|
Update 1 | Update 2
Update 3 | Update 4
Update 6 | Update 7
Update 8 | Update 9
|
|
Update 3 - July 16th - 1999
|
Hello Everyone,
This is going to be a long one, so get ready. It includes:
-The Condesa Update
-The Unknown Future
-Clark’s travel recommendations for the Pacific Coast of North and
Central America
The Condesa Update
It has been a long time since I’ve written a full update, mainly
because I never feel like I can thoughtfully compose in an Internet
café. Now that I have my fully functional IBM ThinkPad, complete with
110 Inverter to run off ship’s power, I can compose in the comfort of
my own home which is now anchored in Quepos, Costa Rica.
It hasn’t always been this way. The computer has been nothing but
trouble ever since my dad brought it down over two months ago. Thanks
to a very helpful guy here in Quepos, it seems to be working fine now,
but the final fix involved the DOS command, Format C:. I have also
purchased a modem that will allow me to send email over high frequency
radio from the boat. I’d give it another month or two before I get it
working.
The last big update was from Antigua, Guatemala. My dad and I left
Antigua for Puerto Quetzal where we met up with my Israeli friends,
Karen and Yehoda. I originally met Karen and Yehoda when John Caron
was aboard up in Puerto Angel, Mexico. They spent a solid month on the
boat after Guatemala, left for the Caribbean coast for a few weeks,
came back to visit me in Quepos, then the three of us went off to the
Caribbean coast for a week or so. Karen and Yehoda have become great
friends and we are planning great things if I ever make it to Israel.
Karen is a filmmaker. The documentary she finished a year ago just
came out in theaters in Israel. The film’s release was delayed a year
because of it’s controversial subject. It is about the most famous
court case in Israel of the last 20 years; a Bedouin (Arab) who raped a
young Jewish girl of his daughter’s same age. Karen’s film is about
his daughter, now her good friend. But I digress.
We left Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala with our newly patched boom and
somewhat of a deadline to get my dad to Costa Rica in time for his
flight home. We had to stop and surf Ollie’s Point, so he was a day
late. Our first major destination in Costa Rica was Playa del Coco.
This is a good time to state that Costa Rica is a small country. You
hear so much about it that you think it’s bigger than it is. The whole
country is only 3.5 million people, a quarter of whom live in and
around the capital. 3.5 Million is the population of what, Dayton,
Ohio? San Diego alone is 8 million. So you read in a guide book about
someplace like Playa del Coco and it says it‘s the “most touristed
place on the Nicoya Penninsula, restaurants and bars with thumping
music etc. etc.’ and you expect Acapulco. Instead you find a tiny town
without paved roads, a descent market or a good watering hole. This
repeated itself over and over. We’d see a place on the map and read
about it, expecting to find some action and you find another one horse
town. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but after a few
months at sea, you kind of crave McDonald’s and some noise.
Having said that, Playa del Coco was a great home base for doing some
repairs, making surf trips and going by bus to other parts of the
country. Karen, Yehoda and I made a great trip to the capitol, as well
as a trip to Arenal, where there is an active volcano, a big lake and a
waterfall. Also near Playa del Coco is the aforementioned,
semi-famous surf spot, Ollie’s Point. Supposedly Oliver North trained
Contras there. It’s a ‘wave machine’ left point break, accessible only
by boat. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get crowded. It does. On
a weekend day you’ll find four or five panga loads of gringos, each
really trying to get his money’s worth, but they all have to leave in
the early afternoon to make it back to El Coco by sunset. After the
crowds left we had it to ourselves several times….and it was good.
