30th december

I dreamt I had five cars!
The jeep turns up at about 4pm with 18 tins of beer and some ice. Dave Jr is the driver. He also rolls a couple of joints so we get drunk and stoned. Through his drug induced altered perception of reality, he decides cooking on a wood-burning stove is fun and wants to have a meal. I am starving and I welcome any pastime that is in any way, shape or form food-related. He wants chips so he pours all the available vegetable oil into the frying pan with the intention of deep-frying the chips in the frying pan. He puts noodles in a pot on the other hot plate but the fire is not going properly yet and is only burning on one plate so even I can see that the noodles are going to be a long time before they are ready. He eats half the chips before they are cooked. I eat the other half. They actually taste like what they are - hot potatoes covered in grease, but I'm starving so I don't care. Anyway, grease fills you up between meals without ruining your appetite!
He uses three packets of sauce on the noodles - I usually use half a packet! The fire is struggling so I get some twigs and some cardboard to give it a boost. He opens the stove at the front and blows through the grate. I open it from the side and blow from the side and we are alternating breaths - working well together here... until something goes wrong and I'm ready to blow just as he blows ash in my face. Then, I’m inhaling as he blows again unexpectedly quickly. I poke around a little bit with a screwdriver and the cardboard comes to life with a blaze. He blows again and singes the hairs on my hand. Bloody hell - evolution didn't take this long! I knew it was going wrong and had experience with the stove to do it properly, but it was funnier to participate than to manage.
On the veranda, he's talking crap.
“Hey Dave, can you see that tree?”
You would think that is a pretty stupid thing to say in rain forest! Or in the dark? Especially both! “I can’t see anything, it’s pretty dark.” Had the drugs given him night vision? “Which one?”
“The silhouette. I think it looks like Donkey Kong.” He is making shapes from the treetops’ silhouettes against the slightly lighter sky behind as dusk dies away. He finally manages to explain which tree it is.
I don’t see Donkey Kong anywhere.
“Can you see the owl eating the mouse with a ‘D’ for digital viewing?” he continues.
I can actually see that. “Yep, but I don’t see the ‘d’ for digital viewing.”
“Oh yeah, its there. Right there.” He points. Pointing in the dark at something two hundred metres away, in the general scheme of things, is not a great use of ones time. I can see the owl eating the mouse but I don’t see Donkey Kong eating Barbie. Anyone else noticed the food theme here? Something tells me he is still hungry.
There is a tree much closer to the balcony that has a slender trunk and only sparse branches, two of which seem to reach out to me. In the morning, the dew hangs off a pretty mean looking spiders web worked beneath the armpit of one of the main branches. To me it seems to have arms that are welcoming a congregation.
“Can you see my preacher,” I ask him.
“Where? Oh this one here? That’s a good call. No, wait. That’s not a preacher, that’s a ballerina.”
I look at my tree. A ballerina? Yep, yep, that’s a good one, Dave.
I might let him have that.

29th december

It is becoming difficult to keep track of the days. I don't even wear a watch because I don't need to. I get up with the sun, eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm thirsty, write if I want to, go for a walk when I want, go into town if I need to, and go to bed when I'm tired which is usually two or three hours after sunset. I am reverting to hunter-gatherer mode. Maybe my socialising skills will fail me and I’ll forget how to communicate in anything other than a series of grunts. Maybe I’ll yet be that caveman I aspire to be…
I poured myself a mug full of orange cordial and went to sit on the balcony where I could wave at the world going by. I took a gulp and got my ‘hit’ at the back of the throat but then it occurred to me that although it is coloured orange, the orange cordial doesn’t taste on bit like orange. I wonder if that is a loophole. There might not be any orange fruit basis to the drink at all and on that basis they could sell other drinks such as ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘ultramarine’.
“Got any orange?”
“Sorry guv, right out! How about a nice refreshing glass of green? Fix ya right up, it will! Or I can do you a nice ‘mauve’ and ice, if you want.”
I feel like wearing some different clothes so I check through the wardrobe to see what I haven't worn yet. I am horrified to find that some of my better clothes that I haven’t yet worn and the necklaces are going mouldy! I wash everything immediately and hang them up, hoping that they have a chance to dry soon.
While checking for dryness, I extravagantly pull a drying shirt off the balcony rail and accidentally swipe a crusty nest that was clinging to the underside of one of the roof beams. Basically, I succeeded in ripping it apart and a swarm of buzzy things flew out in alarm. I backed off but they didn’t seem interested in me. Rather, they just buzzed around, wasp-like but smaller, and I was pretty sure without the sting. They seemed to just hang around aimlessly for a while and, to be honest, I got bored long before they did anything.
“Sorry guys,” I say to them as I disappear. “ Hope I haven’t given you too much work to do.”
When the stove is struggling to kick off as it is now, smoke is everywhere and I need to get a flow through the house to shift it, hence the open door. Having nipped outside to top up my lungs with oxygen, I can see that the smoke does not seem to be lighter than air – it is not going away, but rather it seems to sit on the ground or worse still, rolls down hill to rest on the water’s surface. There is next to no wind and won’t dissipate. When the wind does blow, the smoke is pushed and pulled back and forth because of the irregular currents and swirls in this bowl of low land and water bounded by trees. It tends to surround the point of origin in an ever-increasing radius, just getting thinner and thinner. It doesn’t chug away in a neat orderly queue into the sky like its suppose to.
From time to time, people walk past while this phenomena is continuing and they either slow down as their oxygen intake suffers or they speed up to avoid choking. When I see this happening, I hide to conceal my guilt and general European incompetence at being unable to light a fire. It is only when the wood really starts to burn that the flames kick in and smoke production ceases and this gives the vale a chance to clear.
I blame the wood. I haven’t had any dry wood left for a long time and so I’m reduced to trying to coax the wet stuff to burn. It ain’t easy.

28th december

More dreams - I was operating a woman around a racing circuit by remote control. She went from last to first on one corner.
What on earth does that say about me? Remote controlled woman – that’s just wishful thinking!
A guy comes down the road today and stands at the barbed wire fence shouting for Over. Over isn’t there – presumably in the plantation somewhere – so obviously can’t hear. This guy won’t give in so, blaspheming to myself, I approach him to help him. I mean, I’m so busy – I haven’t got time for this.
“Hola,” I volunteer.
“Hola,” he says, looking me up and down.
”¿Cómo esta?” I offer.
“¿Sí gracias, y tu?” He replies.
“Si, muy bien, gracias.” This is going well, I stupidly think to myself. I wait for him to speak.
“¿Vengo por blah de blah de blah de blah de Over?” he says innocently.
Ha! “¡No esta aquí!” He isn’t here. I know I got that one right even though I have no idea what he just said!
“¿En el campo?”
Ah, I think. In the field. “Sí, esta en el campo,” I echo. Hey, this guy probably assumes I’m a Spanish native.
“Ah,” he murmured thoughtfully. And then he went off. “Quisiera something something something something something something something.” He pauses for breath. “Something something something something something,” and then casts a meaningful glance down the lane, pointing. “Something, something, something, something, something,” and so on and so on. When he hasd finished his eloquent (and embarrassingly long) monologue, he looks at me expectantly.
“¿Como se llama?” I ask him. What is your name?
“Ralfa,” he replies. I am doing ok. The way I see it, two people can be perfectly happy with any conversation on a short-term basis as long as the one who knows what he is talking about doesn’t find out that the other doesn’t have a clue. Everyone will go away happy. I am on a roll and thought I’d take a chance.
“Bueno. Me diré que fue aquí.” I will tell myself that you were here.
Blown it! It hasn’t worked. He looks me up and down and a snigger struggles to remain suppressed. The sentence hadn’t felt quite right anyway - must brush upon my reflexives. We both laugh. We stand around and chat for about ten minutes and at some points I’m doing ok and a couple of times I just pleaded stupidity, just some dumb American (I think it’s what they want to hear - the English are pretty much an unknown quantity in Costa Rica.). It was a giggle and it has brightened up my day a little. Ironically, I forget to tell Over that Ralfa has been here.
I am still burning on the wood stove and cooking on it. (I’m not actually burning … the wood is). Everywhere and everything smells of smoke and there is a thicker-than-ever layer of ash everywhere throughout the house, especially the ground floor.

Oh poor Antony! The bees have appeared and want their hive back. Unfortunately, they deserted it without leaving any presence so according to jungle law; it is anyone’s to inherit. But then, they are much bigger than the ants and they start pushing their weight around. Will it be war?

27th december

Dawn arrived and perfunctorily donned its grey morning suit. It rained all day so I wrote all day. I am habitually hanging out the bed sheets to air because they are getting so damp but it is consistently raining so it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Antony ant is holding a council of war today… but I wrote something else. A short story called the second stage.

The second stage
The beautiful spring day radiated with summer’s imperfections as it finalised its plans to banish winter’s asperity. The sun shone keenly in the azure sky until interrupted once again by the nonchalant clouds, hurrying on their way to nowhere much. April’s children were kept reminded of the transitory nature of its warmth as patches of shade on the ground followed today’s mandatory route, slightly different tomorrow. This year’s lambs frolicked and gambolled in the meadow, excitable doves did their tumbling for the benefit of all onlookers, or nobody in particular, and early spring flowers, keen to blossom tanned themselves by gazing at the sun all day, even when it wasn’t there. The bees had woken up from their winter dreamtime. The world continued as it always had, and as it was supposed to. Shoppers shopped, drivers drove, and all the people who worked were working. Birds flew and chirruped, cows ate grass and the rivers flowed. Cars travelled around, factories chugged away and the wind blew.
The world was several thousand years old according to the religious clerics and everything created by God. According to the scientists, the world was 4.6 billion years old and evolved by chance and a set of vague rules. We wondered who was right. Fact versus faith? Sammy had often pondered how either could claim ultimate responsibility for all the astonishing things he had beheld in his short life.
But unbeknown to the religious community and to the scientific community, there was a third reality that was about to become evident to the people of the earth.
How did the race of giant Superbeings make themselves known to us? I’m not really sure – it seems they were there all along. They were clearly of a much higher intelligence than us. They knew more than we did and when they told us what to do and how to act, we felt obliged to listen.
Perhaps it was in the form of a subliminal message that they informed us that the existence we call civilisation was merely their creation – a videogame- and that humankind had progressed well enough to reach the end of stage one. And so it was that the calm realisation was inserted simultaneously into the minds of all the people of the world:

“You have reached the end of stage one and now it is time to move into the second stage. We have wonders for you in the new age. New technologies will make your life unimaginably easier. We have machines that will think for you. We have computers that will make your decisions for you and medicines that can ease your moods. Let us manage you. Come with us and see.”

