Blog 16 - So Many Cows, Not Enough Cheese

The next day at Tesoro Escondido, we spoke to one of the managers, Jane about our shift patterns for the next month.  She advised us that in return for free board and three meals a day, we would need to work 8 hours per day for 6 days a week.  If we wanted to only work 6 hours per day, we would only be entitled to two meals.  This was not exactly what we’d signed up for, as the original Workaway posting stated the deal as all meals included for 5 hours per day’s work.  I spent the first 24 hours ranting and raving at the injustice of it all and wanted to leave purely on principal, but then decided to suck it up and just get on with it in return for the beautiful Caribbean beach only 30 seconds away. 

 

So for a month from 15^th December, we became actual chefs…  Cooking for actual hotel guests….With no-one else in the kitchen but us!  Items on the menu included: Banana Pancakes, Ham & Cheese Omelettes, Black Bean Tostadas, Gazpacho, Smoked Pork Burritos and Chicken Coconut Curry.  We are obviously now expert chefs, and only had one near disaster: a cold water into boiling hot oily pan situation, almost setting the kitchen on fire.  Almost.

Cheese is very expensive in Central America.  We are not sure why as there are many, many cows.  I have been on serious cheese rations since we began our trip, and I am attributing the half stone of weight I’ve lost almost entirely to this fact.  The cheese at Tesoro Esondido was not kept in the fridge, but is guarded by the faceless owner “Monique” in her house, along with other such forbidden fruits as raisins, nuts, and the Holy Grail: pesto.  We ran out of cheese every shift as Monique would not deign to hand over more than one small block at a time and then complained that we were using too much of it.  I’m not sure this was really our fault as the most popular items on the menu contained cheese, so what’s a chef to do?  And I hardly ate any of it, I swear.

Our days here consisted of work, beach, sleep, repeat, apart from a couple of exceptions.

We formed a workers alliance with another couple of British Workawayers, Alex and Emily, and spent most of our evenings drinking beer (a dollar a bottle), and going down onto the beach to “look at the stars”.   After a couple of weeks of not leaving the hotel apart from to visit the beach, we’d started to get cabin fever and so went on a night out in Bocas Town.  A portion of our night was spent in a bar named “Books, Booze & Beyond”, where we played an incredibly tense game of Giant Jenga before hitching a lift home with three of us (not me), crammed in the boot, while I concentrated on not throwing up in the back seat.  Good times.

Christmas and New Year unfortunately felt decidedly unfestive as the torrential rain that had plagued us in Costa Rica had finally caught up with us in Panama.  Plus, the hotel was fully booked for 2 weeks and we were working far harder than we’d hoped to be on our Travelmoon.  We almost wished for a moment that we were back home, and then it stopped raining, the sun came out and we laughed at ourselves for being so ridiculous.

Nick would like me to mention the vast array of insects found and photographed by him at Tesoro Escondido.  I include a selection of them here.  The final two pictures show a huge dead spider, and then the same huge dead spider having had its insides sucked out by an army of ants.  Nice.

Alex and Emily left a couple of weeks before we did, and once we’d got over their departure, we thought it’d be a great idea to cycle to Drago Beach over on the other side of the island, which was a 40km round trip.  (I know!  Who knew I was such a proficient cyclist?!)  The bikes we borrowed from the hotel were certainly interesting to ride – they didn’t have brakes on the handlebars, so if we wanted to slow down at all, we had to pedal backwards…lots of fun.  The handlebars on Nick’s bike kept falling down every mile or so, so we had to keep pulling over and getting the spanner out by the side of the road.  The idea was to spend a few hours at the beach, but as we didn’t leave until 11am, we ended up having to cycle back again after an hour and a half.  On the way back I got chased by a crazy-looking dog, which was quite scary.   

An unexpected treat at this location:  

As this sign made by Alex shows, we were actually allowed to flush toilet paper down the toilet!!  After weeks of putting used paper in a disgusting bin next to the toilet, this felt incredibly modern.