Jim and Mallory met me in El Coco for their belated honeymoon. We went
back up north over the course of a week, almost to the Nicaragua
border. We had some great anchorages, caught a couple big tuna for
sashimi and steaks, surfed a bit, explored some rivers in the dinghy
where we found baby crocodiles and generally had a blast. In Bahia
Santa Elena, some friends came over and gave us as least five pounds of
shrimp, taken from the 20 pounds that they got free for flashing bikini
to the shrimp fishermen. We had a shrimp orgy reminiscent of the San
Felipe days. Jim and Mal provided a marked contrast to the budget
travel scene with their DINK honeymoon. I know they stayed in at least
two of the ‘small distinctive hotels of Costa Rica.’ Jim and Mal are
closely vying with John Caron for the Sherpa Award. They brought a
duffel bag carrying at least 100 pounds of boat parts and food from
Trader Joe’s.
Jim and Mal overlapped one day with my next visitors, Elias and Alex
Terman. We all had one night together in Tamarindo with Mike Mongiello
and his wife Heather. The married couples graciously shared their
villa and swimming pool with the three bachelors for the night. We all
went out for a great night of eating, drinking and gambling….yes,
gambling as well as prostitution are legal in Costa Rica.
Elias, Alex and I transited the rest of the Nicoya Peninsula, with one
horrible anchorage and one nice….horrible meaning it was so rolly that
we couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. We caught another two big tuna,
continuing the sashimi-fest. Once around the tip of the Nicoya
Peninsula we stayed in Bahia Ballena for a few nights. Elias and Alex
went into the town of Montezuma, an unabashed American hippy colony.
While they were eating in a restaurant they sprayed some insect
repellant on their legs to keep the mosquitoes away. Some hippy woman
yelled at them, “Your children are going to be deformed!” When they
said, “What?!” she said “Don’t introduce foreign chemicals into our
environment!” I just love that.
The next day when we were going into shore to check into a hotel and
flights for Elias and Alex, we had a bad’un in the dinghy. The surf
looked so benign. We were sitting just outside what I thought was the
lineup when about a five-footer came looming outside. I floored it
straight at the thing, making our crash that much more spectacular. It
marked about the eighth time I’d swamped the dinghy in the surf since
leaving California. The engine sustained some damage that wouldn’t be
fixed until a hired boat towed us back to Condesa. While on the beach
I pulled the cord about, oh, 50,000 times over the course of two hours
until my hands had blisters.
Elias and Alex also rented a Villa on their last night….at a resort
where they took all the natural beauty and splendor of Costa Rica,
leveled it, and built a mid-western housing tract without a tree left
standing. Breakfast was included.
When Elias and Alex left I was…..alone. For the first time in months
and months I had no guests. Over the months there were all-American
crews, all female crews, all Israeli crew, all Swiss crew, all French
crew, all English crew (8 at one time), an all-Mexican crew and a South
African guy who still owes me a hundred pesos. But at this particular
point I was without company.
Being solo would allow me a bit of time to do some projects on the boat
that were inconvenient while people were under foot. So I buckled down
and started to work…all for naught. Four days of work and not a thing
to show for it: All the leaks I fixed still leak (the kind of leaks
that let rain drip in the cabin, not the kind that let the ocean in the
boat). And the work I tried to do with some epoxy ended spectacularly.
Apparently there are different hardeners for use in different
climates. I tried to use some California hardener on a sunny Costa
Rica morning and ended up hurling the whole exploding, smoking mess
into the bay. That’s environmentalism. Two whole days of prep work is
now covered in a burned mess of cracked plastic.
In the middle of this fit of work I decided on a change of scenery: I
would cross the Gulf of Nicoya which would normally involve about a
three hours of motoring. As usual I put out the fishing lines, hoping
to catch dinner. Sure enough there was a big strike. I put the engine
in neutral and went to the aft deck to bring in the fish: Not so easy.