And all the people of the world turned to each other in congratulation as though it was a pleasant surprise. “Wow”, the people said, “The world is just a video game. Who would have thought it? Let’s see what the second stage is like." And the people were happy because they felt that they had been successful. You must be successful to pass a stage, after all, and this the Superbeings had confirmed.
All at once, the scenery transformed and everything changed colour and took on a fluorescent appearance. The green fields turned yellow and the blue sky turned grey. The trees turned to metal, the animals to concrete and the sea turned black.
Only Sammy wasn’t convinced. How did they do that, he wondered. It wasn't that anybody had said anything, and it wasn't a giant message in the sky that had made people realise. Perhaps they used radio waves, he thought to himself. Heaven knows there are more than enough inescapable signals drenching the earth, what with mobile phones, radios and televisions, and the rest. In a few hundred years, will we find out that they damage us? Do they cloud our thinking? Perhaps some animals can hear them -who knows? Maybe we give whales headaches?
But Sammy was happy where he was. He had a good life and he was enjoying stage one. He liked the colours and sounds, smells and tastes of stage one and didn’t see that this second stage would be an improvement. There were problems, of course. Stage one wasn’t really finished anyway, was it? There were many things we hadn’t done very well and surely we hadn’t got as anywhere near as many points as we should have done in order to pass a stage. How could we progress until we had finished what we were here to do? How could we say we had been successful? Perhaps the standards of this game are quite low. Had we learnt enough of the rules to cope with the next stage?
Sammy, like everyone else, had been told he had to get ready to make the transition into the second stage. Unlike everyone else, however, this did not make him happy so he said, "I'm not going into the second stage because I like it here in stage one."
Everybody knew that all the people of the world needed to move into the second stage or otherwise they couldn't do it – dissenters are not allowed. They tried to persuade him that the second stage would be better but Sammy was not convinced. They spent hours trying to influence him but he was having none of it. He was enjoying life and he knew that you couldn’t have too much of a good thing. The people of the world began to get annoyed. They were ready to move into the second stage but they couldn't because of Sammy.
The people of his Street had a meeting and decided to find Sammy and deal with him, and tell him once and for all, what he had to do. But Sammy had anticipated this and had disappeared into another street. So, both the streets got together to look for Sammy only to find that he had gone to another town. Soon, entire towns got together to look for Sammy but he had gone to another country. Eventually, all the countries got together to look for Sammy but they couldn't find him anywhere.
With the world still in stage one, everyone was looking for Sammy. Their experts used their machines and equipment to find him. Sammy was seen horse riding in Spain. He was fond of riding and was enjoying the scenery of the mountains. The seemingly ageless splendour and the clear blue sky with the warm sun always gave him gave him a sense of inner peace and tranquillity. The people of the world got on their motorcycles, ruined the tranquillity, and chased him but he got away. Then somebody found him running with gazelles through Africa. He was always astonished by the sheer variety of wildlife of the Dark Continent and thought that they were probably the most majestic beings on God's earth. The people of the world got in jeeps, scattered all the animals, and went after him but he got away. One day, he was seen swimming with dolphins in the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea. The colours and shapes of the Coral, and the extraordinary diversity of fish that he saw made him marvel at the imagination and ingenuity of evolution - it never ceased to amaze him. The people of the world got in their patrol boats, scared all the fish and chased him but he got away.
Eventually Sammy had nowhere to run to. He was in Patagonia, taking in the Savannah and the wonderful flat plains where the guanaco graze. The people of the world saw him, and chased after him yelling and shouting, and the animals ran away. The vista was completely flat - a field that stretched from horizon to horizon. Sammy was running across the field and all the people of the world were running after him. For years Sammy ran, and for years the people chased. Eventually Sammy saw a hedge on the horizon, and headed for it. The hedge ran from the left horizon to the right horizon, the entire width of the field and more besides. When Sammy reached the hedge he hid behind it, but it was clear that he had been spotted. Sammy picked up the hedge, which was as wide as the world, and threw it towards all the people of world. The hedge hit the people and knocked them all over. He ran away. Sammy did not run far because he came across a beautiful orchid and was compelled to stop and take in its unfathomable beauty and intoxicating scent.
The people of world came running over the horizon and they saw Sammy enchanted by the flower. They didn’t stop running until they reached Sammy and they surrounded him and beat him to death in their fury. The flower was trampled to the ground and crushed.
And so the world moved into the second stage and everyone knew they were being managed. The scenery changed colour permanently and the fluorescent appearance remained. The green fields were yellow; the blue sky was enduringly grey, the trees metal, the animals were concrete and the sea remained black and the people were content because there was so little for them to think about. Everything was much more straightforward and they didn’t have to work hard and had no difficult decisions to make.
But strange things started to happen at the point where Sammy died. No matter what the Superbeings did, they couldn’t stop an orchid from growing there. They covered it with concrete but it would eventually break through the concrete and emerge through the crack. They built great structures upon the spot where Sammy died but the orchid would find a way through. They poisoned the area to prevent anything from living there but the orchid still prevailed.
The video programme began to fail and the fluorescence began to flicker. The fields shimmered, the sky became full of holes, the metal trees became warped and twisted, the concrete animals crumbled and the sea began to smell. The people of the world became very unhappy with the Superbeings who had made them such promises and had now left them with this tainted existence. Slowly at first, and with an increasing rapidity, the world became a place of decay and suffering. The Superbeings began to argue amongst themselves and the people of the world lost patience. Inexorably, the fabric of the world was disintegrating and in the gaps left by the faulty programme, the orchid grew.
It grew in the fissures that were emerging in the concrete and in the fractures that appeared in the floor. Its seeds became scattered and the orchid sprouted on the top of buildings and in the poisoned fields. As the pace of the programme’s ruin increased, so did the rate of the flower’s emergence across the world. Soon the programme could no longer function and it crashed. The world spluttered unsteadily and the people of the world understood that they should take back their futures.
This sudden realisation hit the people of the world and they began to look around themselves with clear understanding. ‘Maybe the second stage wasn’t so great,’ they thought. ‘Why ever did we agree to trade the simple wonders we took for granted for the bleak and abstract future that the Superbeings offered us?’
It was clear that the Superbeings claims had been false all along, and that they were not of a higher intelligence than us. They bickered and spat amongst themselves and blamed each other, and begged for another chance but ultimately, they were dependent upon the will of the people. They were banished. All at once, the scenery transformed and everything changed colour and lost entirely its fluorescent appearance. The yellow fields turned back to green and the grey sky returned to blue. The trees changed back to wood and leaves, the animals were reanimated and the sea turned blue-green once again. The people were happy again now that their future was once more in their own hands.
In the spot where Sammy died, the orchid bloomed and flowered again.

26th december

A strange thing happened last night...
After midnight, I got up for a pee. As I came down the stairs into the kitchen, I saw three lights coming down the road. It cannot have been anything motorised because there was no sound. They cannot have been runners because the lights did not waver - they were constant. I can only think they were cyclists but they were going quite fast on a very bumpy road which would have been very, very difficult in the dark and there was still no sound which is very strange. It was surreal, slightly unnerving. They almost appeared to be floating down the road at quite a fast pace. Perhaps it was the Holy Trinity on their way somewhere.

World Service Sport on in the morning so I’m happy as a sand boy on the balcony. I am still in the habit of dismantling the table and taking it up and down the stairs to the balcony in the am and pm. I am becoming interested in identifying the birds and the trees out of these moth-eaten books that are lying around. Montezuma Oropendula, Lineated Woodpecker, Scarlet-Rumped Cacique, hummingbirds and etc - I have you all sussed!
While I am up there, I see my first snake. I happened to look over the side to below and there it was, and it looked mean. It was lying close to the gulley beneath the eaves, around six feet long, jet black all the way down with some yellow markings here and there. I could see Negra laying dozing only around twenty feet away. Her eyes are blinking lazily open and I’ would have expected her to have seen it get that close. Natives of the country are encouraged to kill poisonous snakes and my immediate reaction was to get the shotgun, so I did. I put the shotgun together quite quickly and the snake had hardly moved. I got a cartridge, loaded up and pointed at the snake.
“Where should I aim,” I wonder to myself. “The body? The head?” Dead easy.
It’s too easy. It doesn’t even know it’s being pointed at and I can’t pull the trigger. It might not even be poisonous. I stay well out of its way just in case and watch it as it eventually sidles away into the longer grass by the side of the swamp. Then I lose it. I describe it later to Over and he informs me that it isn't dangerous, which is a relief to me. Wouldn’t want it biting someone tomorrow… like me, for example.

25th december christmas day

Woke up and lay in bed for a while. It’s Christmas day. The air is chill-warm, that strange short-lived combination of cool dawn mingling with the promise of a warm morning. I contemplate the usual stuff – life, the universe, naval lint, what life would be like if insects were the same size as me, and then I rise, flinging on some boxers. I amble to the balcony first to do my weather check and find the carpet of frost has been swept up and bagged by the moon before he exited - stage left. The sky is an intoxicating blue and the sun still a diffused blaze of yellow behind the wall of forest.
I head downstairs to get a coffee and am abruptly reminded that I have no gas. I will ask Over when I see him if he has another connecter for ‘la bombona’ but in the meantime I have a beer for breakfast and light the stove. I get some kindling and realise the stove is still full of ash but I am not inclined to empty it out today.
Finishing my beer, I have a tired attack and have a real crisis. Do I go back to bed and sleep or do I make something of this glorious - not to mention holy - day. I need coffee to wake mew up so I grab the kettle to fill it and boil it on the stove. The water trickles out of the tap. I try to wash up and it peters out altogether - would you Adam and Eve it! Not only has Santa not managed to get down the flue and not only has he not left me any presents, but he has taken back with him my gas and water, or at least blocked the supply while he was attempting to get down the flue. Blimey. It’s not as if I have much in the way of amenities in the first place.
No gas and no water, and the day had only just begun. I go over to find Over and knock on his white door a couple of times but he is not around (or he has decided that he's having a lay in and won't answer the door until he is ready). I dig out a couple of bottles of boiled water and have my coffee. The water comes back on in a dribble about one hour later so I fill up everything I can, slowly.
Well, what can you do? I chill out on the balcony in the full sun and watch the Christmas day routine. Just like any other day really. The bright sun is enveloping the forest with the warm caress of a billion years and the rainforest basks in it all, equipping the world with the oxygen to keep the billions of worker ants in the choking cities alive, whether they deserve it or not.
Eventually Over comes over and mentions the water - he's going up the mountain to the tank in the stream to check it out. I ask him if he has another connector for the gas cylinder but he says not. Looks like its wood-stove cooking for Christmas. Smoked this, flamed that, ash on toast ...
Late morning - the water seems to be flowing okay now. I wonder what he did. I suppose it was just a question of cleaning out the filters and checking the pipes or something. If it happens again I’ll take a torch and do it myself. I have a cold shower.

