Hola, me llaman Gringo: Tortuguero part 2

So I’ve been a little behind in keeping this blog up to date and I apologize (mostly to myself) and I’ll try get stuff up more promptly. Anyways, beaches. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Am I right or am I right? Right. So Tortuguero is on the northeast coast of Costa Rica, meaning one of its boarders consists entirely of the majestic Caribbean Sea and all its sunshine and blue skies. However, this translates to something completely different than what you are thinking to the Hotels and insurance companies of the area: look, don’t touch. The coastline is absolutely gorgeous with its warm sand and coconut trees stretching as far as the eye can see, but it also means danger. Apparently the combination of the facts that the area is entirely undeveloped due to its protected status and the extremely warm water cause Tortuguero to be somewhat of a breeding ground for bull sharks and barracuda. In addition to that the coast is known for its impressively strong currents that have a tendency to drag things away from shore with the intention of never letting them back on dry land. If you didn’t see where I was going with this, it all equates to swimming being a veritable death trap. So look, don’t touch. So instead of swimming the fam and I walked along this beach for a good long while and saw some pretty cool things like drift trees (its like driftwood, just that it’s the whole shebang if you catch my drift… wood…) and this flock of birds that incessantly pecked at the sand for bugs. But more interestingly we kept on seeing these tracks that we couldn’t quite place that led up from the water to these giant pits. They looked like the imprint of a car tire, just that they were a yard and a half wide and the tread was located only on the outer quarter of each side. Turtles. Apparently they were the tracks of the green turtle, a mammoth, saltwater version of our amiable shelled friends that we love so well in the states. Pretty. Frickn. Schweet. And the next night we got to see the baby making, well egg laying, magic in action.

So between July and November of each year green turtles come up on the beaches of Tortuguero at night and lay their eggs. In order to witness this process in action the fam and I dress up in dark clothing and hit the beaches to see to turtles give birth. Now I’m going to do my best to paint all of you a word picture, so don’t blame me if it ends up sounding melodramatic and stupid, blame my lack of command of the English language.

TRACKS!!! I really wish you guys
knew what I was referring to

Don, our guide, lands our boat on side of a canal that leads to the ocean and we all gather our things and step cautiously onto the riverbank. By this time the sun has set completely and the world would be in total darkness if not for the white light cast from the moon which a day past being full. Because of this, nothing on the beach had any true color; just black, white, shades of grey and shadows. We continued to down a path flanked by low-lying bushes and trees until it opened up onto a beach. Overhead the moon is still shining brightly thorough a hole in the clouds that had thinned since threatening rain earlier in day. The sand appeared a grainy, ghostly white while at the same time the waves reflected light off their crests until they turned pitch black as they curled and fell and washed calmly onto shore. Out farther in the water the turbulent peaks directly beneath the moon shone brightly while those to the sides, which were less impacted by light, gradually darkened until they disappeared and became indistinct from the dark horizon. The only true colors we could see were bright flashes of orange and yellow periodically spilling out from the quiet lightning of a storm looming on the distance. All the while along the shore large, curious shapes slowly and laboriously dragged themselves up from the water, over the beach and all its debris towards the low lying foliage that marked the entrance to the forest. Under the brush by the path where we entered, curiously dark soil stood in stark contrast to the white sand of the beach around us. There one of these gentle giants was fighting into the earth, violently displacing the ground with arms and legs better suited for gliding through ocean waters. By the time we found her, she had already been laboring and digging into the ground for an hour, if not longer. Soon she began to lay her eggs in a small cylindrical hole at the bottom of the large pit that she had dug. We quietly made our way up to a place behind her and watched as her eggs fell two, three, four at a time until a hundred or more had been deposited into the sandy earth. Then she began to delicately close the hole, which contained what will someday become her next generation.

