Jeremy's Bike Blog

 The one with all the hand writing…

[The hostel I’m staying in has a laptop for use by guests, yay!  so I’m finishing this post using it]

Another ‘rest’ day has turned into a mini side-adventure, and I’m pretty wiped by the time I get back to the hostel. I chat with a couple of the other guests, an American and a Brit, and then an older Dutch couple that stop in for a drink, then call it a night.
My plan for the next day is to take a road across the peninsula from Agujitas, a remote village that most people boat to, to the larger town of Puerto Jiminez. I don’t bother to look up the elevation profile of the crossing, and at 60KM total, figure that it will be a relatively easy day. My main concern is the river crossings, but these turn out to be wider and more shallow than the ones from the previous day. However, the grade is extremely steep. I’ve only packed a few cookies and a snickers bar for calories, and 3.5 liters of water. I’m nearly done with my water by the time I’ve pushed up what I’ll later learn is the first 1/3 of incline. I stop to wring out at least a half cup of sweat from my shirt, take some rest in the shade, eat the cookies, and give my arms and other pushing-related muscles a rest. For the first time this tour, I’m worn out from the waist up, even though I’ve only been pushing the bike for maybe 40 minutes, whereas I’d pushed it for hours on end up similar grades in Guatemala. The crucial difference seems to be doing so on paved road vs unpaved and somewhat rocky road where there’s an endless series of little hitches that the bike has to be hoisted over. My phone’s GPS on Google Maps is showing me as somewhere not on the sole road connecting the two sides of the peninsula, or on any road for that matter. The chances that I’m not on the right road are slim, but progress is grueling and I want to be certain, so when a pickup truck approaches and slows, I ask if this road leads to Puerto Jiminez. They confirm that it does and then ask if I want a lift. This is far from the first time I’ve been offered a lift, but it is the first time I accept. Well, sort of. I took a lift on the second week of my tour from Gabbie after doing the 100 mile White Rim Road side trip, having her spare me 60 miles of interstate cycling to continue on my way around the Canyonlands. I also solicited a ride, the first week of my tour, from the rancher named Bill who alerted me to the fact that I was cycling up a road that dead ended at his ranch.

We hoist my bike into the back of the truck, and I’m relieved to be done with my work for the day, but I also mildly regret taking such an egregious cheat. It’s 50KM in total, but it’s really the first 20KM of it that is sparing me from the gruel…the rest is down hill and flat. But then again, fuggit. My rest day was a bust in terms of actually getting any rest, so today will be my rest day. When I get dropped off in Puerto Jiminez, I try to give some cash to the driver, Hugo, and am refused. So instead, I exchange cards with him and chat for a bit. We’ve since been corresponding via e-mail, in Spanish, a little bit every couple of days. From there, I grab some food, check into a hostel, and then take a ride to a beach about 8KM away, read and rest. A thunder storm starts to roll in at sunset, and the golden light from the setting sun on the trees with a lightening flickering sky blue-grey sky backdrop is breathtaking.

The next day, I ride my bike, unloaded, 20KM each way on unpaved road to a beach down the end of the peninsula. I start pushing my bike through creeks and tight thicket trails in search of a waterfall reported on Google Maps, but then think better of it. I want, gasp, a second rest day. I get back to the hostel and a couple of German women that I’d met and chatted with the night before about possibly doing a trek apologetically inform me that they booked a 2 day one night trek for the next day, but as they weren’t sure if I would want to pay the $100 for the trip, didn’t include me in the booking, and that the 3pm deadline had passed. I assured them it was fine, I was planning on continuing on the next day anyways. In actual fact, I would have joined them if I had been there in time to reserve my place on the trip, but I’m also OK with how it turned out. $100 does seem a bit steep for the permit, a couple of meals, transportation and the services of a guide, and this is in part enabled by the fact that as of 2014 a guide is required for any trek into the Corcovado National Park, and price competition among guides doesn’t seem to be particularly earnest.

The next day, I catch a ferry from Puerto Jiminez to Golfito. The ride is shorter and smoother than the previous boat trip, and even though I’m charged almost double for transport of my bicycle, it’s about half the cost of the first boat ride. We spot a whale breaching on the way (Whale watching tour: a $60 value!). Ok, I’m going to stop talking about the prices of things now, but I guess my point is, Costa Rica is pretty expensive relative to the rest of Central America.

I decide to cycle down to a surfing town called Pavones. It entails a few hundred meters climb over a ridge on unpaved road that is not on route to Panama, but I have a couple days left in the time I’ve alloted for Costa Rica. I start down a short cut, but double back when it’s clear that this route will involve some signifant amount of carrying my bike and scraping mud out of my fenders (or removing my fenders). With all the rain that we’ve gotten, I’m grateful that the non-shortcut route is gravely enough that I don’t have to worry much about mud build up.

