16th november

I hear Dave and Joe getting up early. I can also hear the amplified sound of the rain falling heavily on the tin roof, a sound I quite liked. Dave and Joe disappear somewhere. It’s 5.50am and I can’t get back to sleep so I get up and then they return. They had been across to Over’s for coffee and they sent me across to get some. I cross the swamp by means of two wooden footbridges bridges and see him pottering around in his house.
The guy doesn’t know me at all and here I am demanding a coffee. Who do I think I am, and just as importantly, who does he think I am? I ask him for a coffee and he points to a Thermos flask. We have a conversation in Spanish – or at least I think he did. I think he was offering to make me a flask for the day and that’s not what I want so I leave without my coffee. Back in the house Dave sees me return still looking pale and wan and therefore almost certainly caffeine free.
“Did you get your coffee?”
“No, I think he wanted to make me a thermos full of the stuff, so I didn’t push it.”
“No, that’s just where he keeps it. He doesn’t have a pot for it. Go back and get a coffee.”
I don’t fare well in a morning. I’m one of these people who has perfected the art of being on autopilot in a morning because freedom of thought and deed escape me. I’m like a butterfly that needs to warm up in the sun before it can take off. In actual fact, it has worked quite well for me over the years because I have got so use to feeling crap in a morning that I always switch onto autopilot so I don’t feel anything or have to think about what a stupid time it is. It’s an art I perfected many years ago. I can actually get up at any time of the day or night because I don’t regain conscious thought until I have been awake at least an hour. The flipside to that is that you could tell me to do just about anything and I would do it because I’m the ‘living dead’ for the interim.
I do as Dave tells me because I hadn’t yet warmed up my arguing wings. I go back across and get my mug of strong coffee from Over. As he pours it, I glance around his house. Essentially a bedsit, it’s a square building. A small corner is breeze blocked and taken up with the toilet (and possibly bathroom). The rest of the squareness contains his double bed, TV, sink, cooker work surfaces, storage places, everything else. It’s a bedsit in the forest.
At 7.30, the sun starts to appear and my freedom-of-thought wings warm up nicely. I have a marmite sandwich, not knowing where Dave and Joe have gone to this time. While they’re gone, I have a proper look around the house for the first time in daylight. The door opens from without into the kitchen area that actually comprises virtually the entire ground floor - talk about open-plan. To the left of the door is an alcove corner with makeshift breakfast-bar furniture comprising a couple of harsh looking tall stools and a tall table attached to the wall, each in a red wood. Next to it is a rotten bookcase with quite a few books, mainly botanical or ornithological and next to it, pinned to the window frame is some sheet of A4 which holds the aims and intentions of the Friends of the Great Green Macaw, the mission statement.
On the left wall, looking from the door stands a type of dresser with the three ring portable gas cooking stove upon it and the gas cylinder next to it. There is a lonely looking blue tin kettle standing on the stove. The dresser has two doors that open outward but it looks like the depths of hell in there so I don’t venture to open the box and release the spirits and dead of many thousand years. I don’t want to share with a banshee, spectre or aeon-dead relic starved of corporeal company. I’ve left my crucifix in my other pants!
Half way down the left hand wall and running into the corner were some concrete worktops and they go into the corner and along the back wall far enough to incorporate a sink and drainage sink. In this corner, above the worktop, are a couple of wooden shelves, from which hang pots, pans and tin mugs from some hooks. There are jugs and small tin milk pails that contain what cutlery there is. Below the sink is a big red plastic dustbin with a lid on it. All the way down the left wall and half way across the back, the room is open to the elements, with merely fly netting filling in the window space. The building has no glass. On the windowsill are the remnants of previous civilisations – plastic and glass bottles with half-melted candles in, beer cans with half-melted candles in and a candleholder with a half-melted candle in.
I hardly dare touch the cutlery but that will wear off – stomach of steel, see? In England, I’m usually quite happy to eat things if they have landed on the ground. Except aeroplanes. If one of those landed, I would leave it where it was. Having said that, I once met an idiot called Ross. One of his many pearls of less-than –wisdom that he expounded was that if some food dropped to the floor, you had five seconds to pick it up before it becomes too contaminated to eat. It’s the ‘five second rule’.