Blah, glad that’s over. All in all it was really cool to see this all happen. These turtles only come to the beaches of Tortuguero once every two or three years to lay eggs. The rest of the time they are hundreds, even thousands of miles away in their ocean feeding grounds preparing for this journey. It truly was a miracle of nature that we were very lucky to witness. Now, I realize how weird and possibly perverse it was for us to sneak up behind a defenseless turtle and watch its distended vagina poop out scores eggs, but there was definitely some magic to it.

Tortuguero International Airport

So the next day we packed up and left for La Fortuna and our ride was this sweet little six-passenger plane that was well, rickety. Probably could have used a little more vitamin D during its childhood… Anyways, I got to ride shotgun during our little flight to La Fortuna and it was pretty cool. Instead of being stuck next to a little 1 square foot window sitting over the plane wing, I got what was pretty close to a panoramic view of the Costa Rican sky. Pretty Frickn Sweet. Also, you know how there is gps for your car? They make it for planes too. Who would have thunk it.

Another interesting part of traveling to Central America is all the drugs and vaccines that you get to take so you don’t come down with some tropical disease. However, the one I’m here to talk about is the antimalarial that I’m currently on called Chloroquine. Now, I don’t know what you have heard about this fun little drug, but “minor side effects occur in up to 15% of people. These include stomach upset, dizziness, vivid (good, bad, erotic and otherwise) dreams, insomnia and anxiety” (http://www.drwisetravel.com/malaria.html). I’m here to tell you that the dream part, at least for me, it is true. Now I don’t know if its happening because I really want it to be true (ie. placeboing myself) or if there is actually something to it, but for about a week now I have been having some really weird, intense and vivid dreams. And I figure that it would just be rude if I kept them all to myself so I have decided to start a new subsection of this here blog: Chloroquine Dreams. There’s no reason to be prude and wait so I’ll just go ahead and share the wealth.

Chloroquine Dreams: Entry 1

So the first chloroquine dream has to do with one of my good friends who I will assign a false name to keep him anonymous to any possible scrutiny. Lets call him B.J. Dicks. Now BJ may have a long history of not having a driver’s license as well as parents that give him rather impressive incentives to motivate him to do certain things. BJ also may have also celebrated his 20^th birthday in the very recent past and what happened in my dream so seemed lifelike and strangely plausible that there was no doubt in my mind that it was real until I woke up very confused. Now in this dream BJ calls me and is very excited about his brand new Mercedes that he got for his birthday. He is informing me about how awesome it is and how much fun it will be to drive despite the fact that he does not have his license. I actually remember thinking to myself in the dream that this was such a classic Dicks family move that I was actually angry. I go over to his house to see this thing in person and when I get there I see him proudly standing next to an old, busted up blue Honda sedan. Sick Mercedes BJ. Then I woke up.

You know who I'm talking about

This next dream was by far one of the strangest that I have ever had. It involved me and the fat kid from hot tub time machine on a cross country road trip. Instead of a car or something like that we were riding BMX bikes because we were super cool and original like that. So I remember us being in the Midwest or someplace boring, flat and generally stupid until we took a turn off down a dirt road. The next thing I know were biking down a ski slope and going off of jumps. They were little at first but then for some reason I was getting really cocky and I started doing 360s and stuff because I was such a boss at winter, downhill, BMX trick biking. This went on for a good while longer than any real mountain would ever actually allow for and it was actually pretty satisfying to be so amazing at such an unrealistic thing. But then there was this one enormous jump and I remember just getting after it and going off it as fast as possible, but then I actually start to panic in real life because I’m like a hundred feet off the ground or something ridiculous like that in the dream. The ground looked really far away… Anywhoo, I’m falling really fast towards the landing of the jump and I’m thinking to myself that there’s no way that I can actually land this jump. And then… I smash into the side of the ramp and I wake up with a kick and a cold sweat. I’m sure the kid from Hot Tub Time Machine was sad that I left.

That’s it for this entry. You stay classy planet earth. And always, if you don’t know, now you know, Jimmer.

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