I’m about 4km from the town when a guy that I nearly neglected to notice altogether calls out in a way that’s friendly and makes me want to stop and say hi back (and not passively-aggressively ignore). He’s got a sort of makeshift workbench fashioned from a sawzalled off top section of a smallish refrigerator, and is sitting at it on a small stool and working with an awl to reattach the sole to a pair of sandals. His name is Luis, and indeed, his occupation is shoe and sandal repair. He speaks less English than I speak Spanish, but we get by. He notes that my sandals are in pretty terrible shape. They are, in fact, about to come apart in a few key sections, and he says that it would be easy to repair them. So, I lay down my bike, take a seat next to him, and take off the one that we’d been discussing. Wet with sweat and mud as it is, I’m a little nervous that this is overly presumptous, but he doesn’t miss a beat as he puts aside the pair he had been working on and reaches out for it as I grimace a bit in acknowledgement of how gross it is, and a bit out of embarrasment. I watch as he severs the remaining threads that had been holding together the crucial strap that was about to come apart on its own, at any time. He then glues back together the leather and textile flaps that had once, together, comprised the strap (the leather had long since detached), and then he stiches it to the sole using his awl and beefy cord. Next, he does the same on the other sandal, and in prepping it and looking at between the two thick flaps of sole that were once much less loosely coupled, he discovers the spare drivers license and credit card I had hidden within, in case I was relieved somewhere along the way of everything but the clothes on my back (ref: “El Salvador and Honduras” blost). I explain this to him, and we share a chuckle over the scheme, and that this is what’s become of them. The credit card is almost completely obliterated. The driver license is more or less in tact but the face of it is so scuffed up, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were declined by whatever authority would be requiring picture identification.

As he repairs my sandals, I learn about his shop and the people that live there with him usually, who are currently in the United States attending a festival of some sort. He’s affiliated with the Rainbow Family, an organization that holds annunal national gatherings in the US the week surrounding July 4 each year, in addition to numerous regional gatherings around the world. I tell him about the two that I’d been to way back when I was younger and hitchhiking my way around the US. There was, in those times at least, a sort of gravitational pull of hitchhikers to Rainbow Gatherings and Grateful Dead concerts. Christ, I’m old.

He invites me to stay with him, and I accept. He won’t take any money for the repairs or the accomodations. He smokes actual oregano out of a bong he’s made from a half pint bottle that had contained rum, which doesn’t make any sense to me, but from which I figure he’d accept a gift of some booze. So when I ride the rest of the way into town for dinner, I pick up a half pint of the best stuff that I can find which is sold by the half pint, and I give it to him when I get back. It’s pretty dark by the time I get back and his flashlight is nearly dead, so I also give him the batteries from the bluetooth keyboard that I’m still carrying around with me, even though I’m decided it’s degraded too much to be usuable.

I doze off while swinging in a hammock of his while he talks to me about a wide variety of increasingly incoherent things as he works his way through the bottle, the most insteresting of which is an account of a drug-smuggling related homicide that had happened the previous day in town. He was prone to bursting out in spontaneous song from the outset, before I went into town or he had had anything to drink, and he doesn’t get very much more animated as he gets drunk, so I feel perfectly safe and not overly inconsiderate letting myself nod off while he’s ostensibly engaging me in some kind of conversation. The couple of times he says something that requires a response, I wing it, not very convincingly, and from then on he just stops soliciting my input, which works for me.

Eventually I say I need to retire for the evening, and he helps me bring my bags up to the loft in the shack where he lives. The staircase is broken and missing a step, so he shows me the prescribed choreagraphy for ascending and descending safely…again. There’s two beds, and I get the one that he had slid a pile of clothes off when he showed me the loft earlier in the evening, along with the inital demonstration of the stairs procedure. Now there’s a sole sheet that he must have found for me, bunched up on the bed, under which a 2 inch cockroach scurries as his light pans over the bed. I’ll take a 2 inch cockroach over a 2mm bedbug any day. Anyways, I’m not planning on needing a sheet, and I’m too tired to really give a shit. He also shows, via pantomime, the procedure for pissing through the slats of the shack walls which I make sure I’ve gotten correct by repeating the pantomime because I always need to pee at night. Ok, maybe this is treading too far into TMI country. Hey, it’s my second to last post!

He leaves and I’m asleep in fairly short order. I pee successfully some time during the night without having to descend the harrowing stairs.

The next day, I’m not sure if I want to stay or go. The town does not have a lot to offer, and maybe the account of a shooting just before I got there is what puts me over the edge. Plus, I can totally get to Panama today. The border is only 50km away! So, I pack up and tell him that’s where I’m headed. Just before I go, he gives me a sun visor with transparent green plastic, the kind you see retirees wear, and says that it will make a good rainshield for the forthcoming rain. I’m skeptical, and hope that he’s just speculating about the rain, but a cop that chats me up at a quick food stop also mentions rain as if it’s inevitable.

It starts as a steady sprinkle, but increases to a downpour within about 15 minutes.  It goes on for about 10 minutes and then lets up.  Then it starts again, and lets up again.  Then it starts again, and doesn’t stop until well after night fall.  About 2 hours into cycling through the continuous downpour, I decide I’m done.  I inquire with some locals in the small town I’m in when I make this decision, and they say there’s a hotel about 6km up the road.  It’s a pretty spot on estimate (was actually 5km), but they want $40 for the night.  By this time, I’m close to the border, I know there’s a bunch of hotels and motels in the border town, and the rain has let up just a bit (so it’s a steady, rather than torrential downpour).  I continue on, and inquire at too fancy/expensive hotels until I get to one that I know before even asking will be the right price based on the Hatian refugees hanging out on the balconies and in the common areas.  Oh yeah, the people of African descent at the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border were probably (also) mostly Haitian.  Steve, the American at the hostel in Agujitas, was intrigued enough by my account of this to actually do a little googling on the topic and he found out that Haiti is where there probably from.

I wait out the weather in the hotel and cross the border a couple hundred meters away the following morning. 

Luis was right, the green visor thing totally works as a good rain shield.