15th november

Dave Snr. was taking me to the farm today. I was keen to see what it was I’d got myself into and to start doing something constructive. Joe turned up at the house at about 11-ish and it seemed he was coming too. We gotta work on our communication here…
I dumped the two SWP trunks in the back of his ‘4runner’ along with my rucksack. Dave and Joe put their stuff in and off we went. I wasn’t sure how remote this place was but Dave told me that Burger King were six hundred meters in one direction and Mitsubishi close by the other way so I guessed I would be fine for snack food and a rental car.
The sky was blue with a few light clouds scudding across and it was very warm. Joe had the air-conditioning on. It was about a 2-½ hr trip to the North of the country and we had lunch on the way. Once again, I was waiting for the roads to improve but they didn’t ever become that good although in places they had been recently tarmacced. Much of the trip was across the mountain range and so we spent many miles crawling up the sides of mountains along windy1 and windy2 (windy1 as in twisting and windy2 as in breezy!) roads. Some of the scenery was stunning, especially on the mountains tops when clouds didn’t obscure the views of cliffs and craggs. Some of the roads were ok but the clouds were low here in places and these areas were like cloud forest, (like rain forest but predominantly foggy with low cloud because of the altitude). There were very few barriers or fences in spite of the reduced visibility and wet roads. It wouldn’t take much …
After about two hours, we hit a town called Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui and the road ran out as we continued through it, going from being a tarmac surface to being cobbled. We went through the town and turned off onto a farm track that was badly pitted and got worse the further we went. The lane comprised of rocks and cobbles set into the mud in the road and it had rained recently. The vehicle lurched and slid around until finally, twenty-five milk-churning minutes later, we pulled over at the side of a lonely two-story building by the road.
The farm is not what I expected. I thought there would be a barn for straw, perhaps an open clearing for a tractor or two, some buildings etc. – a bit like … well, like a farm really. All there is is a house by the road that appears be on some sort of island on the bank of a swamp. There is another house across the swamp where the labourer called Over lives. His house has a small barn, rather like a lean-to, tacked onto it. There is no equipment to speak of and nowhere to park a combine harvester. There are no fields and I certainly can’t see a buxom farmer’s daughter longing to lead me into a haystack for a snog!
The house itself is a shock to me. It certainly isn’t what I had expected either. I wouldn’t describe it as a dwelling except in the loosest possible terms. It ‘s more of a ramshackle dilapidated shell of a thing that has obviously seen better days (but never any good ones, I’m sure.) It only has bare essentials – the electricity is powered by a solar panel on the roof, Dave assures me, and is only good for working the lights to a very dim level – no chance of any hot water etc. no mod cons. Everything inside it is either old, tattered or scruffy and dirty. It is obvious that man doesn’t spend much time here. No one has lived here properly for a very long time.
And as for Burger King and Mitsubishi? I had expected a burger bar and a car salesroom but apparently, what he meant was that they had purchased land in the area that they grazed cattle on! Terrific! There are no neighbours within eyeshot. I saw a house back up the road but it is the best part of a mile away.
Almost immediately upon arriving and before we unload the vehicle, Dave hustles us out of the house and leads us purposefully further up the muddy lane for about a hundred and fifty yards. Beside a sign that reads ‘SE PROHIBE CAZAR’, no trespassing is a break in the barbed wire fence that ran alongside the road. We dodge through the gap in the fence and onto a trail through the foliage that leads into the forest, down a muddy slope and across a footbridge that is ninety metres long according to Dave. He is obviously very proud of it, having built it himself. It winds across the creek and continues across a particularly boggy bit of ground that is obviously prone to flooding. It comprises part of the trail that leads through thick forest to his vanilla plantation and is made of the same gavilán planks as the footbridge that spans the swamp it seems.
Since we descended the mountain range, the skies are much greyer than I had noticed before. I’m not sure whether this is because of the lack of altitude, or due to the Caribbean slope effect, or mere coincidence. I think humidity is also higher and it is definitely cooler, although that would be a given, due to the lack of sunlight at the present time. Dave thinks it might rain again and wants to get there while its dry and he also says that in this part of the world, darkness falls very quickly. He and Joe immediately begin scanning the lines of plants seemingly searching for flowers on the vanilla plants but I have the impression they’re not sure if there should be any. There aren’t any.
I look around at the plantation. The thickness of the forest has been cleared here and there is not the thick-leaf canopy similar to that that we have just walked through. The vanilla is arranged in rows with each plant a few feet away from its neighbour. It is a climbing plant, a type of orchid, and it is trained to climb around a ‘host’ tree. Apparently, this host tree is not to be too thick-leaved because it would cut out too much sunlight and the vanilla’s growth would be affected. Nor is it to be too sparse because too much sun would also have an adverse affect. The vanilla winds itself around the host tree and would continue climbing but workers train it not climb too high because then seedpods containing the vanilla would be out of reach and unharvestable, even if it could be pollinated, which would be unlikely. Vanilla flowers do not pollinate themselves naturally – they need doing by hand so if the flowers appear too high in the trees, pollination becomes difficult and the seedpods won’t grow and hence no vanilla. Forgive me Dave, but this plant is high maintenance!
