I woke up bright and early for my tour of Venado Caves. My tour was supposed to be at 8. By 8:30, I was still waiting and started to suspect something was wrong. After a while, a guy came up to me to tell me that he called last night to say that the tour was canceled. Canceled? Thanks for the memo. Now I was pissed bc the only reason I was even staying a second day was bc this tour came highly recommended by the innkeepers in Santa Elena. I told him that if there was no tour, then I was going to leave for Manuel Antonio. The guy and Noel talked and then they called up the buses and discovered that all the buses had left from La Fortuna already. I didn’t buy it. I think that, for the most part, there was a miscommunication between me and the guy running the tour. I think he thought I didn’t want to take the tour *at all* when really I was saying that there better be a tour of some sort or else I will be pissed. 
I guess what is both fortunate and unfortunate about a tourist town like La Fortuna, is that with such a competitive market, reputation is everything. What a tourist wants, a tourist gets. The tour operater asked me if I would “give him another chance” and wait until 1pm to see if he could find any other people to take the tour. After a lot of back-and-forth, it was determined that whether or not he found other people to take the tour, I was going at 1pm.
So, again, silver lining, because this time lapse allowed me to see the Cataracta de la Fortuna. That’s “waterfall” for those not in the know. I walked a few blocks to the town square, took a cab to the park, had a long conversation with the cab driver – an elderly man who spoke slowly and clearly so that I could understand. At one point, I leaned forward to try and hear what he was saying and he reached over and tried to hold my hand. What is UP with guys in Costa Rica dude? Young, old, doesnt matter. Then he proceeded to invite me to dinner at 7 pm. It was less of a creepy interaction, but still, when he asked if I needed a ride back from the falls, I immediately declined. I would walk back, thank you very much.
I’ve seen a lot of waterfalls in my life, but this was truly spectacular. In the middle of the rainforset, bursting through a seam of black lava rock, is this pristine white cascading waterfall that falls with such force into blue green water below. It is dangerous to swim underneath the waterfall because of the strength of the current. I did see one lady do it though.
Oddly enough, just a few meters downstream, I met up with the same lady who was swimming near the falls and who was now contemplating swimming in the pools around the waterfall. She caught me as I was trying to take a picture of myself and the waterfall, and offered to take some photos of me. Then she convinced me to change into my swimsuit (naked, out in the open, changing beneath rocks…scary) and go for a swim. I met up with her on the rocky beach peering into the aqua blue pools. “I want to go in but look at all those fish.” I took a look. Yup, she was right. There were schools and schools of fish visible because of the clarity of the water. We both stood at the waters edge contemplating jumping in, but instead talking about love and life and all this random soul-seeker stuff. She told me about her life in Calgary – how the town was overrun with cowboys and had a very “cowboy mentality.” “It’s just not Montreal.” She told me of her job at the post office, “hey its not the best job, but it pays well and lets me travel. I don’t understand people who are ‘lifers’ – the ones who will live and die with an envelope in their hand. Even though they have vacation, they never go anywhere. I don’t want that to be me.” What I enjoyed about our conversation, and about her, was her spirit. She told me about her younger boyfriend. About all the things she wanted to do in life. And she had been the only person to swim by the falls. Then she had to go and she said, “good luck with the fish,” I stared at the water and thought – now or never. So I jumped in.
The water was cold but refreshing. All those hours in the pool paid off I guess, because it was pretty amazing. Even though it was a bit of a ways from the waterfall, I could still feel the current pushing me towards the rocky bluffs. That was kind of scary. Still, I swam to this rock in the middle of the lagoon and stood on it for a while. At that moment, it started to rain…in the rain forest…and I felt totally enveloped by nature. It actually felt like I was posing for some movie poster, rain pouring down on my head as I stood knee-deep on a rock in the middle of the lagoon; so surreal was the moment. The sound of rain in the rainforest mingling w/the powerful crashing force of the waterfall, is one I will never forget.
Later that day, I met up with Edward to go on my cave tour. He was a guy about my age, who spoke great English, complete with slang. He informed me that nobody else was going to the tour, so instead of a bus, we took his friends broken down car on a road trip through the countryside to the caves. Just me and Edward. In another place and another time, Im sure Edward and I would have been the best of friends. He and I are cut from the same cloth as he told me stories from his 7 years as a guide. In one of the stories, Edward led a tour group around the cave in circles. Then took a short cut from the front of the line to the back of the line where he tapped a guy on his shoulder to scare him. The guy let out a scream that filled the entire cavern. That story made me laugh. If you know anything about me, you know that this is exactly what I would have done too. He told me a similar story about how he did the same thing to an old lady. Instead of screaming, she farted – loudly. Apparently, they were in a confined place, and the smell was intense. As he told me, that was one of the funniest moments he’s had working as a guide.
Initially, I worried that our ride would be awkward and that Edward would be like all the other men I had met in Costa Rica. Our interaction was completely platonic, and finally, I felt as if I had met someone who I could really talk to. On our ride to the cave, he talked nonstop about costa rica and about his life. He came from a small farming town and moved to La Fortuna in the same way that someone in the US would move from Texas to NYC. I cannot remember how we began to talk about salaries, but it came up, and he asked me what I made in a month. I told him (lowballing it) and he was like, oh my god. I make $400 a month – working 2 jobs. But my rent is only $100, so I lead a pretty good life. $400 a month. And he was able to save up $12k for a car? “It took me 3 years, but finally I am able to buy a used car.” (Cars are really expensive in Costa Rica bc of all the import taxes).