The Christmas Day a la Carte menu:

Breakfast

A beer
Tomato, onion and mayonnaise bun (x2)
Bag of raisins
Coconut juice (CRCCC)
Cup of tea

Lunch

Flame-grilled hamburger, with tomato, onion, and tomato, sauce in a bun
Beer with vanilla cookies
Tostadas with mayonnaise, tomato sauce and French
mustard dips
Another beer
Flame-grilled coffee

Dinner

Smoked omelette with tomato and onion
Pilchards
Orange cordial

Supper

joint (not the kind you eat!)
Beer

(Management extends apologies with the announcement that Ice cream is off the menu today)

24th december christmas eve

I am awoken by a rustle and dull thud as a coconut falling from a tree works its way through the branches of a tree and then hits the ground.
Had a couple of dreams last night...
1) I was studying but took the test early and only got twenty-three percent
2) I rang up Donna and asked her if I could go round for coffee. To my surprise, she said no. I was then in a park at a big table, studying in the sunshine when Donna turns up with several of her friends. They all sit down and we start talking. One of her friends is Caroline.
What’s it all about? But then, Donna has always been unattainable… and getting twenty three percent in a test? Nothing new there – I never cared for tests and would show my rebelliousness by deliberately flunking them.

It's a beautiful day today - sunny and warm with gentle breeze. The forest seems greener than usual and the sound of the trickling water is carrying further. All is well with the world. This is how Christmas Eve should be.
Seems I have palmito plants and coconuts mixed up. What I thought were palmito nuts are actually immature coconuts! They just look unlike coconuts the coconuts we see in the stores because they are not ripe and they haven’t been prepared for sale by being peeled. Explains why I could only see palmito nuts when I was looking for coconuts. I’m not even sure a palmito nut exists – I think it’s a plant that is used as a vegetable, also called Heart of Palm in this country.

I find some coconuts anyway. They are green at the moment because they are not ready. This was the large green thing that I chopped up to get at the juice inside the kernel. I get a machete and chop away the outside pulp to get to the big nut inside. Then, by puncturing a whole in the kernel, it is possible to drain away the juice that is inside. This is the fluid that eventually turns into coconut milk but at this point, it is an almost clear, slightly cloudy fluid that tastes quite nice. With a little sweetener, you might compare it to sprite or something. I get some kernels ready for tomorrow so that I can create my own Christmas beverage. I’ll call it my ‘Costa Rican Christmas coconut cocktail.’ (CRCCC).

It’s difficult today though, especially in the evening. At 6pm here, it is midnight in the UK and I have to say, I feel pretty lonely, thinking about the Midnight Mass, the cheering in the pubs, friends and family etc. I confess I can’t sit still nor get any comfort anywhere. I didn’t think it would bother me but it does. I’m restive and increasingly out of sorts as the day goes on.
I sit on the balcony at dusk as usual watching twilight do its thing and listening to the dusk chorus. They don’t know there’s anything special today so why should it make any difference to me? But it does. Sitting there, the full Moon begins it arc across the sky, ironically from somewhere behind the hickory tree, and soon enough it is casting a whitish topping over the whole kit and caboodle.
‘Well, would you Adam-and-Eve it?’ I declare, once again to no one but myself. ‘ Would you credit it? Frost!’ The full moon has deposited what looks amazingly like a layer of rime over everything I can see. ‘Thank you, God.’
Eventually I try to go to bed. I don’t even get close to going to sleep so I soon give up, get up again and go for a walk on the bridge. I click on the radio for a while and try to make coffee but there is no gas coming out now. It looks like the connector has finally broken. I can’t be bothered to think about that now – I’ll deal with it tomorrow.
I wonder again what I am doing here. Am I wasting my life or am I doing something that few people get the chance to do. Am I finding anything out about myself? And if I am, are they good things or bad things? What happened to my wildlife sanctuary, my jeep from Alabama and my motorcycle? I thought about what Jim had said about other people coming across in the New Year. Is that happening? Will other people be stranded here as I am?
I can’t figure Jim out. Is he a con man? I would say it’s a pretty stupid business to be in if he is – there’s no money in it. Why on earth did he have me fly half way around the world? What does he get out of it? What does Sinai wildlife projects get out of it? I just don’t get it.

Antony has just had a nasty encounter with some anteaters…
Wondering if I’m living thru Antony. I’m sure as hell not living anywhere else. I am surprised I am this motivated to write the novel as I’ve never really aimed to do one before. It’s a revelation to me. I am revelated.

Revelate /rėvvзlayt/ v.tr 1 to have something shown or displayed to oneself; to allow to appear 2. to have something disclosed unto oneself

23rd december

Dave goes to check the vanilla, over to Over’s, and then goes home, dropping me off in the town. This is the fourth time in four days that I have been in town so as you can expect, I almost feel like a native. As usual, he leaves the excess beers. We have to tie Negra up because she keeps jumping in the back of the pick-up with the other dogs when she saw us both getting in the jeep - she did not want to be left on her own. She has been to the house in Alajuela before and likes the company –why shouldn’t she. Also, a poisonous snake has bitten her while she has been resident here and perhaps doesn’t like it much.
Sometimes, Dave looks at me in strange way. It’s nothing bad but it’s almost as though he is assessing me, trying to suss me out. It’s a sort of ‘what exactly are you doing here’ kind of thing. I think he feels partly responsible for it all and perhaps he feels sorry for me, I don’t know. He shouldn’t. If I wanted to go, I would go. I’m not in any hurry to get anywhere and I do feel myself gradually unwinding. And I’m writing at last. I am chilled. I said to him that I would like to stay until my travel visa expires in February and then I would probably return to the UK. He agreed to that.
Do I feel bitter about the whole thing? Definitely not. Life sometimes throws these weird things at you and you make the best of it. It would have been cool to have driven the jeep down from Alabama and I would have loved to have a motorcycle to ride. C’est la vie as they say here in Costa Rica (in the French quarter.) On the other hand, people like Jim shouldn’t be let loose where he can mess other people around. It may have been that I could have been in the position where I had given up something really substantial to be here or spent weeks agonising over the decision, or needed it for some purpose of study etc. Other than that, sometimes life takes you where you don’t expect to go and long may it continue doing so.
Dave drops me off in Puerto Viejo and I spent one hour on the Internet. There has been no reply to the email that I sent Jim on Monday so I send another one today, an altogether harsher version. Dave has not heard from Jim either. There really doesn’t seem too much point in me staying here too much longer if Jim isn’t coming up with the spondulicks or a plan of action. In an email to Linda, I ask her if she fancies meeting me in Spain in February half term.
As I wander through the town, the blue skies rule the roost over the white fluffy things. It’s a warm day and I sadly come to terms with the thought that it probably won’t snow for Christmas. Nevertheless, everything is festive and the shops are hyping it up with navidad this and navidad that. There were even more than a few references to snow and frost and stuff like that, which surprised me a little. The vast majority of people here will never have experienced it until I then realise that it’s all the magic of Christmas and reality is a spoilsport that we don’t entertain. After all, I fully expected some guy in Lapland to be responsible for delivering to billions of children overnight, you’ve never ridden a sleigh through the night sky and I’ve never seen a fat guy stupid enough to try to get up or down a chimney.
I saw one or two signs for the canoeing and I am tempted. Never done the rafting thing so it might be fun, although according to Dave Jnr, this river is a fairly mild one as rapids go. I’m one of these who doesn’t get motivated enough to do these kinds of things on his own – I need someone else to prompt me. I’ll ask Dave Jnr if he fancies it.
I get some choccy ice cream, check out souvenir shop, and get a taxi back. The bottom of the taxi hits every bump but the road was really bad today. I felt for him. the torrents of rain had washed away various degrees of road in several places and it was worse than ever. I tell him to stop at the slippery slope and check to see if he can get back but he is confident that he can and so down we go, sliding sideways nicely. Still, he descends the piste and carries on regardless hitting everything there is in the road. I felt good that I had warned him. I got him to drop me off at the back of the farm and then HE ASKS ME how much. Stupidly, I say “Tres? Cuatro?” Naturally, he says ‘cuatro’ but I don't begrudge it. Four thousand colones, four pounds fifty pence for a thirty-minute ride on a road like that - they deserve it. London cabbies – you don’t know when you’re spoiled rotten!!
When I get back, Negra has broken out of her ties. She appears later in the day, following Over around.
There is some mincemeat left so I do myself another burger in the afternoon and one of my teeth breaks off - that is the second one to break while I have been here.
Evening, and here is a weird thing. I am doing some writing by candlelight on the table in the kitchen. It’s the usual scenario with a candle, ashtray, writing pad, drink within reach and working away in a puddle of light the size of your car. The mirror is leaning against an empty bottle behind the candle to give me more light. Caveman see? But a curious flying thing comes along and doesn't know whether it prefers the candle image in the mirror or the real thing. Inevitably, it eventually burns itself on the flames of the real thing and can't fly any more. The scientist in me tells me that it therefore is more interested in the heat than the light.
It then tries to climb the reflected image of the candle in the mirror but obviously no matter how far it goes, it will never reach the flame because it can never get close enough. The image will always keep moving. Faced with this conundrum, or merely due to previous singeing, it stops, sees itself, falls a couple of times and eventually decides to climb the candle itself halfway. It seems happy and it clings there.
Looking closely at it - it really is an ugly thing and does not bear close scrutiny, rotating its head like that. One of his wings is singed off. I move the pen close to it and the antennae follow the pen as though they are magnetised. After a while, it falls off the candle and appears to be really struggling. It remains facing me, is aware of me and I think that maybe I am more interesting now than the candle.