So, it’s all right everyone. If you drop your lovely juicy battered sausage into a great steaming cowpat, you can eat it if you can pick it out in four seconds or less.
Against the back wall close to the sink is the wood-burning stove that looks as though it was out of date by the time the country was first visited by Cortes in the year dot. The hotplates are not exactly rusty but are extremely worn and looking quite brittle in places. The chimney has been replaced at some point but is in need of replacement again. I don’t really envisage it conducting any smoke out of the room, should it ever be asked to. There are some shelves on the wall with some tins and tubes of stuff and some wood on the floor by the stove. In the far right corner is another sink and a washing line hanging from wall to wall above it, together with a broom, mop and squeegee – so that’s wash-corner then.
Also in this corner is a door that leads to the small extension that is the only thing that stopped the ground floor of the building from being square. The extension was the shower cubicle, which also contains the toilet. It works, it flushes, what more could you ask for? The cubicle however, looks menacing. There are tendrils and roots of plants all over the floor and the tap in the air (no showerhead) won’t stop dripping, even after I have turned the stopcock as far as I can. Just the stuff thrillers are made of.
To the right hand side of the door is a door that leads to the enclosed tool shed that was probably a garage of a kind originally. It took a big square quadrant out of the ground floor, leaving the kitchen as an L shape.
Also, to the right, leading up the side of the tool-shed wall is the staircase that leads upstairs. It emerges into a large area with four single beds, a kind of dormitory I guess, complete with mosquito netting. It looks quite clean, if a little dusty. There is also a separate room that is coincidentally directly above the tool shed. It has a double bed in it, which was where Dave slept last night. A couple of the beds have netting around them and the others seem to have it folded up and placed beneath. A couple of smudged mirrors and a wardrobe comprise the furniture. I have a quick look on the balcony and see a pile of newspaper, which, upon closer inspection, have pressings of leaves between each broadsheet, and the bench that is also mattressed over making a kind of sofa.
Beneath the staircase is a pile of plastic bags, rubber boots, coats and gloves – all of which look as if they would crumble to dust if subjected to a good hard stare or a harsh word.
In the middle of the kitchen is a wooden table, quite a sturdy looking one as it happens. Around it are arranged three plastic chairs, the kind you would see from a cheap patio set. They look hopelessly out of place but then hardly anything looks in place. There are three wooden pillars in the room from which hang various things such as machetes, nets, a plastic shower bag and a couple of as-yet-unidentified metal bars, possibly pokers for the stove, I hypothesised. The pillars have been painted white as have the walls and looking up, so has the ceiling. There are things hanging here and there, pinned to the door or walls; odd trinkets, calendars, strange native arty things and one or two posters.
And cloth birds. Birds made of cloth dangling from everywhere. They look vaguely like showy birds such as parrots and macaws but they are grubby and hanging upside down or sideways because their suspending strings are snapped.
The floor is a sort of … colour. The colour of … something. Difficult to pin down … possibly blue … I’ll let you know.
No mod cons of any kind! Suddenly everything is stark and I don’t know if I can do this thing that gotten myself into. Events have taken a turn that I hadn’t envisaged. I’ve come from the UK - the ultimate comfort zone - to this! I have to admit I am daunted.
Dave and Joe return - they have been to check the road out to make sure that it isn’t flooded. Apparently, there is a stretch not far from the house that floods regularly and there had been heavy rain yesterday and overnight. We head back into town again where Dave and Joe have some stuff to do. They go to the electricity people again, and get some things signed. I have to get some money changed so we agree to meet up in an hour outside the bank. The first bank I try has system problems and isn’t dealing with customers (apart from apologising to them.) I will get used to that. I go to the other bank, Banco Nacional, and there is a long queue. I would also get used to that. GB - all is forgiven.
