Some people chart the passage of time with fancy clocks and calendars. For me, time is what happens between frequent flyer cash-ins. (And I no longer trust my biological clock, so you know - whatever) Since my Australia trip last year, my miles have been steadily re-accumulating toward another free trip. Periodically through the build-up, I check with my sister Lisa to see how her miles are coming along, as it's not uncommon for our "travel opportunity windows" to line up nicely for an exciting sibling adventure from time to time .

Hi, it's Lisa. That was me in the red up there. Mark and I are going to attempt to co-write a journal this time. He'll always be black, and me red. Just like our hearts. Anyway, read on!

"Scuba Diving!" she cried. "Scuba Diving!" I echoed. "Where?!" I screamed. "I don't know!" she bellowed. "Why are we shouting?" I loudly queried.. So in subdued tones, we agreed upon Costa Rica, as it is: a) A fantastic scuba location, possessing both Caribbean and Pacific diving locations b) Tropical, with rainforests densely populated with a stunning collection of cool creatures, and c) Free to fly there for both of us with our respective accumulated miles. It doesn't get much better than that.

(OK actually I voted for a 7-day Caribbean live-aboard, but it didn't take long to convince me otherwise - and hey he forgot: I speakie the Spanish.)

Mindlessly happy with the decision, we then proceeded to outfit ourselves for the adventure. Being both somewhat talented amateur photographers, we decided to split the cost of an underwater camera. And since we saved so much money by splitting the cost, we each had extra money to buy wetsuits. <sigh> With financial logic like that, this "free trip" was going to end up anything but.

(3mm wetsuit for $73 - the Internet bargain of the century! … if you don't count the taxidermy jackalope I just bought on eBay for $46 - long story. But I digress.)

Friday, Aug 30

Five minutes into the adventure and I hit my first snag. Allow me to explain: Due to "heightened security measures", the Cleveland Airport is now outfitted with some kind of enormous nucleonic particle accelerator in the check-in terminal. First they line you up along the perimeter of the structure (so you can actually feel your genitals being bombarded with high-energy mesons and what-not). Then, when you get to the front of the line, you hand your bags to the uniformed homo habilis (where English is his 3rd or 4th language at best). Then, and only then, as your bags disappear into the mouth of the electromagnetic monstrosity, do you see the small sign above the gaping maw "please remove film from luggage". Oh, fucking great - I just exposed 8 rolls of film to the American Airlines supercollider. <sigh> At this time, I'm thinking "It's 200 speed film, It will be okay - if I obsess about it now, then I have 9 days of stress which I don't really want". So I decided to enjoy the remainder of the vacation as if this little physics experiment never happened.

Meanwhile I got on with my TeleCheck pocketknife. See who God likes more?

- Well, that's a given, but it's funny that I got my pocketknife through as well. So where were we? Oh yes, in a masterful display of complex project management (okay, maybe it was just good luck), Lisa and I managed to schedule the arrival of our two different airlines into San Jose within 20 minutes of each other. We met at the baggage claim and were shuttled to San Jose's brand new Comfort Inn.

A note about the Weather: We arrived toward the end of the "rainy season", and although late afternoon or evening showers seemed to be common, the weather was absolutely delightful for the duration of our stay. So unless otherwise noted, assume this Central American adventure is happening during 80-90 temps with big, white puffy clouds and lots of warm, happy sun.

Aug 31

We were told to expect the van to our costal resort at 8:00a.m. When 8:30 rolled around, there was not a van to be seen. The helpful manager of the hotel described a phenomenon called "Costa Rican Time" which implied that prearranged times and deadlines are iffy things at best. When 8:45 rolled around, we went into "pre-panic" mode, which was to hunt down the appropriate numbers of our tour package coordinators (Ones we neglected to bring with us. Doh.). At 8:50 the van rolled up - Our driver didn't speak much English, so I experienced the first of what would undoubtedly be many relieved moments where Lisa's bilingual talents emerged and otherwise saved the occasion. It turned out that the driver was told 9:00 a.m. for our pick-up time, so we went from "mildly irritated" to "delighted" that he was 10 minutes early. ha!