22nd december

Dave Sr. turns up at about 2-ish and is obviously staying the night, depositing his overnight bag in the double bedroom and unceremoniously dumping all my freshly aired sheets in a heap on one of the single beds.
“I've got this thing about having my bed”, he says, undoubtedly feeling a guilt pang. Apparently, he built it himself.
“Did you make your bed?”
“Yes! Did you make yours?”

He has brought his dogs, mother Negra and the other blond hairy one, and Negra junior is overjoyed for the company. They sniff each other and do things that I couldn’t possibly get away with.
We go upstairs to the balcony to chew the cud and he lights a joint that somebody called Alfredo gave him on the way in. We smoked about half of it. Dave says he wants to see the mayor about getting electricity to the house so we go into town. The mayor's office is closed for the Christmas period it seems. I take the opportunity to shop enough for about three weeks after my recent experience, including one or two goodies for Christmas day, and Dave gets some mince for burgers and some beers. We come back and do hamburgers on the gas stove - one each and then I drop one on the floor and swear. I contemplate cleaning it and eating it still but even I draw the line there. Over is over, and I have to bring the table down into the kitchen from the balcony. I would have done it anyway soon. At least he likes the pot plants.
Over goes home and Dave and I ‘balconise’ ourselves again.

Balconise /bálkзnīz/ v.tr & intr. (also – ize) make for or move to balcony, to seat oneself on a balcony.

Fed up of wondering if something is, was, or should be a word. I’m going to make my own up (except the ‘з’ - I couldn’t find the reverse ‘e’.) Dave’s dictionary, I’ll call it.
Anyway, there we are sharing the peace pipe and he casts his practised botanical eye across the swamp and past Over’s house to a tree that has caught his eye. “Hey, has that hickory tree got a nut on it?”
I follow his gaze but have no idea where he’s looking. “Hickory tree?” I say helpfully.
“Yeah, I think it does. Can you see that big pale nut about the size of a football?”
I looked in the general direction of his waving finger. “Yep, got it,” I affirm but I actually have no idea what he’s talking about or where he’s looking. I just want to feel involved and I am feeling mischievous.
“That’s a hickory nut. I wonder why there’s only one. Have you ever seen hickory?”
“Chicory?”
“Hickory.”
“… dickory dock?” I quip.
“What?”
“What?” I repeat. If you want to derail a conversation, just start repeating everything the last guy said and look confused. Never fails.
“Did you say duck?” he asks me.
“Duck?” I repeat, trying to look confused.
“What did you say?”
“What did I say?”
“Did you say duck?”
“I didn’t say duck. I don’t know anything about chicory, Dave.”
“I’m not talking about chicory. I said Hickory. It’s like pecan. Have you heard of pecan?”
“Peking duck?” I repeat. Word association such as this always helps and should not be discouraged when confusion is the intended destination.
“Did you say duck again?”
“I did then but I didn’t before. Peking, wasn’t it?”
“It’s pecan. Its hickory,” he said so quickly that the words all collided with each other.
“Bless you.”
“What?”
“What?”
He takes a deep breath. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t have seen it before. So Dave,” he says. “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Why? Who’s been talking?” I say in my exaggerated voice. It goes right over the top of his head. I’m actually feeling on top form tonight, I’m full of it, and need to be with someone who appreciates my relentless stream of humourous prompts. I’m just so funny sometimes… I hope I’m not winding him up too much.
I don’t expect to get all the credit for my jokes - I’ll play the straight guy too - but this is ridiculous. Dave Snr doesn’t have a bad sense of humour but it’s Americised (is that a word? And if it is, should it be capitalised? Should I invent it too? ) Whereas someone like, for example, Mr Bryson’s is quite anglicised and well rounded. The problem sometimes with Americans is that hey don’t know when the English are taking the piss, they just put it down to eccentricity I think, or the EU. My humour is lost on Dave. I want to be obtuse, poky and take the piss in a nice way, and have someone take the piss back, which I really don’t mind. Well, the English don’t, do they?
I daren’t. After suffering his furrowed brow pointed ruthlessly in my direction and interrogating me about ducks, I apologise. “Sorry Dave, Joking. To answer your question, I’ve been writing. I dabble a bit.”
“You do? What do you write?”
“Well, anything I guess. I’m writing a novel about ants at the moment. All handwritten.”
“Gee that’s great. I had a book published once,” he states, as though I’m supposed to be surprised. I’m not surprised because he’s obviously very knowledgeable about vanilla.
“A book about vanilla?” is therefore the natural postulation I present humbly at his botanical feet.
“No, a novel. It’s called the Dweeb.”
Now I am surprised! At this point, he did explain the plot to me but I’ve lost the thread a bit now. It was something to do with the Internet and a guy on another planet who somehow inadvertently comes to control the world porn supply, or something like that. I hope I’m not doing him a disservice. I have since looked it up on Amazon and there it is – ‘the Dweeb’ by David S Gardella. If I ever have any money, I’ll buy it.
At this point, he has risen my estimation again. I know he’s a good businessman and I know he’s had a varied life which I appreciate, and he’s a nice guy letting me wreck his rain forest time share country home as I am. I have the greatest respect for people who have the ability to reinvent themselves and make a success out of more than one thing. He did his Peace Corps thing after his National Service, emigrated, done his Vanilla thing and had a novel published too. This guy is not afraid of life.
Being published ain’t easy anywhere. The only thing I’ve ever had published was a little poetry many years ago and a couple of snooker match write ups. In truth, the poetry is the only thing I have ever tried to get published but that’s not the point. You have to be good to be published. By his own admittance, he only sold a handful of copies but its there on his CV and it’s there on his bookshelf. Well done, Dave.
“Yabba yabba yabba, blah blah blah,” and on we go, chatting away merrily before we are rendered stone cold speechless by a spectacular shooting star that belts right across the sky in front of us before exploding in an abrupt flash of white and orange blaze. It was a wondrous moment, thoroughly extravagant and uplifting, like seeing a cinder shoot out of Gods own fire. It set Dave up telling a story about how he rented a car on time
“I hired a car in Honduras and drove to Costa Rica in it. I had an accident and so I had to pay to get it repaired and obviously, while it’s in the shop, I can’t use it and I still have to pay by the day, too. I got the car back and then the chip in it went faulty and I had to wait for that to be repaired too. I finally had to drive it back to Honduras – I just wanted to get rid of this car. As I was crossing the border, the patrolmen wanted to stop me but I didn’t want to stop so I kept going. I hit a gate, a black gate that someone had dragged into the road. I just didn’t see it. I didn’t even stop because I was so sick of the car but the police caught me, pulled me over and fined me. I drove and drove through Honduras but I couldn’t find fuel anywhere. I had had this car for weeks and weeks, it was costing me a fortune, and I was sick of it and just wanted to get it back to the hire company.”
“I was about to run out of fuel,” he continued. “I started banging on the wheel and said ' why me, God?' I slowed down until I had almost stopped. In the road, about 100 metres in front of him landed a meteorite. Maybe if I hadn’t slowed down, it would have hit me.”
The chances of seeing the shooting star were virtually nil for us. We are sitting facing the swamp and behind us is the rear of the balcony and the hill across the road so no sky viewable there. To our right is the planked wall of the dormitory and to the left the balcony railing and then palms outside, above us the tin roof. The only visibly sky we can see is the narrow strip in front of us and that in itself is narrowed further by the roof above us and the jungle trees across the swamp. It is the equivalent of watching a wide screen television from a distance of three feet but the shooting star had amazingly entered one side of the screen and rocketed across perfectly horizontally, burning up just before disappearing off the screen on the other side. We were blessed that night.
“How could we combine a shooting star with the thunder dome,” I put to him.
“Hey, what a great idea that would be.” I know he is impressed that I have beaten him to the punch. “Of course, we could never combine the two things because of the timings. It would be a million-to-one shot.”
“I suppose also that a shooting star needs a clear sky but thunder and lightning need cloudy skies.”
“Yeah, but if I had a helicopter that was very high in the atmosphere, releasing grains of sand, they would fall to earth under gravity and burn up in the atmosphere. It would look spectacular. It could be the next stage in pyrotechnics, Dave. Fireworks released from the sky instead of from the ground. I don’t think a helicopter could get anything like high enough, unfortunately.”
“I want a cut on this, Dave, for my contribution.”
“You can have cut price tickets, a ringside seat and the British syndication rights.”
“Cheers mate.”

21st december

I had problems sleeping. It was still raining without and it was cold within – I just wanted to be snug. I’d forgotten what it’s like. I tried to close the window but it wasn’t designed to be closed - it consisted of a column of horizontal glass slats that hardly moved at all. They were designed for the average warm weather but it was chilly indeed. The only sheet on the bed was a thin white cotton sheet so I pulled the sheet off the other bed too and huddled under the two of them to try to engineer a warm bit of bed. It didn’t really work but I dozed off to a fitful sleep eventually only to be woken up at 3am by some noise outside. I went back to sleep and was then woken again at 4.50am by what sounded like huge lorries churning over their big diesel engines. I looked outside through bleary eyes and saw that the room overlooked the bus station and they started really early here (at 4.50am, in fact!). There were quite a few buses and coaches getting ready to depart on wherever their routes took them, each driver revving up his bus to make sure the thing was loud enough for the coming day’s jaunts. Ten minutes later, there was a guy walking down the street playing a harmonica! Soon after that, a load of random people started shouting and I have no idea how I got back to sleep.