Clutching my hard earned wad of Colones, I go to the ‘Pali’ supermarket to get supplies. A bit like Kwiksave used to be, it was reasonably well set out without being plush or Tesco-fied. But where are all my tinned meets - curries, stews etc? Nowhere, that’s where!
Being a bachelor is a state of being where much of the time you can convince yourself that no one knows and it doesn’t show. Who am I kidding? I don’t dress like a married man, I don’t wear any rings and I like empty cupboards and fridges. When they are stocked with anything at all, they are replete with tinned meats, curries, stews and ready meals. Not that I eat badly – I have salads and vegetables too – I just like to eat quickly. I have come to a strange supermarket in Costa Rica to have my bachelorhood thrown in my face – they don’t cater to bachelors! Where are my tinned meats? Snookered, I am resigned to buying eggs, spaghetti, a bottle of pop, a bottle of water, margarine, coffee, sugar, some UHT milk, fruit, hot dogs, various flavours of soup, soap for hand-washing clothes and some zucateros (Frosties). Dave has bought a replacement gas cylinder for the gas stove that was a portable camping appliance, but my only means of cooking, it seems.
We have breakfast in a small café and return to the house. Driving back, I have a chance to observe properly the layout of this… er, hamlet that is now my home. It’s very spread out. All the houses are by the road and there are not many of them, and they nearly all seem to be one storey only, most having farm buildings of some description attached. Chickens seem to be compulsory. I guess they could be described as smallholdings. Apart from Over’s house over the swamp, there isn’t another house for a kilometre, and then another house about another kilometre etc. I’d say there are about eight houses within about five kilometre stretch of road and the town is twenty five minutes in a pickup truck so that is probably an hour and a half to two hours walking. At this moment, I don’t have any transport. My jeep is in Alabama and my motorcycle is still in my dreams.
Soon, Dave and Jo are ready to leave having given Over some last minute instructions.
Dave says “I feel a little reluctant to leave you here, Dave”.
“Too right!” I think to myself. This could be the hardest thing I have ever done. “No problem,” I reply through clenched teeth and buttocks. He takes the keys out of his pocket and drops them onto the table - two bright green keys on a bright green key ring.
Then they leave. And I watch them go like Omar Sharif running up the stairs to watch Julie Christy and Rod Steiger become specks on the horizon in Doctor Zhivago. ‘Will I ever see these people again? Will I ever see anyone again?’
Dave said he would collect me next week on Wednesday or Friday.
Resolving to survive for as long as possible - at least long enough to make up a rudimentary will - I connect up the gas cylinder to the small camping stove and put the kettle on. A very good first move if I may say so myself. It boils and I burn myself lifting the kettle off the stove – the handle has long since lost its insulation and is bare metal. I need … I need … ah, there, an oven glove. I have a coffee and ponder my predicament! I light a cigarette and can’t find an ashtray, so I make one from an old margarine lid that is lying around, pouring a drop of coffee in it to extinguish the cigarette. I have achieved something and as in all moments of excitement and adrenalin, I feel a bowel movement and want to have a poo.
Still pondering, I stub my second cigarette out in the lid, letting the coffee soak into it to extinguish it once again. The coffee in the ashtray has nearly all gone - it is clear I will need to upgrade my ashtray in this world of my own creation - that's progress. I’ve made a management decision.
I have a look around again at the four white walls that surround me and see a note pinned to the wall that I hadn’t seen before. Someone has left instructions on what to so in case of snakebite. The instructions are entitled ‘cruz roja’ (Red Cross). The main course of recommended action seems to be ‘ring someone!’ Sounds like sage advice to me! I must get my phone set up in case of snakebite.
It occurs to me what a state this place was so I think ‘ok, if I’m gonna live here, I’m gonna sweep you out, mate!’ so I do, and it doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference. I slump back in my plastic chair. I see the cooler that has the ice block in and see my food in the plastic bag. It’s an idea to put as much food as possible in the cooler box regardless of whether it needs to be cool or not, but to protect it from the insects and flies that are everywhere. I fill up the cooler with bread, Frosties, mobile phone, boxer shorts, everything.
