Buggin' Out

In my last post I mentioned that 300,000 of the 500,000 species in Costa Rica are bugs. Ever since seeing that statistic, bugs are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Particularly at night time. Jungle living is an amazing experience but the bugs can make you weary. I don’t bother getting excited or scared about most of the things that crawl on me, fly into me, bite me or tickle me unless they are a threat to my life or health, or just plain disgusting.

The morning after that last post we were in the kitchen at breakfast time when I spotted a spider, a giant spider. It was about the size of the bottom of a wine bottle with a big solid body to boot. Being the only one to notice it dance across the floor, I jumped up on the chair and breathlessly alerted my friends to giant spider, dancing spider, under the sink, over there. I knew by everyone else’s reaction that my panic was nowhere near an overreaction. I wasn’t joking about the dancing either, these things don’t crawl, they kind of dance and hop across the floor.

That night I decided to move up to the Yoga deck to sleep and join the slumber party. Going without a mosquito net, I’m really at nature’s mercy now. So I’m lying on my mattress, reading my book when I glance across the floor in the middle distance and see another goddamn dancing spider, it was huge. I jumped out of bed and ran to the other side of the deck in another breathless panic. While Nicholas tried to be kind, sadly the spider was fatally wounded in the extradition process. Last night there was a giant beetle, this one though had a snout with big whiskers coming out of it. Some of these guys have eyebrows and you can swear that they wink at you as they come to land close by.

We are all very aware that we are in their environment, we are the guests and they are at home. There is something magical about lying there at night listening to the symphony, and if you open your eyes you see fireflies buzzing about above you.

On Monday a group of us decided to go fishing. We were up at 4.15am to get the 5am bus into Pavones. Early mornings aren’t really a problem here, the sun tends to wake us sometime shortly after 5am anyway. After working out which boat would take us we finally set off with beers and potato chips for breakfast. So much for the cleanse. I cannot remember the last time I had a beer at 7.48am and I’m sure it will be a long time ‘til I do it gain, if ever.

With our rods cast out the back of the boat, we trawled for tuna with just lures, no bait. After a few hours not much was happening so we went to Mata Pala, a beach across the other side of Golfo Dulce. It was such a beautiful beach and the sun was starting to burn through the clouds. The waves were pretty big and crashed right onto the shore. The whole lot of us acted like five year olds jumping backwards into the breakers and getting washed up. It was tops!

Eventually we went back to the boat to try our luck with the fish again. It wasn’t really our day but we did manage a good size tuna – about 2.5kg. We got that back to our friends place and cooked it up with a nice meal. It was certainly good to have some nice fresh fish after so much rice and beans.