This conversation wasn’t meant for me to feel sorry for him or pity him, or a ploy to give him money. I felt that I could be frank with him, and was asking him pretty much anything – personal stuff about his life, and again, this conversation is on the list of great moments had in Costa Rica, not necessarily because of content, but because of who I was talking with.
“What kind of car do you think you will buy?”
“Probably a Hyundai like this one. Very popular with us Ticos – this wonderful Sonata (I think that was the car)” He said this all tongue-in-cheek.
“And if you could have any car – any in the world – money not an object – what would it be?”
“Oh, do not even ask me that question.”
“Which car?”
“I don’t even want to think about it because I dream about it so much.”
“A sportscar?”
“Welll…I would like a hummer. Like Arnold Schwartzeneger”
I laughed. Of all cars. A hummer.
“Wow, thats a pretty expensive car even in America.”
“Yeah, and twice as much here.”
“What about color? What color would this Hummer be?”
“Well…,” he paused as if this were one of Life’s great dilemmas, “my favorite color is blue…but I don’t think I could have a blue Hummer.”
I laughed. “No, a blue Hummer would be strange.”
We rode along the Costa Rican countryside like this, through farms and pastures and rolling hills. All along the way, Edward pointed out various local sights – sometimes it was a truck of pineapples. “Do you smell that? Pineapples.” I admit, I wouldn’t have even noticed had he not pointed it out, but the smell of fresh cut pineapples was intoxicating. Another time, as we drove over a rocky road, he said, “this road is sliding down the mountain – every year after the rainy season, they have to rebuild the road. Why they don’t go up and over, I don’t know. I’m sure that they road builders have a friendship with the government, no?”
The terrain in this part of Costa Rica felt different than the landscape I had ridden through before now. If anything, it reminded me of the cold, wintery days I spent in Northern France, where the fog hovered over neon green grass. The land had a mysterious quality to it. When we pulled up to the site of the cave, it was just a simple field with rolling hills and grazing cattle.
If you’ve ever been to a cavern with the pretty lights and paved sidewalks, forget it, this was not that. What this was was a hike in the countryside to a hole in the earth where we had to crawl on our hands and knees (and stomachs), through openings not much larger than my head, wade through water waist high, and climb 8-10 feet up slippery rocks while bats flew unbridled around us. The payoff was spectacular though. Edward said it best when he said, “When you experience a cave in this way – seeing fish in the stream and with bats flying around your head – all the other cave stuff seems so boring.” He was exactly right.
Edward, ever the tour guide, showed me all sorts of crazy insects, including a tarantula named Rosarita (who he fed a cricket to), pale white river crabs, a spider that looked like a cricket, and of course, bats – three different types. I asked him to give me the level 3 tour of the cave – or the hardest tour he gave – and he obliged. I climbed, I waded, and I slithered through tiny holes and thankfully, Edward was there to help me…and of course, laugh at me. Whenever we faced a particularly difficult climb up some slippery rock, he would first demonstrate how to climb the rock. Then he would let me do it, pointing where to grab or how to lean backwards to climb up the wall rather than forward (that was fucking scary). At one point, I just scrambled up a rock on my own and Edward laughed out loud at me, “well…ya…I guess you can do it that way too.”
We emerged from the cave on the other end, and were greeted by more green fields. This part of the cave opened up onto another field, this one marked by a saucer-like indentation in the earth, in which a huge monolithic rock marked the center. It looked as if a huge giant had taken a rock and dropped it from the sky, causing the earth to bend into a bowl shape. I’m not sure why, but something about the simplicity of the scenery and the appearance of an out-of-place rock in these misty fields carried a certain power for me. It seemed too placed, too calculated, to be spontaneous. The stone was too flat and shaped to be natural. I don’t know. The cave, the foggy fields, this rock – it all carried some strange sort of magic.
I ended my journey with a cold outdoor shower, separated from the guys who ran the place, and Edward, by a see-through planks of wood that formed a crumbling wall. Maybe this was a joke they pulled on all tourists, but I didn’t care. I was covered in head-to-toe filth and a shower was a shower. The water was cold, but refreshing, and fuck it, when in Rome. I came out of the shower and squeezed the last remaining water from my hair, “there you go, good as new, ” Edward said. We got back into his friend’s car and made the drive back home.
There were a million more things we talked about – about his desire to visit America when he saves up enough money (and when he can get a visa), how he loves American tourists the most because they spend the most money (heh), how to be a farmer in Costa Rica is to live a very good life (as opposed to the US), how the roads are so curvy and winding and how there are so many street dogs walking around, that sometimes you are faced with the choice of hitting a dog or running off the road (and down a mountain) and that the ‘Tico’ way is to hit the dog. He told me about the school uniforms, “Will you look at this color? Green like a parrot.” But mostly, I liked talking to him about his life and his dreams. There was something so simple and child-like and pure about them – the way his eyes glimmered when he spoke – that I found myself buying into his dreams as if they were my own. I had a lot of what he wanted, and he had a lot of what I wanted. Like I said – in another time, and another place, things would be different.
Edward drove me home, and we said our goodbyes – he was off to work, and I explored the town with new eyes. At night, when all the tourists were busy at the Volcano and hotsprings, I hung out with the locals on the main strip, eating ice cream and reveling in how similar, yet different, our lives were.