I wake up early because of the continuing noise and lie in bed watching the arts channel on the TV for a while. Some weird opera thing is showing but I am entranced so I watch it all.
All my clothes are still wet and I knew they would be. I turned off the fan at dawn when I was rudely awoken by the town kick-starting itself. At around 8am and wearing my clean clothes, I head down to the restaurant for breakfast but all the chairs are still upside down on the tables and I can’t find a single member of staff – I guessed this hotel didn’t do breakfast then! I wander outside and down the street, half expecting to see some post-apocalyptic vision of half-houses and orange skies, with the few survivors picking through the wreckage of their town. And maybe some 300 feet tall beetle searching for someone. To my surprise, life seems to be continuing much as it did the previous day. The sun is shining, the streets are dry of puddles and only the waterlogged football pitch shows any ill effects from the battering. I walk as far as the bridge and find the river level has dropped around fifteen feet overnight. It gives me hope I can get home.
Thighs red and sore, the slightest friction agony, I return to the hotel and get my stuff, throwing the key into the restaurant (which is still locked up). Full of hope, I wander the short distance up the road to the side of the football pitch to where the taxi rank is replete with a file of red saloons.
“Hola. Esperanza, por favor,” I say to the first driver in the queue. He looks at me in bewilderment.
“Huh?” he articulates fatly.
“Sabe usted Esperanza? Un pueblo aproximadamente diez kilómetros en esa dirección,” and I point. He follows my point. He seems to know where I mean, or maybe he has just heard of me, the mad pointing gringo, but whatever, off we went. The fact that we set off at all gave me hope too – these guys know the area and which parts flood and stay flooded and which parts drain quickly.
“El agua,” I said,” estaba muy alto ayer, pero hoy, esta mas bajo.” The water was high yesterday but today it is much lower.
“Es un día nueva,” he says. It’s a new day. Yep, sage advice that! I bet he says that to anyone that gets into his cab.
“Excuse me can you take me to Panama please?
“Yes. Its a new day.”
The next paragraph he orates sort of passes me by but I pick up enough to gather that the river Sarapiqui had burst its banks through the incessant rain.
Things go reasonably well. We get to the first corner where the thigh-high floods had been and there was no water at all but then we arrive at the muddy slope that Dave has had problems with sometimes. The fat taxi driver stops the red car at the crest.
I look at him. He is looking at the slope. I look at the slope too. He looks at me. I look back at him.
“No?” I query.
“No,” he declares. He says a few things in Spanish that I don’t quite understand but I get the drift. He’s saying he will not be able to get back up again on his return leg. And he’s right too – he would never get back up! No problem. I am only thirty minutes brisk walk from the house now. I give him two thousand Colones and ask him to wait while I get changed in the back of the car before he leaves, back into my scruffs. The sun is out but everything is still wet and muddy and I am determined to keep my clean clothes clean so that’s why I put the wet ones back on. I start walking gingerly down the slope.
As I pass a farm entrance, a skeleton of an old guy emerges on a bike and begins pedalling in the same direction as me. He is so bony that I struggle to work out where the bike stops and he starts – they almost seem fused together. I watch him slowly pull ahead of me. He pedals in slow motion – I’m convinced of it, and how he stays upright on a bike at such a slow speed beats the pants off me. His wheels keep sliding on the mud on the polished cobbles and I’m having a few problems too.
I walk past the laughing house and start around the bend in the road. I see the bike lying in the road without the guy on it. This was ominous. Not because I think he’s fallen off – I know him to be a magus, being able to stay on that bike like that – but because he must have dismounted his dawdling steed for some reason and that could only be bad news for me. I completed the bend and saw the back of the guy standing there with his hands on his hips, watching the road reproachfully as it still descended into the water. It barely seemed to be any lower than it had last night, although now I could swear that the water was flowing in the other direction.
He turns to collect his pushbike sporting a grim expression on his face.
“No camino,” or something, and he makes a dismissive motion with his arms (or a dance move, depending on how you look at these things). I am fed up and had expected that the water would have gone down. I am also cheesed off walking and determined not to walk any more than absolutely necessary today so I place a pebble at the water’s edge where it laps against the road. I will check it in a couple of hours to see if the water level is receding – I am prepared to wait all day if necessary. I watched Skeletor pace bonily around, wondering why he didn’t just cycle over the water’s surface, being an Indian shaman and hundreds of years old as he obviously was.
I am not going anywhere – I didn’t care. I’ll wait out the water. I can eat my dry noodles! Hey, I have a lighter. All I need is something to burn and a pot and I can cook my noodles. After all, I have plenty of water.
Shamen is hanging around. Can he read my mind? Did he want noodles too? He’s muttering to himself and every now and then, he mutters loudly, if muttering loudly isn’t a contradiction in terms. Maybe he’s casting a spell, I think to myself. A muttering spell. The man says a lot of things, hardly any of which I understand and I crack a great joke in español – “Necesito de un barco.” I need a boat! Yeah, great joke!
¿”Dónde anda usted?”He asked me. Where are you going?
“Esperanza.”
“Ah, la casa alta,” he said, nodding sagely. The tall house.
“No”, I said and then I realise he is in fact talking about the tall house, the bates motel, and follow it up with a quick “si!” I suppose I am well known as the gringo in “la casa alta” – the tall house. I don’t think anybody knows that I really live in the Bates motel, or the house on the hill. One thing about this country – not many tall buildings. Maybe because they’re scared of earthquakes, maybe too much rice causes vertigo – who knows? Anyway, this guy starts to walk toward the laughing house and shouts something - another guy came out. I don’t know whether this guy is real or whether the shamen has just created him out of fire water and an old cornflakes packet with some sticky back plastic but I take my chances. He newly created guy is probably in his late twenties, short cropped dark hair, very tanned, slim and bare-chested, wearing black jeans with a machete hanging from its holster.
It seems that he is going to show me a way through the flood to the other side. I’m not sure what on earth the machete is for but then machetes and I go back a long way. He leads the way into the brown, muddy water, wielding his machete as though to part the waters, and I follow him. As the water level rises up my body, it worries me a little that he is taller than me, but at least the water is warm. About half way across, I have the irrepressible urge to swim, which I couldn’t do yesterday because I had the knapsack held in the air. I ask him to hold it and when he takes it from me, I dunk myself into the water and it’s very refreshing and liberating. Having completed the dunk, I take my knapsack back. The water level has dropped a little since last night and all the way across doesn’t come any higher than my shoulders at any point. I eventually work out that he is walking down what was the middle of the road and I am walking in the wheel tracks, which is why I thought he was taller than me. Once I was walking down the centre as he was, everything is fine. I wonder if he’s a ‘Belbin Plant’.
Soon, the water level begins to inch down my chest and then down my jeans and legs. Then I’m stepping leaden footed onto the shore on the other side, dripping copiously and hitching up my jeans as inevitably gravitate to my ankles. I ask him his name and shake his hand – Eduardo. I offer him a pack of cigarettes but he declines. I guess I could have done the crossing myself the previous night but it was dusk and I didn’t know how deep it was in the middle, and it may well have come just that bit too high anyway, I suppose. Also, nighttime is when the crocodiles and snakes and other nasty things start moving about and they would have been in the water. I wasn’t sure of the currents either.
I take a few steps and am immediately painfully reminded of what its like walking a distance with chafing jeans. I briefly consider changing clothes but decide instead to take the back way home, through the plantation rather than going all the way around by road. I turn up the mud lane and the gateway is further than I remember, probably half a mile. I find a gap in the fence and dip into the plantation, thighs screaming in pain, trekking across the coconut plantation and past the vanilla. There are hidden puddles and pools of water everywhere, drenching the long grass and much of it is more like a paddy field. I cross the long footbridge and duck out to take the last stretch by the roadside rather than the slippery trail which would be very difficult after all the rain.
I get back to the house and unpack everything from the rucksack. – I’ve lost my sunglasses! Damn – I thought I’d make it back unscathed! I am bloody-minded about this and decide to retrace my steps as far as I can to find them. After getting this far, I’m not going to be beaten now. Luckily, they are about forty metres down the road so I don’t have to go far. Every time I go away anywhere, either I lose my glasses or they are stolen. Not this time, bozo!
I have two cups of tea straight away. Within two hours, I have drunk another coffee and two litre bottles of orange squash and lots of water.
Over comes over almost straight away and seems surprised at the flood. He can’t have known. Doesn’t he notice the vast reduction in traffic from one car and twenty cows per day to just one bicycle and ten cows? Surely, it’s self-evident that there is a natural disaster afoot somewhere nearby…
I chill out for the rest of the day, mainly on the balcony, continually going down to the kitchen to find something to drink. The sun comes out for a while and then it starts to rain again. The rain is not so much a hindrance here – just a fact of life. Everyone just dealt with it, which is what I saw in town and with the farmers, magus and Eduardo. It’s just as much part of the rain forest as the trees, monkeys, or birds. It’s almost alive– breathing and unpredictable, contributing to life, changeable. It occurs to me that this whole thing is larger than me – its not just about some gringo trying to reboot his mind.
Sitting on the balcony, I feel as though I have passed some sort of initiation rite. I’ve survived and I still have my sunglasses.
I make the attempt to ring Dave to tell him he shouldn’t try to come here for a couple of days but the phone won’t work – it’s not the signal, it just won’t let me make a call. I think about the UK if they had that kind of rain. The whole country would have ground to a halt, questions asked in parliament and everyone blaming everyone else for being crap.
Evening – strangely I am not hungry considering all I had to eat since yesterday was a hamburger and some scraps. (choccy ice cream doesn’t count…)

