Quiet days

We are in the no-man's land between Christmas and the end of the year, those gentle, quiet days that follow the getting-ready,the anticipation. These are days spent with friends and family, talking with friends and family overseas, not under any pressure to accomplish anything major. It seems as if one is, without really being aware of it, waiting: waiting for the year to wind down, for something coming to a close, before the pace will pick up again and something new is begun.
Time is of little significance now, has a vague quality about it. The sun 'stands still' (the meaning of the word 'solstice') in the morning, while evenings are very slowly starting to gain light: four minutes today - not much, but the very idea gives hope. 

                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Christmas morning 

The scent of burnt-down beeswax candles still lingers faintly in the living room, the brass holders with the ball that keeps them in balance winking here and there when a rare ray of sunshine touches them.

        Last night, after coming home from the late candlelight church service, our little family sat together for the first time in a few years on Christmas Eve, watching the candles burn down one by one. Courtney played a few Christmas carols on the piano, gifts were opened without hurry - one could re-use some of the wrapping paper, couldn't one? This long-practiced, but almost forgotten custom took on more significance after Carl read somewhere that, if all the wrapping paper and Christmas cards used in the UK each year was composted, it would provide enough fuel for a double decker bus to go twenty times to the moon and back.

          We watched the shadows of the spruce boughs change on the ceiling, become vague and fuzzy for a little while, then, with the burning down or sudden flaring of yet another candle, every needle was outlined crisply for a moment. The room darkened, conversation slowed, Stanley, the cat, careful not to neglect anyone, changed laps from time to time, snoring quietly as soon as he had found the right position. By the time the last wick glowed red in the darkness we, too, had trouble staying awake. I couldn't help but think back to the time when the kids were small, when we had to let the candles burn down in two, sometimes three sessions, because the kids could have never sat still for that long, the boys were wrestling too close to the tree, Lego trains had to be assembled, games to be tried out that very night - how long ago it seems now, and yet it's hard to believe that they are full-grown, with lives of their own, so soon.

Watching the candles burn down on the Christmas tree
 
Slowly the candles die,
one by one, flames arch
one last time.
Some, wick crimson
like a hot wire,
go fast, one mad whirl
in a darkening world;
some, almost forgotten,

just bade their time:
in near-darkness
the sapphire bead of flame

shines quietly.
Is it the blue light
from the fairy tale
that summons dwarfs,
fulfills your every wish? 
Be careful not to let it die,
to keep it close
when on the ceiling
all the shadow-boughs
have gathered
into one big darkness
once again.

Transition

Another sunset

Four o’clock in the afternoon, the sky the palest blue, almost washed bare of all colour except for a seam of gold where the sun has just set behind the hill. I pull my toque a little lower over my ears and adjust my mittens: it is -11 already, snow crunchy under my feet.

It feels like a dream scape, as if I don’t belong here. Tropical summer is still too close: two days ago we watched a harvester cut and chop sugar cane, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that this should happen in the middle of December.

So much has happened since I left, so many impressions have I taken with me, so many encounters have left their imprint on my soul - I cannot make the transition from where I have been to where I am now in a matter of hours, and maybe not even a few days. It will take time, and what has, by necessity, been compressed will slowly unfold. I will – I know that – revisit many of the places I have seen again and again, and each time more little details will emerge, stowed away, but not to be forgotten. The pictures will help me to remember, of course, and my notes, as often hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, a napkin, the back of a grocery bill as entered into my journal. Some of the experiences will find their way into this blog, hopefully: a few stories are still begging to be told.

In the meantime, I will find my way back into my home environment, a process that began during the last couple of days, with packing the backpack for the last time at the ‘Alajuela Backpackers’, filling out the customs form on the flight from Houston to Calgary, walking across the tarmac to the terminal after we arrived in Edmonton, when the craving for a bit drier, cooler air from a few days ago was met more than I had bargained for – not that it came as a surprise.

I walked across the pasture with Leo this late this afternoon, the landscape so different from the abundance that had surrounded me for a month, and for a moment I asked myself: what am I doing here? Who in their right mind would want to exchange all that colour and lushness for something this pale and sparse? Who could dare to compare the two?

White Poplar, Alberta

Pochote, Costa Rica

I know that I will find beauty here as I have found it there. Sometimes it hides in the most unexpected places. I just have to look for it. 






This journey was a wonderful experience, and I would not want to miss a single day of it, but this is home, and it's good to be back!

Cañas - the last day

A sound, both strange and strangely familiar, drifts in from the street through the open window when I wake up this morning. It takes me a moment to realize that it is the hissing of tires on wet asphalt – yes, it is raining in the farming town of Cañas. It seems almost appropriate: this is our last day in Central America. Tomorrow morning we'll be on our way home.