And as promised, here’s another picture of a lizard.  This tiny gecko arrived after breakfast every morning to lick the sugar from the lid of the pot.  What kind of lizard will it be in the next edition?  There’s only one way to find out!

Blog 15 - Dear Panamanian Highway Authority

A new day, a new country: off to Panama....and on the way, our most entertaining border crossing yet.

You know how in England you get those strange shop combinations like Shoe Repair and Key Cutting, well the Costa Rican border town of (Sixoala) has gone one better. The roadside stall whose main trade is in hats and dresses also acts as a place you can recharge your mobile phone, exchange currency and is where you have to buy your customs papers. 1 randomness point to you, Costa Rica.

The border is marked by a wide river, with mountains upstream and impenetrable jungle either side. The only way across is via a disused railway bridge. 

For us, with our reasonably light bags, and in calm sunny weather this was an amusing novelty. But it’s worth pointing out this is the only way across, short of a 300 mile round trip to the Pacific Coast. So sometimes a teenage backpacker with a bag three times their size will turn up in the middle of howling winds and torrential rain, and they'll be told, ‘Yeah you’ve got to walk across that’. 

Also a reasonable number of the wooden planks are missing or broken, so sometimes a person must be walking across when part of the bridge gives way underneath them!

Fortunately we made it without any such pitfalls, at least until we arrived at the Panama border control office. The man on duty was insisting we needed an exit ticket before we would be allowed in. Now technically he was right, this is a requirement for the entry visa, but it also was for every other Central America country and we’d never been called up on it before. It’s also not entirely unlikely he was after some kind of bribe. Anyway he didn’t get one. For about half an hour we had a conversation which went round in circles, here’s the abbreviated version:

Border Guard: “You need an exit ticket to get in. Why don’t you have one?”

Us: “Because we don’t know when or where we’re going next”

Border Guard: “Then you need to buy an exit ticket now”

Us: “We can’t because we don’t know when or where we’re going yet”

Eventually his supervisor turned up, probably as a result of the queue that was rapidly growing behind us, asked us if we had enough money for our trip, if we had a credit card and decided that was good enough. We were in!

After a short ride in a collectivo mini-van, we got on a water taxi to take us across to Isla Colon, part of the Bocas Del Toro archipelago. The water taxi was definitely an exhilarating, if slightly drenching experience, as the twin-engined speed boat hydroplaned its way over the waves of the Caribbean.

Arriving in Bocas town we had a bit of trouble finding a taxi driver who was prepared to take us up to our destination, ‘Tesoro Escondido’. On the map the journey seemed like a simple 5 mile drive, but the first four drivers we stopped all said no on the basis of the condition of the road. Finally we did find one who was prepared to give it a go, and we soon saw why the others were so reluctant. To summarise the situation I have penned an open letter to the Panamanian Highway Authority.

Dear Panamanian Highway Authority,

While we have come to accept that dirt tracks so heavily potholed that most 4x4 drivers take a sharp intake of breath when considering tackling them, are considered legitimate places to drive in many areas of Central America, I would like to inform you, that usually the beach does not count as a road.  Neither does a river, nor as you appear to believe, in at least one place, does the sea.

Yours Sincerely,

Nick Madge.

As it turns out we were actually rather lucky as at one point during our stay, the hotel, along with the rest of the East side of the island became entirely cut off, as the condition of the road following some stormy weather meant not a single vehicle was prepared to attempt to traverse it for 3 days.

So after an entertaining day of travelling we arrived at our home for the next few weeks. 

Tesoro Escondido is an eco-hotel on the edge of Bluff Beach, one of the best surfing spots in Central America. Scattered around a huge central four story house are a maze of cabinas, bamboo platforms, a yoga hut and two private beaches. 

Just off the main house, is our room, and to the right our outside shower. 