20th december

The flood
I awake and immediately sense a difference in the air. It seems cleaner, lighter, quieter. Quieter? It has stopped raining. Jumping out of bed, I dash onto the balcony to greet my long lost friend the sun. There he is, somewhere behind the wall of forest but I can see the blaze of yellow already spreading from the east, the day well under way, bright and cheerful and the warmth tangible. The sky is a blissfully silent blue, with just the merest whisper of fluffy white cloud across on the horizon. The whole day smelt of new beginnings and old rain, the humidity already high. The birds seem to be more vociferous than usual and that brown bird with the yellow tail is flopping around in the tree on the island. It makes its distinctive cry that echoes across the swamp and as it does so, it leans forward and loses its balance. So, each call is accompanied by the frantic flapping of wings to prevent it from falling out off its perch. I don’t care what you do, brown bird. Have your fun in the new dawn. The whole forest seems relieved that the clouds have dissipated.
I have a coffee on the balcony, watching the forest come to life, biding my time until I can actually see the old man, the sun and hail him in person. The old reprobate sparkles and glimmers through the branches and peeks inexorably above the treetops – he won’t be rushed will he?
“Hi. How are you doing? I’ve been waiting for ages for you. How is your mate in Alpha Centauri?”
I am enthused and energised by the feel of sunshine on my face for the first time in what seems like a century, steeled more than I can say in the knowledge that my vitamin D yet has a chance of being converted into something useful. What can I do today? All things are possible in the sunshine. I decide to go into town. It’s part of my decision to try to go once per week, but I want to do better this time than I have before. Everyone in this country is always clean and dry no matter how wet or muddied the conditions. I am going to walk through that town looking tidy, just for once. It’s never happened before and it’ll probably never happen again. I don’t know how they do it. Perhaps their clothes are Teflon coated or something. And I’ll take my camera.
Using the small black rucksack in the SWP trunk, I pack it with spare trousers and t-shirt and pack my camera in a side pocket. Bloc sunglasses on, I’m feeling mean. Let’s go. I set off and walk into Puerto Viejo. It’s still early.
I head off down the lane and the pitted section just down from the house is as bad as ever but the sun hasn’t had time to dry up any of the puddles so I can’t avoid getting splashed by my own movements. I don’t care. I’m following the sun. picking my way over puddles and around mud banks, I walk past the hamlet and the school and reach the road bridge that crosses the creek. I look either side and find that the creek has overflowed here and the surroundings are flooded. A grove of trees have their feet in a couple of feet of water and instead of the grassy field that once lay verdant, all I can see is the blue sky reflected off the water’s surface. The same is true on the other side. Slightly amused, I snap a couple of pictures and walk on still choosing my steps carefully. I make it to the town after a couple of hours and not being hungry, head straight for the Internet café, spending three hours catching up on emails and current events. It would only have taken 1 hour anywhere else but these PCs are quite old and have slow processors.
I also sent Jim an email for the first time from myself – the others have been sent from the Gardella’s. I was polite but let him know that I wasn’t happy and that he needed to be a little less backward in coming forward. It was short and sweet. I had a burger then wasted an hour in a queue in the bank changing some dollars into currency. It would have been 20 minutes anywhere else but the cashiers here are quite old and have slow processors.
I head for the Pali supermarket. The supermarket is right by the bridge over the river on the edge of the town that I walked across earlier as I entered Puerto Viejo. I notice that the water level of the swollen river has risen markedly and now the bridge is under some water. I couldn’t see how deep but the cars were not attempting to cross so I figure that the taxis won’t either. Since the taxis are all in the main part of the town, and my route home is the other side of the bridge, it looks like I won’t find a taxi to take me home. That means I can’t buy much since the only container I have is the knapsack and I will have a 2-hour walk. I buy noodles, bread and some other stuff that I hope will be light and try to cram it all into the knapsack. I see my spare clothes and realise I had forgotten they were there. I have been walking around looking like a refugee again.
With the food-crammed knapsack, I begin the 2-hour walk back down my tortuously winding, slippery, wet lane back to the house. The afternoon has arrived and is doing its utmost to dress the naked blue day in a cloak of grey, the clouds filling out ominously into a more or less continuous bank of slate grey. The increasingly infrequent patches of blue are being snuffed out as I watch. The air is becoming close and muggy again. I think it’s going to rain.
After about 1½ hrs and past the sadistic stretch, cardiac hill, I come to a dipped area in the road that has become flooded. I’m not sure how deep it goes but it doesn’t look too bad so I empty my pockets just in case, putting the contents in the knapsack and lifting it high above my head. I tramp gingerly into the warm water and it rises up my leg with each step. About a hundred feet later I’m through it and back on dry land with the water having come up to my thighs at the deepest point – no problem. In fact, I am quite amused by this too and take some more photos. I walk on a little way and for the first time realise that the landscape has been very recently redefined. There are far more water features now than there have been before. Some of the lowlands in the fields are underwater and I wonder where all the water has come from all of a sudden. There were some puddles, pools and a little flooding this morning but nothing like this.
Walking has become a little painful now as the wetness of my jeans is causing them to chafe on the inside of my thighs. I have to keep pulling them around and I find I’m altering my step to relieve the rubbing. I probably look like I have piles.
After about another kilometre, I hear a laugh coming from a farmhouse up ahead. The craziest feeling I have was that someone has seen me coming and is laughing at me! How silly. I continue walking past the house, giving it a good hard grimace as I go past. I round a bend in the road and find myself wondering where it went. Stretching from feet and away from me is the road, slightly cobbled, slightly pitted, and quite muddy but still the known road. It stretches away all the way for about thirty feet before it plunges into another one of these water features that wasn’t there this morning.
The inundation is a mother! The gateposts by the side of the road were of varying heights but still disappeared beneath the muddy brown water long before its deepest point. There are trees in the water and I can’t even see the trunk because the water is already as high as the branches and leaves. Its deep. Bugger! It must be two or three hundred feet across.
I try wading through this one as I did the previous one, hoping for the best. Holding the knapsack above my head, I take the plunge regardless the water reached the height of my shoulders before I was even a third of the way across. I walk up and down the sides of the flooded area, tramping through the fields and woods either side for a few hundred metres in both directions but the inundation had flooded the entire vale. No way across anywhere!
I am screwed! It’s only about 2 hours to dark, and dark is not a good time to be in the rain forest – in the dark! I am only about twenty minutes from the house! But I have no option – I have to go back to Puerto Viejo. A sudden gust of chill wind slaps me around the face and causes me to look at the skies. The still fresh recollection of the morning cobalt sky withers pitifully in the memory as I see the thick heavy gunmetal grey rolling mass of cloud darkening further. And that wind was cool and portentous. It’s going to rain again and its not going to be pleasant.
I set off back to town, acutely aware that I am probably being watched by the guy in the laughing house who is probably still chuckling to himself.
Great anecdote he has now. ‘Hey, everyone peepols. Ze guy in ze bates motel, ee could not cross ze rio.’
It darkens tangibly, dusk plunging to earth as though its parachute hasn’t opened, hitting the ground with a crunch. It was day, and then it was night. It‘s grim and the wind is picking up threateningly. A jeep comes down the hill toward me with three men in so I do the neighbourly thing and inform them that the water level is too high and they can’t get through – they seem grateful but they carry on anyway. I half hope they would come back this way because they will be sure to give me a lift because I am so friendly - my thighs are very sore now. They don’t pass me again so I guess they were almost at their destination. Either that or the jeep doubles as a submersible.
The inevitable happens and the weighty skies open and it begins to rain like an absolute bitch! It’s like being at sea with heavy squalls gusting out of every direction at once. Heading up cardiac hill, I feel like I’m being tested. I’m already drenched through, having been up to my shoulders in muddy floodwater but this is another level of drenching entirely. The raindrops are like paintball bullets, hard, lashing down and exploding against my forehead, dripping down my face, rivulets forming and flowing into my eyes and mouth.
I make it to the end of the road and turn onto the harder stuff – half an hour to go but visibility is extremely poor. It should still be daylight but it isn’t. It’s light and dark at the same time. Through the blackness the trees are swaying violently, being whipped this way and that by incredible winds tossing them around as if made of rags. The twist and contort in the gales clashing against each other and breaking up. There’s a bleakness about things I’ve rarely experienced before and it seems the more I walk, the closer I get to town, the worse it gets. I have been walking for hours on slippery roads and in draining conditions, first through the sapping morning heat and now this. I am sodden wet and parched at the same time.
Approaching town, I am convinced I am making my way through some forerunner for Armageddon. I am being pushed, wrenched and bullied all over the road by ferocious gale force winds and on a couple of occasions I hear substantial branches or even whole trees come crashing to earth close by through the howling and frenzy of it all. The charcoal clouds are powering across the sky at a surreal rate of knots and it occurs to me that the world is working on triple strength and treble speed. The clouds have been wrapped upon themselves and again to make the thick, brawny harbingers that are muscling menacingly over my head. The vigour with which I am pelted by the raindrops, hard and voluminous, and the speed with which night crushed the life out of the day – it all adds up. It’s kinetic energy on overload. This is how the world will end. This is a glimpse at the apocalyptic vision that will one day come to pass.
I feel strangely alive. It feels as though death is all around. I can barely walk because the inside of my thighs are so painful at the chafing of my sodden jeans but what else am I supposed to do. I push on.
There is nothing else on the road. Why would there be? No one else is so stupid. There is nothing else anywhere. I am absolutely drenched. There are twigs and leaves strewn over the road as I hit the edge of town and begin walking under the orange pools of street lighting but I am relieved to see the trees by the roadside thin out. A cow goes sailing past and Dorothy is about to find the wicked witch of the east with her feet shrivelled up. I can see the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Make that three – one just got blown away.
I don’t care. I am walking on autopilot. There is nothing else out in this storm, nothing and nobody. Eventually, I reach the town proper for the second time that day. I have walked for about six hours, mostly in the rain on difficult surfaces and for four of those hours with a knapsack full of food, for two of them with chafing jeans. I am wet, tired, and hungry, in a great deal of pain, pissed off! My legs don’t feel like my own except when they scream at me.
Know what I do? I make the town and keep walking until I hit the ice cream shop – I get a big tub of chocolate chip and a fanta and sit on the wall in the rain eating it – damn that’s good!!! I will not be cowed! I finish it and have a cigarette, still in the gales and gusts. Then I go to Blair’s house in the hope that they will put me up for the night. They are not there and it wouldn’t surprise me if they have gone back to the States for Christmas.
I go to find a hotel. Not sure of whether I am about to get ripped off or not, I walk into the lobby of the first one, Mi Lindo de Sarapiqui, and ask how much for the night.
“¿Cuánto esta por una noche aquí?” I briefly wonder what I look like, but I’m sure I look exactly like someone who has nowhere to sleep and is desperate for a bed.
“Cinco mil colones, señor,” the senorita replies. She quotes me five thousand colones. Five thousand colones!! I splutter! I am appalled, and then I realise that it’s about £6 for the night! “Si, esta bueno.”
The girl leads me upstairs to the first floor and unlocks the door of the first room in the corridor. She takes my passport, returning with it a few minutes later and wanting paying straight away.
“Esta usted Francés?” she asks me and I am indignant at the suggestion – especially after she has just looked at my passport! I’ve just turned my nose up at Armageddon to get this far and she immediately accuses me of being French. I tip her anyway. The room is small but clean, has two beds jammed in somehow one lengthways and one widthways with no room between them, a television and a separate bathroom with shower – that will do me! Actually, the showers in Costa Rica are a joke – I think every one I saw had loose wires somewhere open to splashes with water.
There is a tall freestanding fan. I hang up all my wet clothes on the coat pegs, point the fan at them and turn it on – maybe they’ll dry but I’ve a feeling all I’m doing is throwing damp air on something that’s already wet. I shower keeping one eye on the loose wires above my left shoulder and dry myself with the flannel – no towels. Luckily, I have the change of clothes that I packed so at least I can be dry. I get changed and go downstairs for a coffee in the restaurant.
Actually, I fancied a chat with that girl but I can’t see her. The restaurant is deserted apart from me. I buy a coffee, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and get change from £1. I find a seat where I can look through the shutters to the main shopping parade and there are still people wandering around. I briefly consider going out in the town for a night on the tiles but I am knackered and I not in the right frame of mind for socialising with people who are not famous like me. Besides, I don’t see many people around. It does occur to me though that if the hotel is only six quid for a night, I could make this trip once a week and actually try socialising in this town.
I contemplate my day. I wonder if my Superbeing planned it. I think there was a very small timeframe during which it stopped raining, which led me to come to town, and the flood which would have prevented me. The window of opportunity there was small and yet I made it through, and with clean clothes to change into, my passport to enable me to get a room and my camera. I wonder if I’m being set up and this is where I meet the superspy.
I retire to my room, watch TV for a while and go to bed.