Now, two hours later, the sky is slowly starting to clear. It would have been unfortunate if it had rained all day, because today we will take a tour of “Ingenio Taboga”, the biggest sugar producer in Costa Rica. This is the only commercial agriculture-related experience of this trip.

We drove here from Montezuma yesterday, a trip not without its challenges – but that will have to wait for another time: in half an hour we will be picked up by someone from “Ingenio Taboga”.

Our last night we will spend not in San Jose, the capital, but in Alajuela, “the other city” in Costa Rica, closer yet to the airport. Our flight for Houston, Texas will leave at eight tomorrow morning, and with a stop in the US we better be at the airport in plenty of time. With any luck we'll be home late tomorrow evening.

Already I feel the slight shift: I am no longer fully here, but part of me is on the way home. I am glad that this process is starting only now, so close to the end of my journey.

Monkeys and pelicans

What's in a name?

Luz de Mono – Light of the Monkey - what a strange name for a hotel. It seems likely that there is a hidden meaning, a twist of words that eludes me because my Spanish is in its very infancy, and all I can do is put words together. But when I ask the manager, she, too, shrugs her shoulders. “The original owner was a crazy American”, she says, “the locals can't make any sense of it either. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, with the morning light, the monkeys arrive, too.”

Here goes my hope of an intriguing story ...

The light, however, and the monkeys remain. At the moment the monkeys are quiet, and the light seeping into my room is filtered by trees and vines. It is mid afternoon, and I am still not ready to face the glaring sun at the beach. I will wait a bit longer and follow the others when the shadows slowly start to lengthen.

Like Pablo Neruda, I love the ocean, but fear it, too. Frolicking in the waves holds much less attraction for me than walking on the firm, wet sand where each one breathes its last sigh, feeling the ground pull away under my feet where it retreats. I can do without the feeling of total helplessness I experienced the other day when I didn't judge an incoming wave correctly, and found myself tumbling head over heels in the seething mass, losing all sense of which way was up and which down, scraping my knees on the rough sand and the rocks under the surface.

This morning, roused by the urgent wake-up call of the howler monkeys at 5:30, I spent another peaceful hour and a half at the beach. There, every bird species has its area: the pelicans fishing off-shore, the spotted sandpipers and whimbrels tracing exactly the end of the waves on the beach, finding their food in the fine line of sea-foam, the great-tailed grackles sitting in the crowns of the trees above the driftwood line, dashing to the higher part of the beach when something catches their attention, the heron in the tide-water pools, waiting patiently until one of the tiny translucent fish gets careless and darts out of cover. If I were a bird here, I would be a sandpiper.

We have watched the pelicans on numerous occasions now, admiring their enormous fishing skills. A few of them fly in, land on the waves and bob calmly for a while. One suddenly lifts out of the water, flies a small circle, and dives, peak pointed straight down like a lance, into the crest of a wave, and again swims calmly, lifting its beak for a moment, the skin sack on its underside still twitching a bit with the swallowing movement. The next one follows suit, then another one, and again they are rocked by the waves. They never seem to miss; every time they lift their heads to swallow. They must have a very keen eye!

This morning, from our vantage point on one of the driftwood logs right above the rocky part of the shore, we watched the waves roll in and break. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their size: for a while they are small, seem quite harmless. Then comes a set of increasingly powerful waves, lifting high above the rocks with a deep, menacing roar, breaking with a huge crash, each one bigger than its predecessor. Then it starts again, but there is no way of predicting how long it will take for the next monster waves to arrive.

The sun, just broken free of the horizon, shining at a low angle, turned the waves into translucent jade when they were lifting their powerful shoulders out of the water. Suddenly a long line of black shapes appeared to be swimming right below the spine of a high wave: a huge swarm of fish! No wonder the pelicans are so successful when their table is so richly set.

We kept a close eye on the incoming waves, but here, too, no prediction was possible: some waves had fish in them, others didn't. What are the fish doing so close to shore, and how can they still make it back out to sea instead of being thrown on the beach? How do the pelicans know which waves carry fish and which don't? They lift up at just the right moment, rarely circle more than twice, and – bingo! - swallow their food.

To me, it is as much a mystery as what makes the monkeys howl exactly twenty minutes before sunrise.



Sunset at Montezuma Beach



Sunrise

Could there be a more perfect start to a day?

Last night I went to bed with the intention of watching the sun rise over the ocean. I wake up shortly after five. It is still dark, and it would be so easy to just turn over and go back to sleep. 'Only a few minutes more', I think. And, 'the sun will rise again tomorrow'. But my inner voice isn't to be silenced that easily: sunrise is not that far away, after all, and who knows what will be tomorrow?

