Magic Tree House

January 14th 2017

The situation is noncritical

With Jan, Nils and Willi

We are aboard the bus to Puerto Viejo, we have not yet found a place to stay for tonight and it's slowly getting dark outside. Willi is 'fine' with the general situation.
Puerto Viejo is so touristic, we'll surely find something there.
The bus stops, the hood is put up. Willi is fine with the general situation.
Normal in central America. Luckily no one here is in a hurry or has to arrive when front-desks are still open.
We are standing on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere for two hours. We hear faint singing from a nearby church. Nils and Jan are knocking down coconuts* from palms and attacking them with stones.
Willi is fine with the general situation.
One hour longer and Beck and Paul would've started reenacting Lord of the Flies.
A replacement bus arrives, we drive on through the jungle. The sea looks frozen in pale light of the full moon, every now and then black silhouettes of palms and trees pass by. The hostel we managed to book is six kilometres from the bus stop. Willi is fine with the general situation.

*In continuation of my papaya praise from last time, here is a short homage to the coconut. Despite its ubiquitous growth, the coconut palm remains mostly untouched by the Nicas or Ticos. Which is somewhat understandable, as climbing is not for everybody and often required to get to the ripe coconuts that are not yet bit open by monkeys. But once they are down, the nuts that almost always contain delicious coconut milk are quickly and uncritically opened with a machete. Free and much better than in German supermarkets. Coconut meat is harder to find as the native species of coconut are very hard and thick and, as opposed to the ones commonly known in Germany, yellow or green in colour.

Meanwhile Jan, who — lacking the Panamanian peace of mind — is significantly less fine with the situation, is on the verge of three distinct, simultaneous mental breakdowns. I am somewhere in between Jan and Willi mentally and listen to some podcasts, the other Nils seems to feel similarly.

"Ehh, I'll just jog the 6km to the hostel" — Quote Willi. I really can't share that level of chill given how late it is already.

Really, the only thing in the way of a small nightly stroll was our luggage. A hostel that wasn't 6km away was recommended to us just minutes after arriving in Puerto Viejo. But the overly cautious subset of our very harmonic travel group insisted on booking a hostel beforehand (which, granted, was great). (Thanks for the parentheses) (Rather too many parentheses than too little, especially in stochastics or calculus)

Praised be cross-national central American data plans.

After the grinning taxi driver reminds us of the fundamental principle of supply and demand (supply: 1 taxi, demand: high), we finally arrive at the hostel — a gorgeous, unique wooden structure that is open to almost all sides.

To be a taxi driver around here, it is enough to own a car and not have any problems scamming tourists without batting an eye.
On the third floor of our strange little tree house, we drift to sleep to a lullaby of screaming monkeys and other jungle sounds.

A very interesting experience to sleep in the nature like that. The clattering of the rain has something very calming about it; I was able to recover from the strains of our journey and the stress that apparently only I experienced.

The next morning

Still half asleep, I notice that Willi is already up. But — like Jan and Nils — I don't let that disturb my sleep for now. Thanks to the very open architecture of our house, it's surprisingly cool in here and the beds are all the more comfy.

Mornings are the best time to run and the beach was beautiful, if a bit rainy.
Later in the morning we emerge one by one from under our mosquito nets and move one floor down into the living room. From the jungle around us you can already hear crickets chirping again — it really does feel like in a jungle camp in here.

Thanks to a very lax checkout-policy, we spend the first half of the day here, playing darts and listening to music.
Around two in the afternoon we take the bus to downtown Puerto Viejo, which is a tiny but pretty tourist-village, which might pass for a 'city' around here.
We missed the bus to Panama, so we are having lunch at 'Outback Jack's Roadkill Grill' — a bizarre combination of restaurant and bar, run by Outback Jack himself — and begin looking for another hostel for the night.

Too bad they didn't have sloth.