19th december

The gentle, insistent rain tap-taps on the corrugated tin roof as it has for the past six days, gathering in the runnels and trickling down in rivulets before pouring over the precipice of the gutterless sheets and into oblivion below. On one side of the house, the deep gulley fills part way up with water and on the other side, the water pours onto the thick, coarse leaves of the palm trees or perhaps straight onto the ground. The horseshoe of the swamp seems to have gained a permanently ethereal appearance and the water’s surface shimmers, lacking definition, unable to cast a reflection through the unrelenting ripples. The walls of the forest on three sides remain an appealing invitation to a different world – different to this world of uniformity and mind numbing monotony. It saps at the spirit and preys on the will.
Negra is up here on the balcony with me but I don’t think she feels comfortable. I thought perhaps she’d like a change of scenery and I guess I did it as much for myself as for her. I’m relaxing on the hammock on the balcony, pondering life and stuff when I poke myself in the ribs and wake myself up. “What did you do that for,” I ask myself, irritated.
“Wasssat over there?” I reply, peering and pointing to a spot across the road.
“Where?” I say, swinging off the hammock to get a better view.
“There, across the road on the bank, you idiot.”
“Huh? Where? What bank?” I’m a little perturbed at the way I am being spoken to by me. . Don’t I deserve respect? “Don’t call me an idiot,” I cry.
“Over there, you dipstick. Can’t you see on that bank? Those strange shapes in the sand?”
“Uh, oh er … yeah.” I couldn’t see anything but I didn’t want to admit it. Maybe I don’t deserve respect after all.
“You can’t see anything, can you?”
“Er … yeah! I can see some things.”
“Come on. I’ll show you.” I lead myself, hand in hand, across the road from the house to the perpetually subsiding magnesium rich sloppy red muddy slope. One of me slipped on the muddy road surface. Negra comes along, curious.
“See now?” I asked myself.
“Ahh. Wow.” I could see it now. Strange formations in the sand. They looked like towers and blocks of flats a few centimetres high. “What do you think it is then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ants or termites.”
“You think so? But it looks almost like a model of a city landscape, with towers and high rises and stuff with straight sides and flat tops for helicopters. Do ants have any helicopters?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe termites have though. It looks kinda cute. It’s like a miniature civilisation. I’m going to take a picture.”
“Ok.”
Neither of us have any idea what the strange formations are but they are most intriguing. I never saw him again. I miss him.

We picked some Gavilán planks up from down the lane yesterday while Dave was here, unloading them outside the tool shed. Dave wants to see them used as proper steps in place of the muddy ones that lead down to the footbridge by the side of the house. I’m not surprised. The steps dug out of the ground are slippery and treacherous and they are the steps that I attempted to redefine a few days ago. Needing just to get out of the house and do something different, I have a go with the planks, inserting them into the steps that I dug out of the slope.
It’s raining, the soil is completely sodden and it sticks to my boots until I can hardly walk straight. I manage about three steps but the planks are wider than the steps and so the steps need widening and deepening. I’m clumping around like a farmer wearing flippers and my feet are getting really heavy. I give it up as a bad job.
Dave Snr also had seemed pleasantly surprised that I had had the presence of mind to place the planks over the gulley. Giddy with my success, I find half a dozen more and set them similarly, all the way down the gulley. Now, if eight people wanted to cross the gulley at the same time, there is plenty of room for them all. It’s very important to cover any eventuality, such as an impromptu visit from conjoined octuplets or the Costa Rican Riverdance team.
The gas cylinder is now exuding a marked hissing sound when it is turned on. It seems to be leaking pretty badly. I am having to turn it off at the connector whenever it is not in use.
I have also decided to quit smoking when my current supply runs out. I bought about seven or eight cartons of duty free stuff and at current rate of consumption, I will smoke the last one on the 12th January. I’ll quit then. Not buying no more, so there.

18th december

18th decemberWell, today is Saturday and you know what that means – 8am BBC world service day! The skies have remained steel grey since the beginning of the week – just a blanket of pale sameness stretching in all directions, raining steadily and persistently. My world has been drained of all colour and the monochrome sky has become the insidious enemy– no dark or fluffy clouds, no patches of blue sky, no milky sunlight straining to breaking through – just the same shade of grey, featureless cloud without definition or edge. For all I know, the sun has had a week off and has buggered off to Alpha Centauri to visit a cousin in midst of a supernova and who is therefore terminally ill. At least they tell me that December is supposed to be the wettest month here so it’s not supposed to be blazing sun – that would really hurt. I imagine this is what it would be like after Armageddon or before the universe was created, just loads of sameness. That’s the most soul-destroying thing about it all.
I’m happy at my table upstairs, overlooking my lush estate, making sure the swamp stays wet, the trees remain as erect as they need to be and there is a majority rule of green as opposed to the luminous polka pink contingent who, I know, have their eyes on the place. I’m in charge. I drink coffee and have my writing pad open, selection of one single two-coloured-fine-nibbed pen on the table. I also have a fly splatter-er that I use on the tiny black, biting flies. They seem to come and go sporadically and then come back again and they can really be a nuisance when they are hungry and landing on me. It’s when the secretly navigate their way to just above my forehead and then drop to two inches in front of my eye that they annoy me the most. I have frenzied periods of random thrashing around to take as many as I can out of the equation but they’re sneaky, flitting their sly way behind my back and at my shoulder where they know I have a blind spot. Damn, they’re cunning.
Having a real problem with laundry now. The clothes I washed on Wednesday are still wet and the clothes I didn’t wash are steadily getting damper!
Negra is chasing flies – guess she’s bored too. In fact, I’m pretty sure the fly appreciates the extra excitement as well.
Dave Sr. and Dave Jr. turned up at about 2pm. They want the pig that Over has in his barn. It’s an interesting job getting the pig across two footbridges and into the back of the jeep – it really isn’t having any of it, even with three of us dragging it and lifting its legs up to stop them from being used as anchors. By no means fully-grown and yet a little too heavy to lift, the makeshift collar around its neck leaves nasty red welts as it digs its hooves into the soil in protest. It’s for slaughter tomorrow and I think it probably knows. The strange thing is that from time to time, we stop and get our breath, or have a moment’s contemplation and the pig immediately begins snuffling around in the grass or soil, hunting for things and seems quite happy. Is it like the fish? With a ridiculously short memory span? We are the ones trying to take you to the abattoir – don’t you hate us? Aren’t you scared? I think it would have objected whichever way we tried to lead it. It just objected to being lead. It objected to us.
We finally manage to get it across the swamp footbridges and up the rise to the house and lift it into the back of the jeep, tethering it to the stanchion. Have a nice Christmas guys. Don’t think of me…

Dave Sr. had made a fuss of Negra while he was here, as he always does. “Gee, is she getting fat? I think she is. Who’s feeding her?”
I looked at Negra. I had been feeding her most of the time lately. It had occurred to me that sometimes I was feeding her in the evening and there were leftovers still there from the morning. “I’ve been feeding her.”
“How much?”
“Just one tin full in the morning and the same in the evening?”
“In the evening too? Just one tinful a day is enough.”
“Oh really?” I’m sure my dad used to feed his black Labradors twice a day. One meal per day doesn’t seem much. But then, she was certainly getting fatter, and she wasn’t eating everything so I guess he’s probably right.

Antony had a dream today. Well, it’s only fair – I have so many…

‘He dreamt then. He dreamt of foraging for food with his beloved Princess before she became so fat. They were foraging and they were happy. Then he saw her holding the hands of lots of smaller, pale ants and she didn't have time for him any more. Then all the members of the hive surrounded them and they were marching together. They all started turning round and getting confused - they didn't know where they were marching to, and then it began to rain. Just a little at first and then incessantly and then everybody was drenched through and struggling against the raindrops. The rain turned black and sharp and cut right through the leaves and the members of the hive ran for cover wherever they could find it, losing themselves and each other. The leaves on the trees began to disintegrate and the trees wilted and started to die. The black rain was turning the forest into a barren wasteland.
Antony looked at the beehive and saw that it too was disintegrating, cut to ribbons by the sharp rain. He watched as the rain fell to the ground in sheets, reducing visibility to less than a few yards. He saw Hercules thumping away the raindrops until he sank deeper and deeper into the mud and Antony couldn’t see him any more. When Antony turned around he was alone and the rest of his collective had gone.’