And that’s not the half of it! The flower appears for a day and then dies, but if it is pollinated in that time, seedpods (which look like a bunch of fat runner bean pods) will follow. The pods are then left on the plant for up to nine months to mature. After it is harvested, the beans are treated with hot water or heat and placed in the sun to ‘cure’ until they are a fraction of their normal size, possibly taking months, after which the beans are sorted for size and quality. Now they start to smell like vanilla.
Boy, it wouldn’t do to be in a hurry for this stuff…
I notice that the bases of the plants are surrounded by rotting coconuts, dead branches and leaves.
“They like to have something so cling to on the floor,” Dave explains. “Also, it keeps the base of the plant cool and protected which is important when it’s young.”
“There are ants all over these plants. Don’t they pollinate it?” I ask him.
“I wish. It would make our job a helluva lot easier. They are too small.”
“So all over the world, every single vanilla plant has to be pollinated by hand?”
“Yep!”
The plantation also has letters such as J, K, L etc sporadically placed at intervals at the front of some of the rows to identify the year when each planting took place. The current crop of interest had been planted five years previously and that’s around how long it takes the plant to mature enough to bear seed. Hence, it was to be the first crop at this site and thus the excitement at the possibility of flowers.
There were also smaller plantings of cocoa trees, also arranged in lines. I didn’t get a close look at them because Dave was in a hurry.
There is a resident dog, a black Labrador type called Negra who was born at Dave’s house in Alajuela but has been deposited here. As we make our way back to the house, it jumps all over me with red, muddy paws. Thanks, black dog.
After about half an hour, they were satisfied and we head back to the jeep and back into the local town, a twenty-five minute ride back the way we came to Puerto Viejo. Jeez, this road. It would not even classify as an awful farm track if it were in this country! A couple of times, Joe had problems and trying to get up a particularly muddy rise was like Bambi on skates performing Holiday on Ice. I can see why we came in the four-wheel drive. Having said that, I’m not sure that a six-wheel drive would have fared any better.
Dave gets a few supplies from the hardware store and speaks to a couple of people he bumps into before trying to visit the electricity people. Their office wasn’t open. He had said over the weekend of his plans to be connected up but the cables and poles were still some way from his house. In order for him to get electricity at his house, it would help him if it first arrived at the next house to him, which as yet, it hadn’t. That house was about a kilometre away. He wanted to do a deal with them to have the electric wired all the way to his house from its last current position; taking in the next house along the way and then the combined charge would be paid by him and the owner of the other unconnected house together.
He also stopped at a small house at the back of the town. It was Blair and Harmony’s. These are the people who work for Friends of the Great Green Macaw. They came out and we were introduced. Dave and Harmony spoke a little about the proposed tour and Dave basically said ‘keep it quiet.’ It seems their boss is not in on the act.
He pulls in at a shop and emerges a few minutes later with a big block of ice – ah, the cooler. It starts to rain.
Back to the house, Joe goes to bed early and Dave and I sit on a three-seater bench on the balcony overlooking the swamp and watching the skyline. He’s right about darkness falling hard. It fell so fast and hard that I was waiting for it to pick itself up, dust itself off and apologise for crumpling into a heap like that.
Dave is a botanist/biologist by origin and was telling me about the plants and animals in the area. Dave does not have anything specific for me to do just yet until Jim shows up so he suggests I could shore up the rotting footbridge across the swamp if I was in the mood, so I guess I will.
He also questions things about Britain – its role with the EU, petrol prices, , royalty, and imperial measurements etc. “We don’t care about kilograms or whatever. We like gallons,” he said.
“But you use kilograms don’t you, sometimes.”
“Sometimes I guess. But you guys have gone metric haven’t you because the French told you to.”
“I wouldn’t say that. We use these things to keep the peace but we still have imperial measurements. Distances are measured in miles and if we did it in kilometres, no one would have a clue. I haven’t got a clue how much I way in kilograms.”
“Yeah, you weigh yourself in pounds like we do?”
“Almost, we use stone.”
“You do?”
“Yep, And anyway, our gallons are bigger than yours.”
“They are?”
“Yep. Our gallon has eight pints and yours only has six.”
“Hey, yeah. I heard that somewhere. Why is that? Are our pints bigger than yours?”
“Dunno, Dave.”
I don’t think he thinks very much of the UK or the EU. But then I don’t think he thinks too much of the US either. And he hates Bush, as does Joe. As indeed does Jim. Doesn’t everybody? All these Americans seem aware of the impression that the world now has of the US and they are a little embarrassed by it. And yet, they all hate him, all voted against him. Does anyone anywhere think Geo W Bush has a brain?
“I think the best place to put the cages for the animals are behind Over’s place,” he muses later. “There is more shelter there under the trees from the rain and the sun.”
Although it is dark now and I can’t see where he was pointing, he goes through the ideas that he has about where he will put all of the new buildings. “This house we’ll spruce up and for a while, we’ll use it as the accommodation for anyone who’s working here. It’ll be okay. I wouldn’t mind researchers coming here for a while either, if we have room. Even scientists who want to check out the poisonous plants in the swamp or the flies – they’re all part of the rain forest too. If Jim can sort out any more volunteers, which he said he has, we’ll build the future staff accommodation while they’re here. I think maybe it can all go on the other side of the swamp too.”