You know, multi-lingualism (is that a word?) is a talent of mine. Diplomacy is not. That being said, I must tell you that I was very effusively generous in my explanation that we had been told 8:00 but it certainly didn't matter to us now that he was there and we were on our way, etc. Vacation is so good for mellowing out one's control issues. :)

The drive through Western Costa Rica was quite enjoyable. Being a few degrees north of the Equator, I was struck with how similar the terrain (jungle-covered hills) looked to West Africa, where I used to live. Plus the whole "beaten down" look that tends to be the norm for tropical climes (you know, the tin roofs, concrete buildings in various states of disrepair, cars that are a bit more "worn" than the U.S. ones, etc.).

Oh! Speaking of beaten down… I forgot to add a bit about our van. Once the whole 8/9 o'clock issue was settled, we got ready to get in the van. At that moment, Mark said, under his breath, "Man, those are some bald tires." And they were. …Uber-bald. The thought came back to me over and over like a song as we traveled to the coast. Not unlike the Macarena - "bald tires, bald tires, bald tires. Bald tires, bald tires, bald tires. Bald tires, bald tires, bald tires… baaaaaalld tires!"

Though we passed all kinds of wrecks, the tires held, and we got to the hotel after about 4 ½ hours. There, we immediately explored our stretch of Pacific beach (tide pools!), and proceeded to knock back a few of the local beers over a couple of Travel Scrabble games (Beer makes Mark smart! - 2 wins). Later that evening, we met the nice couple, Bob & Susan (U.S. citizens living in C.R.), who helped put together our dive package. More beers were consumed (normally, I wouldn't expound on the amount of beer, but I think it actually has an impact on tomorrow's stories, as you'll see).

Sunday, Sept 1

Oh goodie! I get to tell Day 2 -- it's a fun one. We got up super early - the sun rises at 5:30 making it hard to sleep late - and prepped for our first dive day. We loaded up our gear, prepped the camera and headed to breakfast to "carb up" before our first big day of activity. Mmmm… huevos rancheros - eat up, kids! Big day ahead! (Foreshadowing - a fantastic literary device in action.)

We went down to the dive shop and met our super-nice dive master Eduardo and our equally lovely dive partners for the day - the honeymooning Mike and Shannon. We boarded the boat in fantastic weather to head out into the Pacific. Shannon warned us that she sometimes gets a little queasy, but did just fine on the way out and we soon took our first dive.

The water was a comfortable 85 degrees or so (Hm, 3mm wetsuit) and aside from a persistent surge, (It rocks you back and forth underwater in much the same way as on the surface. You let it take you back a little and then swim out in the forward motion.) the dive was great. We saw pretty cool fish, some eels; a good starter dive.

We came back up on the boat to off-gas for the second dive and immediately Mark looked exhausted. When I asked if he was OK, he was slow to respond but indicated a general weariness. As the interval progressed he became decidedly green as we (Eduardo and I) encouraged him to take deep breaths and drink some water. He didn't pink up and started, in a dazed state, describing some bilateral tingling and other physical distress. Dude. He looked bad. Eduardo said, "Yes, that's just sea sickness. Breathe deep, you'll be OK." Mark wasn't so sure. He launched into a litany of symptoms he was sure couldn't be sea sickness (thumbs curling under, tingling) that lasted a good five minutes before promptly lurching to the side of the boat to "feed the fish." No Eduardo, I never get seasick. I've been on 65 dives. :)

Well, more like 30, but yeah, that was the first fish-feed. I'm pretty sure it was the dehydration/beer thing I mentioned earlier, but it was pretty choppy too - any of these things can forcibly remove one's breakfast from one's stomach. The good part is, it never happened again.

Feeling 1000 times better we had a splendid second dive, seeing sharks (small white tips), octopus, lots of fish and the occasional eel. Man, I love scuba diving.

It was during this dive that my trusty Fossil watch flooded. The thing is supposed to be water resistant to 165 feet (it flooded at 45). So I was effectively without a timepiece for the remainder of the trip - It's not necessarily a bad thing on vacation, but we did have some time schedules to keep. I would ask a lot of "Que hora es's" during the week.