What to do with my laundry? I decide to rig up some sort of system to dry my clothes using the stove. Bearing in mind what happened when my sock melted on the kettle, I decide very early on that physical contact between said clothes and said stove is out. I find some twine and hang it across the beams above the stove, dangling my wet stuff from it. I can pull it across to circulate the clothes, or lower or raise it as I need to for long things like towels or short things like my boxers. Caveman-ism again but I have my doubts, I suppose it just makes me feel like I’m doing something positive. The problem is that the dampness is so pervasive; it permeates everything so thoroughly. I’m not sure this will achieve too much.

17th december

It started raining on Tuesday morning and it has been raining ever since – incessantly. I spent the first couple of days pottering around the house, chilling, smoking, translating my Spanish book, talking to myself etc. Then I was so bored I actually read a book and that is really bad for me – I hate reading! I finished it in an afternoon and decided I could do better so now I am writing my own about ants. Antony Ant – Denizen of the Rain Forest is the title of the magnum opus that will revolutionise literature in the twenty-first century. The only problem is I think the name of Antony ant is already taken, so I might have to change his name to Anton, Anatoly, Fred or Maureeece! I don’t know that to be fact but the name slips of the tongue too readily for comfort and I think therefore I’ve heard it before. I have actually done quite a lot in a very short space of time; especially considering it is all by freehand. I did 6500 words on the first day and then 3500 on the second day – freehand. Of course, my writing is bad that I can’t read most of it so I don’t know what the plot is but that’s a small price to pay. I have now done over twenty thousand words in a week. I am like a pen possessed and my hand ain’t ‘alf aching!
I began thinking it had a short story in it of perhaps three thousand words based on the ants that I had seen fighting over sticks and nicking my wafer biscuits. The story just took on a life of its own and will be at least twice as long as it already is by the time my hand has had enough. So far, Antony Ant has been evicted from his nest, struck up another one with some mates in a disused beehive, nicked a princess, annihilated a glow worm colony by accident and soon the Colombian invaders will be appearing to give him a hard time.
Having a lot of fun writing it. I sit at the table on the balcony during the day. I find it difficult to write when the sun is out but it’s easy when it is raining, and it’s been raining a lot. It is a theme that I have noticed increasingly as I have got older – how my work rate is inversely proportional to the amount of sunlight. That is to say that when the sun is out, I think it is a crime to be indoors. I‘ve come to the conclusion that I’m becoming solar powered. It’s not that I’m a sun-worshipper necessarily but I just like the feeling of the thing, even in winter. In fact, is there anything that can surpass ambling around outdoors on a crisp, sharp, December morning through the oxygen-rich air, watching the distant sun melt the early rime frost and hearing the satisfying crunch of footsteps through a heavy ground frost? I don’t think so. One of the more endearing gifts of the UK climate.
At night, I usually take the table back downstairs into the kitchen and work by candlelight until I get tired. There are less flying things to get attracted to the candle in the kitchen because of the netting around the windows. I’m using up a lot of candles that way but as long as I have a supply, no problem.
I have my routine. Make tea, clear table, get a couple of candles going and get everything within reach. Cigarettes, ashtray, candles strategically placed – one behind my writing pad and maybe one to the side to negate shadows, maybe have a drink nearby and definitely another chair so I can just swing round and put my feet up when I feel like having a break and ciggy. Hell, it works, and I write until I’ve had enough, which is hardly ever at the moment for some reason. Its not even difficult – it’s just flowing and the story is half decent. My imagination is in overdrive even if my technique may be lacking.
And once again, my entire universe is approximately ten feet wide, the rough diameter of the pool of light splashed across the room by the candles. There’s nothing without and only me and my tiny existence within. If both candles were to extinguish at once, I would undoubtedly cease to exist.
At times, writing is awkward. Sometimes, the wind picks up and comes in through the fly netting, caressing the candles’ flames so that they flicker and sputter. Shadows salsa across the desk and destroy my concentration. I have known the wind to pick up so that a candle blows out. I took to putting an A4 sized mirror behind one of the candles. It is then sheltered from the worst of the breeze and the mirror also doubles the light, throwing the back half of the sphere of light in front of it and across my page. The mirror helps but it slides slowly and falls onto the desk. Once it knocked the candle over as it went, splattering wax on my page. I stand a folder up behind the other candle and that helps to protect it from the mischievous winds too.
What do I write? I write this diary. I’m always writing in it. If I do something, I sit and put it on paper. If something occurs to me, I make a note. If my mind wanders, it ends up in here recorded, and I’ll read it again when I’m eighty-five years old and rocking in my chair by the fire and remember how my mind once worked.
You may be reading this on a pc somewhere or, even better, in a published book but I’m writing in a leather bound A6 diary with a very fine nibbed blue pen. The pen is very clever because it has a nib at each end, one blue and one red but I like it best because the nib is so fine. I can get 300 words per page and my writing muscles are now so well developed that I can read every word. That wasn’t true in the beginning. Sometimes, if damp, the page won’t take the ink and then I have to skip a couple of lines or turn the leaf. There is this diary and there is Antony who seems to have taken over my life at the moment. I’ve spent virtually my entire week writing freehand in an A5 size blank leaf book I bought in the town. It hasn’t even been difficult. I’ve had plenty to write without thinking too hard and it’s not as if I’ve wanted to do anything else. I haven’t forced myself or been disciplined, it has flowed. It wanted to come out. There’s a novel in everyone and this is mine – well, my first.

Dave was supposed to come on Tuesday but I knew he wouldn’t. He eventually turned up Thursday.
The bat now lives hanging from a nail in the garage, somewhere between the pliers and a circuit tester but just above the setsquare.

11th december

Dave returns to the farm and I’m happy to go back too, strangely enough. I have a couple of great ideas for stories and books but I could really use a word processor. I haven’t used my hands for handwriting for a very long time and I’m sure I’ll struggle to write long stories freehand.
For the first time really, I appreciate the countryside that we travel through from Alajuela to the farm. The first thing I notice as we leave Alajuela are the richly decorated gardens with hanging baskets and gaily painted shutters. And there are ox carts here and there – it’s a nationalist thing – some sort of source of nationalist pride. Then the road skirts right by the volcano of Poas and its huge crater, about a mile across. The road curls around it and the mist crowned the crater toady but it is spectacular on a clear day, by all accounts. Turning right to Varablanca, there are beautiful coffee fincas (farms/plantations) and further up strawberries and ornamental plant and cut flower nurseries and from certain views, you can look down and see the patchwork of different coloured fields. It even reminded me of England’s arable and pasture chequerboard, but I’m not sure it was supposed to. after all, this country prides itself on forest.
Down the other side of the volcano and across the spine of the mountains is the most stunning scenery though. The Rockies through the west coast of North America and the Andes on the west coast of South America are essentially part of one long mountain range formed by the destructive plate margin, with the spine of it continuing through Central America. The road winds up, across, along and down these mountains with many places lacking barriers so that at times, you are just feet, or a sneeze away from plunging several thousand feet in a vertical plunge. Add to that, in many places the rain forest gives way to cloud forest so that one is essentially driving these roads in foggy and damp conditions.
At the top of the mountains where some of the land is suitable for grazing, the trees are a little more scarce with the majority having been cleared. Perpetually blowing from the Caribbean Sea, the trees all lean over the same way, away from the wind as if trying to get way from the bad breath! I pointed it out to Dave Jr and he admitted he had never noticed the effect before. Further down, we pass the ‘la Paz’ falls which is one of the dozens of waterfalls in the country. Even by the roadside, it gushes pleasingly out of the rock wall and you can guarantee a handful of sightseers at virtually anytime during daylight hours.
And it’s free. No sharks have been able to charge you just to look at something that isn’t even theirs and then herding you into the gift shop where you’re compelled to purchase marmalade, which is refreshing. Being one of the more accessible and visually pleasing has however prompted developers to build a brand new hotel on the mountainside overlooking the view.
From here, the road winds down the mountainside and to flatter land and the return of plantations for sugar cane, pineapples and bananas. As we approach Puerto Viejo, tourism rears its frothy head with the riverside restaurants and the sheds housing rafts and canoes and their home made advertisement boards.
Dave checks the vanilla but I stay in the house, saying hello to the desk and radio and reacquainting myself with the termite tunnels now criss-crossing the walls by the sink. Dave leaves saying he will return on Tuesday.

I come down in the night to pee, clutching my torch as usual. I hadn’t used to ue it but I had an incident a few days ago when I think I trod on a mach two fishing rod thing in the dark. I’m not sure who was more alarmed - it or me - but I’d rather it didn’t happen again. A favourite place for them to hide is down the sink hole but I can’t really block it up so there isn’t much I can do other than continue pouring boiling water or insect repellent down there once a day.
Anyway, switching to caveman mode, I decide to take a more proactive role in finding these things, rather than just praying they don’t find me. I descend the stairs surreptitiously so as not to disturb any life forms I may find skulking the environs in my absence. I prowl the kitchen with my torch flashing around, the halogen fuelled beam stabbing through the inky black darkness, chasing away the shadows and gloom. Under the wooden table blazes the white light, across the red concrete worktops and around the sink and drains and patrolling the floor, doing a comprehensive sweep. Up and down the walls, behind pots and pans and the cooler boxes and trunks, and I saw another of these things.
I make for the bottle of insecticide that’s sitting on the shelf and spray it. It races off and after a moment tries to climb a wall, falling off feeling sick. It scurries away again, not getting far. It stops and wonders a bit, probably getting a headache. It seems that some of its legs have stopped working at this point. It spreads its wings, buzzes around, and takes off!!
“SHIT! I didn’t know these things flew!” This is a whole new kettle of fish! I’ve just gone down one rung on the food chain! They’re a formidable sight in the air, especially when there are flying around in ever expanding elliptical orbits at mach two like this one was now. I have to duck. Then I have to swerve, jump, sidestep and finally duck again before it crashes into the netting at the far end of the kitchen and plummets to terra firma. It seems to have had enough and is upside down and hardly moving.
It was the airborne version of the chicken with its head cut off. I don’t think it had a clue where it was going but it got there in double quick time and frenzied with it.
“Sorry mate.” I continue my journey to the WC.