“What’s Over there apart from Over’s house?” I ask, resisting the temptation to ask him to go into more detail about the poisonous plants and flies.
“Not too much. A little clear ground but it’s hard. There actually isn’t really too much hard land here right now. Just a lot of boggy swamp.”
“This is what Jim said I would be overseeing, this construction.”
“Yep, this is it. I’ve been thinking about the design,” Dave goes on. ‘I would build them to look like mushrooms. The steps leading into them would rise into the centre of the pod at the top – the living quarters. Each one would house two people and there would be two or perhaps three of these mushroom houses. That way they would be off the floor. There would be gaps between the walls and floor, and maybe in the ceiling to let the heat escape but they would be covered with netting so that the insects can’t get in.”
“But I don’t know where to put the research centre,” he says. “I suppose I could move the nursery. It’s on some good ground and it probably doesn’t have to be on such hard ground because it’s not a substantial structure – its just netting. I would rather have it away from the living quarters. That way, you feel like you’re going to work in a morning and when you finish, you feel like you have left. Or I could put the research centre on the slope over the road. Then it can overlook the whole place.”
“It looked a bit unsteady to me,” I comment, having seen the pile of soil in the road that had obviously slid from further up the slope. “Why is the soil there so red?”
“I don’t know. There must be something in the soil that makes it that way – maybe magnesium. Nothing grows there at all. If we could get things to grow it would be less dangerous to build there. But then I could build further up the slope and fortify the slope with a wall at the bottom. If I did that, I might build myself a house on the hill that overlooks everything. That would be cool. I could live here but I think Cecilia [his wife] wouldn’t be too keen. She would visit, perhaps bring her friends for weekends but she would miss her home comforts.”
The beers are going down really well again by this point. Dave has an excellent imagination of his own.
“I don’t know who put that there,” he says with disdain, pointing to the handrail at the front of the balcony. “I guess they thought it was for safety but it blocks the view. I guess it was the FGGM dudes. I love sitting here, Dave,” he says. “It’s possibly my favourite place.”
“Did you build this house?”
“No. It was here when I bought the land. Well, the ground floor was. I added the second floor and the balcony. I bought it in … ’84 so I’ve had it for over twenty years now. I come up here to watch the storms. I love storms too. I’ve thought about building a Thunderdome, Dave. What we have here is a natural amphitheatre anyway, with the trees cleared in a vague arc and the swamp magnifying the sound of the thunder. If there was lightning, I would shoot a rocket up in to the air attached to a metal wire to ground it. The rocket would attract the lightning and be hit by it, bring the forked lightning straight down in front of everyone. There would never have been a light and sound show like it. I would build somewhere for them to sit and then charge them to come here and experience the whole storm thing while it was raging.”
“Interesting concept, Dave,” I said, “but wouldn’t you kill everything in the swamp if you electrified it?”
“Hmm, there is that. The other main problem is predicting the storm.”
And therein lies the problem, Dave…
“So I guess there’s no Burger King close by?” I enquire hopefully.
“There sure ain’t. They just have some cattle near here. When I was in La Paz, MacDonald’s opened a restaurant there. Gee, those guys queued around the block just to get a burger. For some reason, they imported the beef for their burgers instead of using the local farmers. Soon, more burger restaurants sprang up all over La Paz using the local cattle and I guess they were cheaper because pretty soon MacDonald’s had to close because nobody went in there any more.”
That guy has some infectious ideas and he obviously thinks deeply. He wants to drain the swamp and replace it with a proper lake so that he can sit on his balcony – the one we’re on now – and gaze at it.
As I’m getting ready for bed, Joe tells me to check under my bed and in it for scorpions and that gets Dave going again.
“I was here once and I’d been smoking some dope and getting pretty paranoid. I went to bed and I was arranging it when I found a scorpion in my bed. I tried to get rid of it but it started running and disappeared in the sheets or down the side and I lost it. I couldn’t find it and I was getting really paranoid so I thought I’d have a shower and try to get some control over myself. I went to down to the shower and got in and found and an even bigger scorpion in the shower.”
Thanks for that, Dave. I won’t be smoking dope in the rain forest!
Boy, does Joe snore – then I remember the earplugs that Linda put in my emergency bag. I didn’t think I’d ever use them but they were the reason I got any sleep tonight. I use my sleeping bag for the first time ever.
In Alajuela, Dave had asked me if I had any bed sheets to which I replied that I hadn’t but I had a new blue sleeping bag. He had a sort through his cupboards, found me some old sheets, and gave them to me to bring to the farm for my use. He told me to sleep on the sleeping bag but under the sheets because of the heat and humidity. I tried it that first night but the bag was tapered and wouldn’t lay flat even when unzipped. When zipped, it was not wide enough to lie on anyway. I had to sleep inside it or not use it. I tried sleeping in it and found I didn’t like the tapering because I like to stretch my legs when I sleep.
My pillow is a pair of trousers stuffed with some clothes.