It is close to high tide, and the beach stretches empty in front of us when we arrive around 5:30. A single set of footprints in the firm, wet sand: a man who overtook us on the road, carrying a fishing reel. A young woman passes us unhurriedly, stops at a higher part of the beach, does a few stretches and sits down to do her morning meditation.

The bare-throated tiger heron we have seen on previous visits to the beach has taken up his spot on the huge rough rocks. Head and neck stretched out he stands totally still, a sculpture outlined against the pale apricot sky. While we sit and watch a skein of pelicans flies overhead. Three of them drop down and land in the water, just far enough from the shore to enjoy the slow rocking of the waves without being thrown about by the surf. Nothing else is moving.

Slowly the sky is getting lighter. The bank of clouds on the horizon takes on a faint golden glow around the edges. For a moment we are fooled, thinking the sun is waiting right behind it, until a glimmer of deep crimson appears to its left, almost right across from where we are standing. It grows amazingly fast, and in no time at all the whole burning circle of light is suspended above the horizon.

5:50 am – the sun has risen!

Late afternoon in Montezuma

Four o'clock in the afternoon, an overcast sky - and I am dripping wet. The humidity must be around 90% here in Montezuma, close to the southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula.

I'm sitting in the beautifully designed open-walled circular restaurant/bar/reception area of the “Luz de Mono” (Light of the Monkey) hotel, where, at this time of day, the only people around are staff moving tables and chairs into the garden area around a huge barbecue in anticipation of guests arriving for dinner.

They have turned up the Latin dance music so that the sounds inherent to this place are audible only in the brief pauses between songs: the constant battering of the surf, occasional screaming of monkeys – one of the white-throated capuchins almost dropped on my head when we walked up to the reception area yesterday - and the piercing cries of birds. The white-throated magpie-jay, as the name suggests looking much like a cross between the two birds, with the blue jay's colour and the size of a small magpie, but adorned with a kind of curly feather spiral standing straight up from its head, makes about as much noise as its more northerly relatives, and is similarly brazen when it comes to bumming a meal. I watched one swoop in this morning and pick up a piece of bread right from a plate just abandoned by a diner in the middle of the restaurant.

My spot in a raised area with a shiny red-brown hardwood floor in the back where I sit on a cushion, leaning against the white-washed wall, gives me a sweeping view of the “garden”, a kind of park that seems carved from the jungle. Vines are dangling from mossed branches,composite magenta blossoms poking like lifted fingers from the sea of green. On the large trees three capuchins in charcoal coats with yellowish shoulders and head are playing hide and seek, stopping from time to time to peer curiously into the strange gathering place of their human relatives. But wait – two pieces of yellow fur stacked on top of each other? Yes! There is a mother with a baby clinging to her back, seeming in no way hindered by the extra weight. Oh, this is a treat!

The loud monkey calls I heard at daybreak, however, came not from the capuchins but from the howler monkeys who also dwell here, their voices suggesting a much bigger animal.

Twilight is gathering slowly, and guests are coming back from the beach in small groups. Yesterday around this time we, too, were still out on the beach, watching the moon weave a silver net in the water.

The lunar eclipse tomorrow will not be visible from here, however, no matter if the sky is clear or not.

Tomorrow we will drive the seven kilometres south along the coast - a short distance, but the road is supposed to be rough - to the Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve for another day of hiking in a tropical forest.

Late night at Cañas



Entering Guanacaste province at sunset



Cañas, Guanacaste province, Costa Rica. Midnight.

I'm sitting on a desk chair under the yellow light in front of our hotel room because the wi-fi signal is stronger here than inside. From the backyard of the hotel mellow Latin music and animated voices drift over: the party has slowed down a little. A couple of hours ago an enthusiastic group of trumpet players and at least three drummers made much more noise, and two pretty girls in short black dresses were dancing, ringed by a clapping, shouting group of revellers, smoke rising from a big barbecue. What were they celebrating in the middle of the week? Maybe a Christmas party.

Above me, two very pale green, almost translucent geckos – like the kind of Guatemalan jade they call 'purple' – are clinging to the overhanging roof. When I move, they dart back and forth, excited for a moment, but soon they sit still again, waiting.

The wind is herding white clouds across the moon, close to full, lifting the sleeves of my blouse, my hair, rustling the leaves of the banana trees and bird-of-paradise plants that line the white-washed walls surrounding the yard. Cicadas have fallen silent for the moment; maybe they, too, need to catch their breath from time to time.