What a horrible night’s sleep we had. The fan had haunted all of our dreams. My brother and I both had a series of bad events unfolding in our subconsciouses. The noise from that fan had penetrated our brains and turned a good night’s sleep into a toss and turn fest, separated by horrible sequences of events in our REM. One of the dreams my brother had was of a big scorpion, who would make the exact same sound as the fan as it would run across the ground, he later got punctured in the heart by it right before waking up. One of the dreams I had was of a screeching tornado that was approaching, which also sounded just like the evil fan. Evil evil fan. My dad went out for a walk at about 6, came back at 7 and got me, and we went further down the trail. We first spotted a giant spiderweb in the air that looked just like a vinyl LP, and continued down the trail and we saw one spider monkey initially, two different wood peckers, many butterflies, a long thin brown snake, and a cocoa tree. On the way back we saw a black and green poison arrow dart frog, and 3 more spider monkeys. We were walking down the trail and we saw one spider monkey leap from one tree to the next over the road ahead of us, and we stopped and looked up and watched two more do the same, and then off through the woods they went, just flinging from branch to branch, seemed like a good source of entertainment to me if I were able to do such a feat. We went back to the hotel and got Mark, and then headed off to the beach. Mark began trying to change the topography of the river, as he put it. He began making a big ditch and a dam to try to reroute the flow of water. I joined in after a while, but after a bit of work (we did manage to get the two streams to connect) the rising tide got too high and destroyed the mouth of it, so we gave up and went for a swim. The three of us decided we’d walk along the beach to Punta Uva, so we set off on our way.
We began by going down a little road into some jungle and explored around, it was beautiful in there but eventually we came to where they were clearing trees, probably to build a house. While inside we heard a high pitched whistle, followed by a low pitched whistle from another location. We then saw two little boys running out of the woods away from us, probably thinking we were the “rich white men who owned the area and were cutting down all the forest”. They hopped into their kayaks and paddled away. Then we set off down the beach to Punta Uva. The first stop we made had a bunch of hammocks in the back. We stopped and hung for a little bit, then decided to go into the hotel to get some refreshments. The name of the place was Almonds and Coral, an “eco-friendly” hotel, meaning there were boards that ran through the forest, and crabs and trees could be seen along the pathways, kind of neat. We went to the bar and got three sodas and she asked us for our room number, which we didn’t have, so she wrote us a check and told us to go to the reception desk. We went over there and found out each club soda was a $4, and then asked to see a room. A man came to show us the room, and during the walk he informed us that the rooms cost $325 a night. When we arrived at the room there were two beds with mosquito netting, no air conditioning, the heavy humid tropical air was basically motionless; a hammock in the park would have been much more pleasant.. The kicker of the whole place was that you couldn’t even swim in the beaches behind the place! We thanked the man for his time and left snickering. We saw a family seated inside near the bar and they looked very unhappy, and my brother whispered to me that he would be unhappy too if he was staying there and had to pay such a ridiculous amount for absolutely nothing. We went back to the beach and carried on, eventually the sand started becoming so deep that about every step we’d make would go up to our ankles, so we all took off our shoes and carried them. We walked through more ankle deep sand, a beach littered with twigs that would wash up and down with the waves, and stopped at a big tree on its side that the waves were crashing into. Mark sat down on the log and thought deep thoughts for a minute, and we then pressed on. We passed another hotel which had a bunch of lawn chairs on the beach, and after a bit more walking, we made it to Punta Uva. At this point my father was dehydrated, and had a horrible headache. We went into the water to cool off, and then went up the road to try to find a place to eat and drink. We went to the Punta Uva dive shop and ordered three fish sandwiches, and a giant bottle of water. They were playing a reggae version of OK Computer there, which was cracking me up, and I asked the guy what we were listening to, and he said “Radiohead Dub”. While eating we saw a bunch of leaves falling from the trees, so Mark stood up to investigate, and we saw a bunch of green parrots in the tree doing some trimming. After eating we decided to walk back on the road. Mark pointed out a monkey in the tree and we looked up, and to our surprise there were 20+ howler monkey babies in the trees! Shortly after that we got picked up by a bus and it drove us back into town. My brother and I went swimming again, while our dad went to relax in the hammock across the street from the hotel. We built a sandcastle with a nice barricade that managed to last all night and was even there the next day. The sky was a beautiful red as the sun was setting, even though it was setting way behind us. It cast a magnificent red light onto the top of the water, and I was in awe at the beauty of the shimmering orange-red water, but it started to get dark in a hurry, and our dad came out to get us. We decided we’d go to Puerto Viejo to go to an internet café as we hadn’t used it in several days. After checking up on our email we left and headed to grab a bite to eat. The service there was pretty bad, and the food was decent at best. Mark had rice with seafood and had two mussel shells sticking out of the side, and my father and I split pasta with seafood, and a marlin fillet in brandy sauce. The marlin could have been a boot for all we knew, but the sauce was excellent. It tasted better on the rice than on the fish. We went to Sonya’s again, got another margarita pizza with garlic, olives, and mushrooms, and went back to the hotel to crash.
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