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!