11. LEAVING CENTRAL AMERICA

I am getting tired fingers from this blogging. So this will be my last from Central America. Tum tum te tum. How to summarise?

Guatemala was fab.
Central American food is rubbish. The day to day food that is. Bloody plantains and beans. Arghh.
People here are lovely but on the whole short and ugly. This is true. Shoot me if you must.
Volcanoes are everywhere. The whole isthmus will eventually erupt and sink. This is fact.
Will come back here for sure. I thought it wonderful.
Never saw the Quetzal Bird. This is a good thing.

Back in Costa Rica now to stay with my friend Marie who I love dearly.



I stayed with her and her man Mauricio, who is also lovely, and they showed me far too much hospitality and kindness. This is fact. They also have a dog called Karenina whose eyebrows and moustache are too long



I campaigned very hard to get her eyebrows cut down on the basis that one cannot enjoy life if one cannot see it. Finally they trimmed her eyebrows and now her life has improved in many ways: she has more energy and gets on better with other dogs and I feel has an improved concentration too. I take considerable credit for this. Denis Healy take note (is he still alive?)

Did you know that nails grow after you die? Do eyebrows do the same. If this is true and if DH is no longer alive his whole coffin might be eyebrows.



OK, quicker now. Went to jungle again in very south of Costa determined to get some better photos.
Failed miserably. Again. Got lots of photos of lizards but really in the jungle you would expect more.
Jungle was impressive nevertheless. Green forest tumbling into blue ocean sending parrots and monkeys into the air. 40 degrees, 100 percent humidity, how these wild animals survive I don’t know. Oh so remote! Yes Dorothy indeed! Took a ten hour bus journey and then a 2 hour dust track. Two cars waited to take us on the dust track. One new one old. Would I take the comfortable leather clad 4x4 or the open backed local truck? Both cost the same and took the same time.

What would you do? Are you a romantic or a realist?

Its dawn, the birds are coming out, the clouds look a little ominous but oh so NATURAL and what an experience you would have driving in the wild under those clouds in an open backed truck. But then again you are tired and the leather is smooth and after all you are from London, home of the duvet.

Comfort or challenge? Nuture or nature?

I took the leather and then immediately felt comfortable but ashamed. We were passed by the open truck full to the brim with other travellers, healthy looking and smiling as if in ad for GAP. One had his top off and wore rippling muscles and a brilliant smile. ‘Shit, that could have been me!’ I thought. Oh, why do I always take the safe option!? Lament, lament. Look they are sharing jokes and the wind is in their hair and mosquitoes may be attacking them but they are ALIVE. Meanwhile my driver closed the window turned on the AC, put a Bon Jovi CD on and the jungle around us disappeared behind a veil of sound proof glass. What has this comfort bought me?! Disocciation. Lament, lament. Oh Dorothy!



But just as I was about to make a life long resolution to always take the bumpy but interesting path in life the good looking boy was slapped over the head by a low lying palm branch and then soon after the truck broke down. We stopped to check on them and from inside our climate controlled box I watched a man kneel in the dust, climb under the engine and fix the loose part with a LONG PIECE OF STRING. It started to drizzle too. I sank back into my chair and watched a mosquito fly into the glass. Ahhhhh, how comfortable the chairs felt. Ah, how happy I was. Choose comfort. Never take the dusty bumpy route through life!

Ultimately the jungle was not so comfortable and, you will be glad to hear, bought out the man in me. I saw crocs, a whale, a shark, a large snake and all the while I had at least 4 buttons of my shirt undone. What I will not tell you is that the creatures were very very far away which is why I have no great photos and only pics of lizards. No Quetzal bird. Better that way of course..

I do have a FEW photos. I watched Pelicans diving into the ocean for fish.



One bust his shoulder as he went in. I came across him with his wing flopped to one side. He couldn’t fly, he couldn’t swim, he stared out at the ocean.



I tried to get close. What could I do? Throw him fish? I ask you. He hobbled away. I walked back and he continued to fix on the horizon. That night a vicious storm closed in. I heard the rain playing drums on my cabin roof and thought of the bird with the broken wing. What could I have done. Throw him fish? The camp I was staying in had some bread. Do pelican’s eat bread? The next day I came back to find him dead. I was stung by that. How many adverts for NATURAL ORGANIC HAIR PRODUCTS will we need to see before we know that its all a lie: nature’s fucking rubbish. I sat with him for a while.



I thought to myself then, ‘I’m going into this jungle for three days and I’m going to survive, I am not a wimp. I have two good legs a will of steel and an ipod. I will FIGHT NATURE’ I took impressively little in my rucsac and intended to stay in camps with no change of clothes. I set off with the same sort of focus and determination with which one starts to build Ikea shelves. I was enthusiastic and practical. Within two hours I was suffering from extreme chafing on my inner thigh and had eaten all my sandwiches and was fading fast in a pool of pathetic whiteman’s sweat. I walked into the camp in the inner park not able to open my legs more than 30 degrees and covered in grime and hopelessness. I was truly beaten. I too would have died in a storm. I had the indignity of having to ask an American medical couple if they had any cream for my awkward CHAFING. ‘For what?’ they asked over our dinner of rice and beans. ‘For my bottom’ I said quietly. ‘Oh you want lube! Yeh we got lube alright’ They said it loud and clear in only the way that doctors with no bodily shame can and in only the way that American’s can. The rest of the table tuned in. Twenty minutes later I had ten different creams and a face even reader than my arse. I felt a bit of a failure if I am to be honest. God the jungle is tough. When I got back to electricity and a mirror I saw that my hair was covered in slime and was sticking up and out as though I had been staring at a jaguar for three days. Of course I hadn’t. If I had seen a jaguar I would have been out of there and on the next over priced helicopter ride. ‘Take me to a supermarket’. That’s what they should do for white people who don’t make it through the jungle. Take them not to a hospital but to the nearest Marks and Spencer. I need civilisation. I need duvets, I need hot food, I need people. I’m coming back.

I’m still reading Howards End. I read terrifically slowly. One of the characters asks if civilisation is all that it’s cracked up to be. ‘Has it paid to give up the glory of the animal for the tailcoat and a couple of ideas?’ he asks. The answer, in my book, is an emphatic ‘yes’. It HAS paid. And for these very ideas:
BEDS
BEER
FILM
FRESH SHEETS

I’m leaving the jungle just as it is, wild and free. As it should be. I’m not going to capture its animals. I’ll see you all very soon. I’m going to NY for some work and then I’m back end of feb. I’ll finish with another bit from Howard’s End which I find moving and which fits with the ambling theme that’s emerged in these blogs. Not quite sure how it fits but maybe you’ll see. I hope you are well. I miss you. Lots of love. Be good, and remember: floss. M xx

‘Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. Them most successful career must show a waste off strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is duly good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.’

And here is a photo I took in San Jose, capital of Costa Rica. It is of three people watching pigeons. I of course was watching them.