I decide to wash my clothes as it is raining and I can’t do much else. Everything seems to stop when rains anyway - not that anything was really started in the first place. I put the kettle on the gas stove to boil water again to wash with. I find the biggest container I can see which is a big manky, metallic pot that has seen better days, like a big stewing pot I suppose. Swilling it out, I half-fill it with cold water and put my socks and underpants in to soak. I will top it up with boiling water when the kettle boils. (Remind me not to have a stew!) I wash my clothes and hang them on the washing line in the kitchen. I will do my whites when I see the outcome.
I look at the big plastic dustbin. It seems to be swarming with flies and when I pull the black lid away and peer inside there are hundreds of eggs, or larva affixed to the sides. I put the bin outside.
I have a cigarette, deciding to sit and write for a moment. When will room service replace the damn ashtray? I need a bell to summon them. I make a note to that effect. ‘must get bell,’ I write in my diary.
I flick the ash from the cigarette onto the floor - who cares? I still feel guilty about it and I know that I won't leave it there for long. It's because I'm conditioned, see? A creation of the society that spawned me. And now I’m in another society and I’m like a fish out of water. It’s like tarmac off a ducks back….
They are quite big on recycling here, in a small way! Dave takes the garbage away with him and the dead batteries too. The toilet door has a sign on it that says not to flush during the night for fear of disturbing other people and not to flush toilet roll or tampons away, but to put them in the wastepaper basket.
Thus, the wastepaper basket is full of used toilet roll. I decide to burn it in the antediluvian wood-burning stove. As I suspected, the smoke does not go up the flue, but fills the room through the vents and the gaps in the ancient chimney pipe. As the place fills with smoke, I consider that now would be a judicious time to go for a walk. This incident is quickly and neatly counterbalanced, however, by the fact that there are actually no windows, just mosquito netting in the frames and the smoke disperses quickly due to the breeze through the netting. The previous embers begin to glow in the stove and it is actually quite becoming. I take off my shoes and decide what else to do. I have nine days to mend a footbridge and come up with a few ideas.

I decide to put the rest of the detritus in the stove. As I reach the bottom of the wastepaper basket, I wonder how long the paper towels have been there. I’m plucking them out very carefully trying to ensure I don’t touch any dirty areas. I have a slight complex about this, because when I was young and I sat at the table without washing my hands, my parents told me that the germs on my hands could quickly travel down the fork and sit on the food before it entered my mouth. So part of me thinks that the germs from the soiled areas could very quickly contaminate the entire towel no matter how clean it looked, and if I pick it up they will know, and will suddenly move at mach 5 and settle on my hand. One particularly dirty towel requires picking up by the smallest corner and flicking into the stove through the side door. It takes three goes and I wish I had played more darts.
A guy just went past on a mule!
As much as I am becoming one with the stove, I expect it will rain soon so I think again to go for a walk before it does. I go upstairs to find a clean T-shirt and to hide my personal documents. You never know who's around and even mules cannot be trusted all the time...
I empty out all the contents of my rucksack and spread everything out on a bed. I am immediately glad that I am not a heavy packer, preferring to travel light. This seems to me to be the kind of place where you take the things you don’t want anymore, so that you can wear them until they fall off and not care what kind of state they get into. I look at the layout of the single wardrobe and separate my clothes accordingly into piles of underwear, socks, t-shirts and ‘rest’. This is the most organised my wardrobe ever gets. I manage to hang a few things up like my one good shirt and my half-decent merino wool top. I take a couple of things downstairs like my transistor radio, CD player and travel clock.
By the time I come down the stairs, it’s raining so I write some more.
3.30pm - a kid is going past on a horse making Tarzan noises. He is dressed extremely neatly and has a satchel. I don’t remember Tarzan ever wearing a satchel and I am about to tell the schoolboy just that when I have second thoughts. ‘Let his parents tell him,’ I think to myself. ‘He’ll find out soon enough and he’ll be better for knowing.’