We returned to the hotel for lunch and Scrabble (I won - my only victory this trip - doh!) and did a little beach combing. Later that day we went on a monkey-hunt - walking a couple of miles on a road near our hotel and seeing an astounding variety of birds, fantastic tropical plants, lizards, colorful land crabs, brilliantly colored grasshoppers and - alas - no monkeys. Despite that small disappointment, it was a truly fantastic day. We were both so thrilled just to be in Costa Rica.

Sept 2

After (a much lighter) breakfast, we met with Daniel, the resort's other dive master. Also present for the dive were two other Americans, Ron and Robert. Ron was an old pro, bringing along his huge underwater video housing and some great "fish stories", like diving with white sharks in South Africa, etc. (in a cage, sports fans - in a cage.)

Our first dive turned into an impromptu drift dive, as an unexpected current carried us along the bottom at a rather quick clip. We fought our way out of the current, but ended up missing the areas of interest. There were still a helluva lot of fish to be seen, and even the "worst day of diving" is better than the "best day of work".

Daniel said it was only the second time he'd encountered such a strong current. Small consolation for a relative novice like me - I was a wee bit stressed by the experience. Aborted the photography mission in favor of staying focused on buoyancy, avoiding rocks and not ending up in the Cocos. Wow.

Then, as we kicked back in the boat during our surface interval, we heard the boat captain repeatedly call out "Tortuga! Tortuguita!" - (That's turtle for you monoglots.) We motored over and saw the sweetest little turtle all caught up in a shredded plastic bag. Damn humans! He'd been there long enough that it was starting to cut into his skin a bit. Robert, who was in possession of a dive knife we earlier ribbed him about, came to the rescue and we cut the little tortuguita free and sent him on his way. It was a good feeling and I said, half jokingly, that it should earn us some good dive karma for the next descent.

Good dive karma? Er, yeah, you might say that - for on our second dive we saw Manta Rays! I've got 2 words to describe the mantas. Holy and Shit (in that order). They were the biggest things I've ever seen in the ocean. I saw the first one in silhouette, immediately got Lisa's attention, then sprinted off to get a closer look. The second (bigger) one emerged from the murk bearing directly on us. As it gracefully banked, its 10+ foot wingspan seemed to flap in slow motion. We even got a second look as they banked again to make a second pass. I had fortunately positioned myself at about 25 feet and the big one came within a body length of me. It was one of the best dive experiences I've ever had (and life experiences!).

We're hoping to get a photo emailed from one of the other guys. Annie Liebowitz there blew all of our film on blurry shots of tuna. ;p It was, as Mark said, unbelievably awesome.

We also saw a couple of 5-6' reef sharks toward the end of the dive, but somehow the sharks just didn't excite me as much after the manta experience. Go figure.

Back on land, we met the other people in Ron & Robert's tour group. They were a nice bunch o' folks (all from the U.S. - either San Diego or Dallas) who were experiencing a similar tour. Elle, the cute Texan, lent us her rented mountain bikes for the afternoon. Lisa was a bit concerned, not having been on a bike in 20 years ("Hey, it's like riding a bike", I said). We pedaled 5 km to a neighboring village to eat lunch at "Marco Polo Pizza".

Here's a story I can add. Sometime in the last couple of years I have altered the biological classification system. Now I haven't crossed owls with frogs or made a tree that grows donuts or anything, but I have shifted one of God's creatures into an entirely different kingdom (as well as genus species and the like). I have decided that anchovies are now vegetables. This is, of course, to add them to my otherwise strictly vegetarian diet. I'm sorry, but anchovies taste good. …and it's not like they have overly developed communications systems and thought processes. I don't think. Anyway - the pizza was great - olives, capers and anchovies. Yum.

Mmmm.. salty. On the way back to our hotel, Lisa spotted a group of Howler Monkeys foraging close to the road. Monkeys! In the wild! Just hanging around - how cool is that?!

