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…)