It looks as though he has just been to school. He goes to school on a horse? Maybe it is the horse that goes to school. Maybe it’s a riding school.
I decide to do a candle reconnoitre. I find only old small ones but I make a couple more holders with bottles etc. I put the kettle on for coffee - it suddenly occurs to me that I could wash with hot water if I wanted to. What a stupid thing to think! Of course, I could wash with hot water!! Strewth!
I don’t know what I would do without oven glove. But then, I have my new best friend - oven glove, so I don’t have to do without! I will find some wood tomorrow and bond with the stove some more. Might give him a name … Steve, I think. Steve Stove.
Coffee is ready - lit a cigarette - damn ashtray! Hey, I’ve found 1½ inches more of candle - find me another bottle. I stick the candle in the neck of the bottle. There is a battery powered portable radio lying around beneath one of the coats under the stairs that I found when I was sweeping. I conclude it to be time I made a noise of my own so I turn the thing on and to my surprise it works. Tears for Fears are playing 'everybody wants to rule the world'. Can I do that from here?
Ok, where is the SWP trunk. It’s time to check the laptop - maybe there is some charge left in the battery. I open the blue trunk, fighting down another bowel movement and pull out the laptop from beneath a wetsuit. I finally work out how to turn it on and the display tells me that it is at ninety-three percent. Is that good or bad? Ninety-three percent left or gone? Ninety-three percent humidity? Ninety-three percent chance that I will die here? I have a play with it and notice that it has basic Windows stuff but there’s nothing in ‘My Documents’. It looks like Windows 95 so it’s pretty old. Did they even make laptops in those days? It goes to eighty percent in no time at all, so I turn it off. I will use it when I have some proper stuff to write for real rather than just this jotting that I’ve been doing today. At least that’s another piece of civilisation to my collection. It gives me an adrenaline rush …I have another poo!
The trunks don’t contain too much of interest. There’s the single-barrelled shotgun, of course. It’s one that comes in bits like an Ikea chest of drawers and you have to fit the seventy-nine pieces together. I do so, it’s perfect, and I have some bits left over! Actually there are only three parts. Lock stock and barrel I suppose. There is some fishing stuff and what are obviously some of Jim’s clothes such as wetsuit, boots, spare trousers etc, There are some incense sticks, big thick ones like I’ve never seen before, a digital camera still boxed, a writing pad, pens, some minor surgical equipment and some batteries.
I check my clothes on the line but they are still wet. Unsurprising, really in this humidity. I wonder if they will ever dry without me putting each item on for one hour. I wonder if Steve Stove could help me here. I wonder why there is only one monopolies commission. I notice a spider on my washing-line. I don’t mind it being there, and I don’t mind what it does or where I goes but before I put on my boxer shorts tomorrow morning, I’m going to want to know where it is!
I was actually stung, or bitten, once by a spider. I got up one morning in my flat took clean socks out the sock drawer and put them on, as you do. I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil and a couple of minutes later had some discomfort on one of my feet. I took off the sock and a big hairy spider rolled out, much the worse for wear, presumably because I had trodden on it. I guess it had been holidaying in my sock, saw my foot coming and bit me as a last desperate effort at survival. I’m pretty sure it would have run away if it had anywhere to run to rather than stay and fight it out, which was unfortunate for the spider since most of my other socks actually had holes at either end.
I decide to wash my whites now because some of them got covered in red mud yesterday and I don’t want them to stain. See how domestic I am? Thanks again, black dog. Dave said he suspected the soil to be full of magnesium, didn’t he? I fill up the stew pot with cold water again and put them in to soak. Suddenly, I notice a big, green, plastic bowl by the sink and some washing powder. Was that there before? I look at it again. And then I look at the tin stew pot and the bar of hand-washing soap that I’d been using.
‘Why was I using stew pot and a bar of soap?’ I look back at the big green plastic bowl and the washing powder. I look back at the stew pot and the soap bar ... ah, fuck it! I have a cigarette.