Returning home, we enjoyed a well-earned rest (biking in 90 heat & 90% humidity takes a bit out of you), then joined our new friends for happy hour and a nice dinner at the nearby Playa Flamingo hotel (not to be confused with our own "Flamingo Marina" hotel). I believe Costa Rica actually translates to "Land of the Many Flamingos".

Sept 3

Our first dry day. As part of the package we had put together, we signed up for two neato land excursions. The first was volcano + natural hot springs. I'm just going to jump right in and start with this: I HATE traveling with, near or even within a generous 50 mile radius of other Americans. We shared our van (and our day) with two couples who, while very nice people, were the epitome of retarded Americans. I'm going to try to remember the highlights:

- "Why do you call soccer football?" and the reply from another, "Actually, I think they call it football soccer, but just football for short."

- (In reference to the gum with the squirty-stuff in the middle) "I call it cum gum. Francisco, you want some cum gum?"

- "How much money do construction workers make here?"

…and my favorite random fucked up question of them all…

- "Why don't they have spare ribs here?"

Anyhoo - the trip to Arenal - an active volcano in central Costa Rica. The ride, uninterrupted, was to take 4 hours. Impediment number one was a stop at a souvenir shop. While Mark was against it, I didn't mind. ...pick up a few gifties for family and friends and be off. Well, it didn't work that way. A) The prices were outrageously expensive prohibiting our purchasing anything but postcards and 2) One of our fellow Americans decided it would be the perfect time to bargain for an hour or so over the gold jewelry Costa Rica is so well known for. (???! Hello? I think they export coffee and poor people - not gold.) Let's just say the trip, lunch and a camera battery stop (guess who, again - hint: they couldn't find a gold battery) took more like six. The one really excellent part of it was a stop at a bend in the road to Arenal to feed wild Coatimundi. (click: )

Coatis sure are cool, but I have to agree with Lisa - Americans suck. No wonder we're universally loathed. One serendipitous thing that came out of the frequent stops for batteries & "famous Costa Rican opals," was the church in the town of Cañas - every square inch was covered in broken tile and it made quite the nice photography subject.

When we finally got to the volcano we hit our first weather related snag of the trip. It was about 60% covered by clouds. :( Well, ya can't have everything - at least we could take a nice nature walk on the national park grounds. While still in the parking area we saw all manner of fantastically colorful tropical birds, including 3 species of toucan, woodpecker, lorikeet type birds and other exotics I have no name for. Very nice. We searched in vain for poison dart frogs and instead found many creepy spiders and a whole parade of leaf cutter ants. Still, a cool hike. On to stop two: Tabacon natural hot springs/resort.

Oh man. Everyone should go to Tabacon. Besides being gorgeously landscaped with all of the most impressive local flora, it is unbelievably relaxing and peaceful. The resort has a series of spring fed pools, both natural pond and man-made pool-style that vary in temperature from "tepid" to "holy-jesus-where'd-my-skin-go?" The "ow ow ow, ahh" pool had a powerful waterfall that absolutely pounded any stress out of your back enabling you to lie in a wee puddle of boneless happy. Aaah. The soak was followed by an outstanding buffet dinner at the resort's restaurant. Man - they have some weird and tasty fruits there. I still don't know what some of them were, but my advice is that if you find yourself in Costa Rica, just randomly stuff plant matter into your mouth - most of it will taste great.

Anyway, during dinner - SURPRISE! - the clouds lifted and the volcano put on a show. First just fire and rocks percolating from the top, but then a full-fledged lava flow. Apparently lava flows are a rarity - score another one for Pedersen luck. I was loading my plate when it started and caught only the tail end - but Mark'll tell you it was great.

Let me tell you, it was great! The perfectly conical (a-ha, now we see it) volcano spit out gobs of fiery rocks down our side and the low layer of clouds overhead reflected the bright orange lava that must have been gooping out on the far side. Nature's fireworks kick ass.

Aah, what a day. Costa Rica. I slept on the way home in prep for another early dive day. Ah, Costa Rica.

