Way back in 1996, my friend Peter asked me to come with him and his twenty-six year old brother Matt to Costa Rica for ten days of surfing. Now, we had recently been getting into surfing, like good Southern-Californian youth do, and the trip sounded unbelievably cool to my teenage ears. We left the next year after a lot of planning and saving. The trip itself had lots of golden nuggets worth sharing, but for readability’s sake I’ll truncate it to one story about having no money the last couple days.
Matt, Peter and I all shared expenses for the jeep, fuel, and food. However, the outrageous cost of petrol and Peter’s grossly underestimating the amount of money he needed for the trip left us hyper-rationing the last four days. We had been driving south along the pacific coast when we reached Dominical (is that right Peter?), and since we had unknowingly arrived during Semana Santa all the hotels were packed with San Joseans who had come from the capital to the coast for the holiday. Luckily, we were provided accommodation by Jimmy, a hefty hawaiian with a mesmerizing facial twitch who resided there, just for a few bars of surf wax and my straw hat. Jimmy had a guest house deep in the rainforest, perched on a hill with a spectacular view. The were no doors in the entrance and no glass in the windows, everything was open air; great for taking a shower while gazing upon the valley, but inconvenient when it rained and the insects of the forest sought shelter in our sheets. Anyway, having no hotel expenses really helped our budget. Nevertheless, we were reduced to eating nature’s complimentary buffet of bananas and mangos the last few days. However, my mother had insisted I take some canned food, which, ironically (I thought it ridiculous, and took it to appease her), was actually invaluable towards the end.
One night we were driving into the rainforest towards Jimmy’s through the pouring rain, only to find that Jimmy’s guard dogs would not let us get out of the car. We honked and shouted, hoping Jimmy was there to subdue his sentries so we could enter and get some sleep, but no luck. So we waited in the jeep in the pouring rain eating some bananas Matt had acquired earlier. After some time one of us asked what was about the remaining canned food, and after some rummaging I announced that there was just some canned sausage (which were gross). The light bulb flickered, could we buy our passage with mini hot dogs? We coordinated our escape, throwing hot dogs strategically to the two bastard guard dogs. Unfortunately, we only had enough for the beginning and had to escape to an off-the-property round-about route where we found ourselves navigating thick underbrush in the wet darkness. Eventually, we made it to the hut and luckily the dogs were trained well enough not to enter a building, despite the absence of a door. We recovered from that night easily, as young bodies do, and continued our trip in shoestring fashion. We were sufficiently frugal to have enough money for fuel back to San Jose to make our flight out.
Matt's banana-trapping skills would feed us for days.
As I write I realize there are a few more memorable moments from the trip I want to include: Arriving to the beach the first day from the airport just in time to surf in the sunset’s light among giant sea turtles. My trying to convince Peter and Matt that ’soy enorme’ was another way to say ‘thank you’ in Spanish. Trying to teach local kids how to surf, only to discover that one of them didn’t know how to swim. My thinking that when someone asked ‘do you guys burn?’ that they meant get sunburned. The fact that the trip was the week before Spring Break, and that I had told my teachers that my grandmother had passed away in order to get out of school… only to come back with a suntan. And, finally, topless beaches (a huge event for a fifteen year old).
That trip was one of my first travel experiences and set the tone for later trips; Charlie’s life would never be the same.
-Charles P. Pearson
hahaha i remember pete telling me about you guys eating nothing but bananas the last 4 days
[...] with Peter I took my first non-parentally supervised international trip to Costa Rica, discussed in Costa Rica – Circa 1997. Our surf trips were almost always in his little Toyota pick-up, which is now totaled because Peter [...]