This monster of the deep kept going and going until I was almost
spooled. In fact I could see the shiny metal drum through the last
remaining turns of monofilament. It would call for drastic measures if
I were going to save line, lure and leader. Now in a sportfishing boat
they use the boat to their advantage, they ‘back down’ on the fish,
chase it around. In a sailboat you cannot really do that, or so I
thought. I climbed into the cockpit with the rod sticking out to the
side, put it in reverse and backed down a bit. I was able to get in
enough line to buy myself some time. Then I turned the boat around and
started chasing the fish. This way I got quit a bit of line in. I
happened to glance at the ship’s clock; 1:00PM. Mind you I’m operating
the throttle, turning the wheel and fighting this fish on a nine foot
rod all at the same time. Well, fish don’t swim in straight lines:
Backing, forward, turning, parrying, thrusting, running up one side of
the deck, around the headstay, down the other side of the deck, all by
myself in the middle of the bloody ocean on a bucking boat. After a
while my arms are completely pumped, I’m getting a blister on my
reeling hand and I’m dripping with sweat. At this point it’s war.
That fish is going to feel the steel of my gaff if it takes me all
day….and it almost did. After covering miles of ocean and running
around like and idiot, the fish gets smart. It starts heading under
the boat. As soon as I get the boat turned around it goes under the
boat the other way. The line ground on the boat and broke. Most of
the line, now blue with bottom paint, was on the reel. Lure, leader
and fish, gone. I never even got a look at the thing. Time, 2:30. I
had been fighting the fish for an hour and a half. Total exhaustion.
Call me Ishmael.
Not a few minutes later I hooked into a big Sierra and easily landed
it. While he was flopping around on the deck and I was looking for
something with which to bash his brains in, he regurgitated a
half-digested sardine on the deck, flopped around some more, then ate
it again! Then I ate him.
The next leg of the trip, a mere 20 miles, brought me to Quepos, where
I am now. Garry Crummer’s sister Cynthia lives here with her husband
Diego. They have a jungle canopy tour business, the kind where you go
up in the trees and slide down cables with pulleys. I did it the
second day I was here: A really fun day with two meals, a long 4WD
trip into the rainforest, and swimming below a waterfall.
Quepos is an interesting place. It’s definitely the biggest town on
the Pacific coast and is right next to Manuel Antonio Park, the oldest
national park in Costa Rica. It is feeling the effects of tourist
money: There is a certain element here, and in most of Costa Rica,
that is always on the make with cons, petty and not-so-petty crime. So
you’ve got kind of a new world meets old situation with traditional,
Catholic, family values-type local people on one hand and then
jet-setters, expatriates, eco-travelers and the gay scene on the other.
On my one big night on the town I got quite a look at the night life.
When I went in to the bathroom in one club, behind stall number one it
was………crack smoking. Behind door number two it was ….drug deal.
Behind door number three, the far stall, it was a big crowd of guys and
I don’t want to know.
I just got back from the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, Cahuita and
Puerto Viejo. Yehoda had two goals in returning to Central America; to
cruise on a sailboat and to go back to Cahuita. Cahuita and Puerto
Viejo are more Caribbean than Costa Rican. A lot of the population is
black Caribs who speak English, Spanish and Patois interchangeably.
The scenery is idyllic, the water clear, the surf excellent, if
bordering on dangerous at the infamous Salsa Brava, the people
friendly, and the nightlife hopping. In this region there is a
complete canonization of Bob Marley, whose music plays on an endless
recorded loop from every restaurant, rooftop and roundabout. If you
strain your ears you can always, at any hour of the day or night, hear
Bob Marley playing somewhere in the distance. It’s incredible. At one
point I gingerly asked two locals if they ever got sick of Bob. They
became very serious and said it was a lifestyle, not a matter of being
sick or not sick of the music. Bob’s going to the back of the tape
rack on Condesa for a while.
There is another quirk about Cahuita and Puerto Viejo: They are known
for being places where white tourist girls have trysts with black local
guys. It’s enough of an issue that black local girls are getting
pissed off and there are occasional skirmishes. The black guys and
white girls seem perfectly happy. We know a Jamaican girl, Muji, who
is doing her doctoral thesis on the phenomena with a year of research
in Cahuita.
I had a great time in both places and met some cool people. I surfed
four or five days there, my first in any other ocean than the Pacific.