Wednesday, Sept 4

Our schedule had us back in the Pacific today. We met 2 new divers and Daniel, who took us back to the location with the bad currents for another go. I'd have to say this dive went a little better, as it was the best dive of the trip! (er, well, if you don't count the Mantas from Monday) The coolest part (and I mean that literally) was when we hit the cold water currents. The temperature dropped 20 degrees instantly (from 85 to 65º) - and you knew when it was going to happen, because the water at the boundary of the cold & warm water shimmered like we were swimming into gasoline fumes (or maybe a heat mirage - for those of you who don't burn down buildings like I do). Lisa and I were extremely glad to have our wetsuits during this dive, as we remained comfortable in and out of the cold swells. The same can't be said for our 2 skin-diving compatriots, who looked like plucked chickens with their goosebumps and arms curled to their chests like big, swimming fetuses. Aha! - 3mm bargain suit finally cashes in!

Big, swimming fetuses aside, the cold water brought incredible amounts of fish - schools of jacks were so dense that it was often a literal wall of silver, fins and eyes. We saw a couple of Eagle Rays dive in and out of the mass, and then spotted a couple of Guitar Fish (some kind of weird flat, bottom-dwelling ray or shark). A couple of white-tip sharks, an octopus or two and a large, needle-thin coronet fish rounded off a fabulous dive.

Just to reiterate - I have never seen so many fish in my life. The jack school completely encompassed us at one point - as I pirouetted in the water, they were literally on all six sides of us. Surprisingly, this is not at all scary - just kind of surreal.

Our second dive was also punctuated by cold swells, but was most memorable for the large amount of eels - several big green morays, a striped moray and even a little "jeweled" moray were spotted on this dive. Sweet Jeebus, how I like the scuba diving.

Back on terra firma, I prevailed in another of our hyper-competitive scrabble games over lunch then ventured off to take pictures around the marina while Lisa immersed herself in the Costa Rican tradition that is "Siesta". Later that evening, Bob and Susan popped in to hear our fish stories over dinner. Another fabulous day in tropical Costa Rica.

Sept 5

Today was our second "dry day" and after a brief look at the itinerary, I felt I should call it our "EXTREME dry day" (isn't that what the kids say?) - as we were scheduled to go zipping around the rainforest canopy on a series of suspended wires. I love this kind of stuff! I won't say I'm an adrenaline junkie, but I'm definitely on a first-name basis with my adrenaline pharmacist. We drove out to the zip lines with a new American couple (young newlyweds - much cooler than the volcano crew - as they never once mentioned football or cum gum).

Of course the zip lines were cool. It's always cool when you hook yourself onto a pulley and jump off a platform 150 feet in the air while tropical jungle whips by you at 30 miles an hour or so. But perhaps the coolest part is when you reach the distant platform and wait for your companions - there are things in the trees! We saw several large iguanas climbing into the sunny spots. We saw monkeys - fucking monkeys! I mean, in Cleveland, if you look up into the trees you're lucky if you see a little black kid or two, and here were monkeys and 3-foot lizards. I love this place.

Just to clarify, the monkeys were not actually fucking. Mark was simply using fuck as an adjective to indicate something amazing or out of the ordinary. He also forgot to mention my brief shining moment as eco-tour guide. Our guide/safety monitors asked me to listen to and then translate their speech before hooking us up to the, gulp, 400-meter wire. I guess I did a good job… nobody smacked into a tree at 40kph. :)

It's true - the monkeys were in no way copulating (But we did see some fucking turtles the day before).

When we returned to the marina, the sky opened up and we realized why they call this place a "rain forest". We worried that it might impact the next thing on the list (EXTREME horseback riding), but the rain stopped right about the time we were ready to leave. The riding was part of a "cantina tour" where we visited a couple of small villages on horseback and stopped in their local cantinas for some tasty Costa Rican beer. My favorite was "Imperial" - whose logo (click )I referred to as "El Pollo Diablo" or the Devil Chicken - Lisa informed me that I was calling it the Devil Chicken Meal, as calling chicken "pollo" is the same as calling a cow "beef" - which actually makes it a little funnier if you ask me. Even funnier would be if he were to get the gender wrong and say Polla de Diablo. That means Devil's Dick.