4.45pm – it’s getting dark inside so I go onto the balcony where there is more light. I see the remnants of last night - some burnt-out candles, half smoked cigars and some empty beer cans (potential ashtrays). Hey, another washing line! Back in a minute...
Now the view of the ancient rain forest is fifty percent spoilt by my underpants, but hey - who cares? It’s an experiment! I decide I might do myself an egg butty before it gets dark. I throw my ciggy overboard - so much for my new ashtray.
I briefly wonder what Edwina Currie would make of these eggs ... I’ll let you know in the morning. I swill the frying pan with water. A fly appears in front of my face so I swat it with the frying pan. I see the washing up liquid and the scrubber. I decide to wash the frying pan with the scrubber. I then decide to wash the scrubber before I wash the frying pan with it. I clean the pan, knife and fork and spatula. I clean a plate with a smurf pattern on it. Another fly appears (or the same one again) so I swat it with the dish. I realise I have to clean the dish again.
OK, Thunderbirds are ‘go’. Gas on... ignition... frying pan on hot plate... oil in pan. I crack open the eggs. ‘Hey, they look just like English eggs from English chickens,’ I think to myself. Where to put the shells now that the bin is outside? In the margarine ashtray! I wonder if eggshells make good ashtrays in their own right. Outside, the dusk chorus is kicking off... my eggs are done sunny side up. I spatula-ise them onto my bread and butter, cutting off the protruding whites that spill over the edges of my bread slices and… into the margarine ashtray they go! Heyyy, an egg butty in the rainforest - I resist the urge to poo! I finish my butty and write about it instead!
I don’t think the ice block that Dave Snr left will last to the end of the week but hopefully it wouldn’t matter too much as long as I have eaten eh perishables by then. I try the solar powered light now that it’s dark but it’s hardly worth bothering with. Somebody has left the bathroom light on today, and much of the charge was gone from the battery anyway. The black dog, Negra, the resident Labrador, is barking at everything that moved – it’s kinda reassuring. I think I’ll give her what’s left of my egg. Man, dogs will eat anything.
Somebody is walking past...
I’ve hardly been out at all today, still coming to terms with my predicament. I feel like a cat that has moved house and is a little unnerved so I spend the first day in my unfamiliar surroundings hiding under the bed. I look around at my new abode and my new country, going over in my head the chain of events that lead me here. Man, I do some stupid things…
It is dark, I‘m on the balcony, the radio is playing Bonnie Tyler, the candle is burning, and the crickets, cicadas, the frogs and the birds are all at it... a firefly winks at me from a nearby palm with the regularity of a metronome like a miniscule jet plane in the sky that flashes its light every second. There is not much for me to do except to smoke and get drunk.
I have a warm wash and decide to go to bed with a coffee. A big bug is on my cooler box and ready to jump in when I make a dash for the milk. It is tricky, but I wait it out and then outsmart it and then when I bang the box for the fourth time, it falls off. I think I woke up Negra, because I can hear movement outside. I go to bed with my coffee.
I sleep in the same bed as last night, which is the single one by the window almost above the door. I noticed last night that the mattress is a little thin and unforgiving so I got one of the other single mattresses and placed it beneath that one. I’m sleeping on two mattresses on top of each other now. I wonder if I will still be able to feel the pea. Also, the mosquito netting was already up so I didn’t have to mess around with it. It is by a window too, which I like because I can see the rain hitting against it, albeit through the grime and cobwebs in this particular case.
I’m particularly tickled by the knowledge that an exocet raindrop can come hurtling out of the gloomy skies thinking that its on a collision course with my face, only to be stopped dead in its tracks with a mere foot to go by a glass window, and then I can glare at it and stick my tongue out at it as it dribbles down in defeat, clinging to the glass.

"Did you hear about the Irishman who made a mosquito net for his bed?"
“He did? Did it work very well?"
“Yep. The mosquitoes couldn't find a way out either! "

End of the first day:
friend Oven glove/ swamp
enemies Negra/ margarine ashtray



Man, I do some stupid things…