Salsa Brava bears particular mention. I paddled out alone one
afternoon, between the two jutting rocks in the reef, through the
riptide and into the lineup. I felt mortal fear while surfing for the
first time in a long while. And I think I was the only guy out because
it was too small for the regulars. I never really knew there were
waves in the Caribbean.
The Next Six to Eight Months
That is how long the combined hurricane seasons are, and that is how
long I will have to wait before crossing the Pacific if I choose to do
so. There are a lot of options.
A few weeks ago I reread that letter I handed out at the bon voyage
party, the one that described the trip and how to reach me. I’ve done
all that. This was as far as I’d really planned. This is the first
day of the rest of my life!
If I can keep busy in Costa Rica, it would be easy to just stay here
until the right time comes.
To cross the Pacific I need crew. I was talking to myself after four
days sailing alone. I’m not going to attempt 30….and that’s 30 days to
Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, not a place where you can catch a
Broadway show. I need two people who can commit for a minimum of six
weeks, but really a few months, because being solo in Tahiti isn’t that
different from being solo here. It’s still a long way to Australia or
New Zealand, the first places of real civilization, like McDonald’s and
buy boat parts civilization. And these can’t just be people I pick up
off the street. They have to be people I know already or can get to
know before the passage starts. There are too many horror stories
about strange crew on long passages…Dead Calm for one.
If the magic crew does not surface, or if I decide I don’t like Costa
Rica after a few months, then going through the Panama Canal is an
option. Cruising the Caribbean, Jimmy Buffet-like, and then off to
Brazil or the Med could work out as well.
Clark’s 1999 Travel Recommendations
As I have now traveled every inch of coastline between California and
Costa Rica, I can pass on some recommendations for trips, short and
long, even if you don’t have a boat. The first recommendation is to
come visit me in Costa Rica, but if you can’t or if I’ve already left,
here are some others.
Yelapa—This can be a great little getaway from California. You could
do Yelapa in as little as a three day weekend. Yelapa is about 15
miles west of Puerto Vallarta in Bahia Banderas. It is reachable only
by boat, and that’s the key to its coolness. Sure, some tour boats
come from PV each day, but they leave after a few hours and things
return to normal. To get there you would fly RT to Puerto Vallarta,
take about a 30 minute cab ride to Boca de Tomatlan, then about a 20
minute boat ride in a panga to Yelapa; all very straightforward. I
would wait until you got there to get accommodations; and look at a few
before choosing. You can get anything from a total dump to an
incredible bungalow for about the same price. There was a retired
American woman, whose name escapes me, who had some great bungalows on
the far western side of the bay. ie If you are sitting on the beach in
Yelapa, her places are on the far left. They come with free sea
kayaks. Yelapa has a great beach, clear water, jungle, a waterfall,
and paragliding off the hill over the beach. It has a great mix of
really cool locals and expatriates from all over the world. There is a
fun little disco and no streetlights, so people walk around the little
paths at night with candles. No road so no cars.
Puerto Escondido—This is still the ultimate surf destination in
Mexico…if you can handle it. I barely could. It definitely deserves
its moniker, ‘The Mexican Pipeline.’ This place is the most surfed-out
place I have ever been. It has a completely evolved surf culture, more
that any California town, complete with big wave legends, local heroes,
the Hawaiian contingent, burned out could-have-beens and yes, many
deaths in the water over the years. You can still find a place to stay
for $6 per night or go five star. The restaurants are great. Direct
flights from Mexico City. Look up my friends Jose and Brandy who own
Mexpipe, the legendary surf trunk makers.
Guatemala—I’d heard about it for years and finally saw it first hand.
Take your mountain bike and your trekking shoes and go to Antigua or
Lago Atitlan and stay for two months. It’s dirt cheap, the people are
friendly and the culture is amazing. Over half the population speaks a
non-Spanish dialect and still dress as they have for 500 years (just
the women). Active volcanoes, coffee plantations everywhere and some
of the oldest architecture in the New World. I would love to go back
and spend more time. The climate in the high country, where all the
action is, is springlike and cool year round.
That's it for now. Stay in touch.
-Clark
|
|