Just a note on the villages we rode through. It was a chance to see "real" Costa Rica. What struck me most was that even though a large percentage of houses were the bare minimum assembly of anything that could be called shelter (mismatched boards, corrugated tin, etc.) and many still had outdoor kitchens and toilets, I don't think we saw one without a T.V. Weird.

After the second cantina, we moseyed back to the ranch in near-total darkness. The moon and stars were obscured completely by the post-rain clouds. I have a new respect for our equine friends now, as they obviously see much, much better in the dark than the monkeys riding on their backs.

What was really awesome was the explosion of fireflies - while not enough light to navigate by, it was, nonetheless, spectacular. Have I said this before? Ah, Costa Rica.

Sept 6

I woke up with serious "horse-butt" and a wave of sadness realizing that we had come to our final dive day, signaling also the wind down of our amazing holiday. Sigh. But sadness passes as quickly as seasickness, only without the body wracking retching, and we were off to enjoy the great blue. You know, I never mentioned this before, but after that first day, "wet" days' breakfasts were limited to fruit, toast and coffee. Plus Bob graciously gave us Dramamine from his own personal stash. Yay, Bob!

Dive one found us battling a pretty strong current. I was, it seems, the weakest link in this dive and after kicking my wee legs off for only 35 minutes was forced to ascend due to low air, taking both Mark (my dive buddy) and Bob (a gracious dive-master) with me. Not before seeing some cow nose rays, HUGE southern stingrays (4+ feet) and a number of eels, though. Sorry Mark and Bob!

No need to apologize, but if anyone should it's Daniel - I wasn't very pleased with him when we surfaced. He went kicking off into the abyss and never really checked back to see if little Lisa could keep up in the heavy current. When we were back on the boat, I politely explained that Lisa was pretty new at this (and had horse-butt for chrissakes!) - he did seem more attentive on the second dive..

Dive two was easier and we were able to go a little deeper and stay a little longer. We saw more rays a bunch of eels and the, at the end a GAGGLE of guitarfish. We had been told they were pretty rare, and yet miraculously stumbled upon a good 18 - 20 of them ranging in size from 3 to 5 feet. Wow! Daniel was amazed as, previous to our dive where we saw two, had only ever seen one in his life. Cool, huh? It's that Pedersen luck/turtle karma.

We spent the rest of the lazy day playing Scrabble (2 more for Mark), watching DVDs, (Mark brought the portable) drinking beers and having dinner. Sigh. I need to take more vacations.

Sept 7

We left our Pacific resort early for the 4-hour ride back to San Jose. We were told about a new shopping center near our hotel: The "MultiPlaza" (which translates roughly to "Standard American Mall"). It was a nice enough place - a food court with all the standard American fast-food type restaurants, trendy clothes shops, touristy souvenir shops - but I found it hard to get into a "spend mode" after a week of constant eating and tipping.

Here's my only note on the mall. There was a clown there promoting Latin band-aids or some such thing, and well - man--- clowns are just as scary if not more so in another language. I had visions of this clown waddling towards me and chanting, in his cigarette-deepened rasp, "te matare cuando duermes." (I'll kill you when you sleep) Clowns. Shudder.

Back at the hotel, we found some college ball on the T.V., read, and otherwise "decompressed" from a wonderful kinetic Costa Rica holiday.

Sept 8

On the way to the airport in the morning, I was able to mentally play back all the cool things we did and saw - Manta Rays, monkey troops, horseback riding in the dark, active volcanoes, soothing hot waterfalls, sharks and eels, great food, nice people, 5 Scrabble wins (well, my memory at least) - Wow, it really was a near-perfect holiday adventure. I'm always amazed when vacations turn out better than you expect (of course the key to that is not to have too many expectations). I suppose it also depends the people you travel with - and to the amazement of my peers, Lisa and I actually got along really well for 8 consecutive days - a new 32 year record! (Of course it helps when I need her Spanish skills, and she needs my Ninja fighting skills).

Ayup. True. All of it. Ah, Costa Rica. Hasta La next time, gang!

Mark Pedersen
& Lisa Pedersen
September, 2002