.

The surf-point-with-no-surfers thing was interesting in itself.  The artwork about-town especially.  It was like wandering a temple and viewing faded frescoes of the gods.  Images of bronzed young men with washboard-like stomachs (or women in bikinis) clasping long boards loomed from wall after wall, making me feel small and out of shape.  Carol talked about waves that were only a few "hands" tall, a surfer term that means "feet," and how it was low tide there as far as business.

It also was a good time to put into practice Number Five of Jim´s Rules of Travel -- Reflect.  Through the previous two months I had been in three countries, met a lot people and done a lot of things.  There had been a few rough times but generally it had been a fantastic experience.  Colombia, especially, was some of the best travels I´d ever had.

New Year´s Eve, bonfires flared up here and there along the beaches.  As I watched them crackle and burn through the waning hours of 2010, I passed this plethora of experiences through my mind, one by one.  Most I savored and some I cringed over.  As best as I could, I let them work back into the receptacles of memory, to where the good stuff is stored.

If I had a wish or resolution for 2011, it would be that I could remember it all for a long, long time.

Last bonfire of 2010 -- New Year´s Eve at Pavones Beach

 

Low tide at Pavones Beach