We were a little skeptical of the outside shower at first given the number of bugs wandering around, but having a hot shower surrounded by tropical jungle during a tropical thunderstorm is amazing!

We had arrived just in time for the evening meal, and spent some time getting to know the other workawayers we had joined. Here’s the restaurant where we would be doing most of our workawaying, and the view wasn't so bad either!

Blog 14 - It's Still Raining

From La Fortuna, we took a bus to the capital city of San Jose.  The journey should have taken us 4 and a half hours, but due to a huge traffic jam it ended up taking us 6 and a half.  This meant that when we arrived, we were STARVING, and consequently I made the mistake of suggesting we eat in the very first place we saw, as I “just couldn’t go on anymore”.  It was a KFC and a pretty horrible one at that.  Ten pieces (between us) of greasy, grisly chicken later, we walked the two miles uphill to the  hostel we’d booked, feeling more and more nauseous with every step.  We did witness an amazing sunset while on the bus though, which made it more bearable.

Castle Tam hostel was pretty weird – I wouldn’t recommend staying there.  It was decorated in a “London theme”, with each of the rooms having a different tube line painted on the door.  It was also FREEZING cold and the window to our room wouldn’t shut.  There were rules everywhere you looked – on the walls, the fridges, the doors.  A couple of examples: On the bathroom mirror – “Do not leave your bathroom items in the bathroom overnight.  Any items found here in the morning will be destroyed.”  Bit unnecessary, we thought.  On the fridge – “Alcohol may be stored in the fridge.  However, if alcohol is not removed by 9am it will be thrown out.”  Funny how the bathroom items get destroyed, but the alcohol does not….  

These clocks were in the lobby area.  Nick thought it was mega lols, so took a photo.

Anyway, we were looking forward to the “best hostel breakfast ever”, as stated by numerous visitors on Hostelworld.  It turned out to be a giant pancake – the American kind, not the delicious English/possibly French ones we have on Pancake Day with lemon and sugar.  Also, there was nowhere to sit and eat breakfast, just a teeny tiny desk in the kitchen where the two of us plus the cook crammed round (all of our knees touching) and ate in silence.  All very strange.  Before we left though, we were treated to a HOT SHOWER!!  This was our first since leaving New York 6 weeks ago, so it was reason to celebrate indeed.

A pretty flower in La Fortuna

We had no desire to hang around in San Jose as it’s pretty much just full of shopping malls and office blocks, and we are nature-loving hippy traveller types now so we have no love for such cosmopolitan surroundings.  So, we took a bus to Puerto Viejo: a small surfer town on the Caribbean coast.  It’s a cool place, and it would have been good to spend a few days here on the beach sunning ourselves, if it had not been raining, as it had been throughout our whole time in Costa Rica.  We stayed in a nice little cabina-type hostel for a couple of nights and as our money was dwindling away rapidly, we cooked all our meals in the kitchen on site. 

I believe I have come a long way since the beginning of this trip, when at first I would not even entertain the idea of eating anything that had been prepared in a hostel kitchen, as let’s face it, they are always really dirty, no-one washes anything properly and as the plates, cutlery and cooking equipment do not belong to me, basically I don’t trust them. However, I've persevered and can now eat pretty much anything off a surface that hasn't seen a sponge this decade.  And I've only thrown up once so far…..Hurrah! 

A lizard

So, on we went across the border to Panama.  We’d arranged a Workaway placement from 15^th December lasting a month, in a small hotel on Isla Colon, Bocas del Toro.  This border crossing was the most interesting of all.  I’ll let Nick tell you all about it in the next installment as I’m very tired due to not having a siesta today.

P.S. Apologies for the random pictures again.  We don’t have any pictures that go with this bit of the trip, so instead you’re treated to some that don’t really make sense with what you’re reading.  Also, as there are a lot of lizards i n the part of the world, I’ve decided that the next couple of entries will include a picture of a lizard.  Because we have about 100 of them.