BW: Consider me gone.
 Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? After sleeping in fits and watching the sun rise up out of the Pacific, there were 5 people from 3 countries at Delicias arguing over what day of the week it was this morning over coffee. Several others had no opinion. Somehow I was convinced that it was Thursday, because I was convinced that it was Wednesday yesterday and I’ve never been so glad to be wrong. Getting an extra day was like Christmas and then I had to make up my mind whether to stay on another day here or head out, but then it occurred to me that I could stretch it and see three or four other places. So I bought the ticket for the 9:30 one hour boat to Jaco which left at 10:10 after having the nerve to make us wait on the beach (!), me popping another lomotil, not sure if I was still sick, but not wanting to find out on a boat the hard way, and got there at 11:30 after it stopped twice to drop people off on scuba boats and snorkel tours. It was a gorgeous ride on smooth water and the soft repetitive beating of the hull against the blue with the engine hum in the background was like a tympani in a very heavy orchestra. I had been contemplating staying the night in Jaco because the LoPlan deems it a den of drugs and prostitution, but we pulled up on an ugly brown beach and the shuttle van dropped us on the side of the road at a bus stop on a street that reminded me of Sarasota, so I decided to roll onward south with Jarred and Athena and Morris/Norris and Antonia hoping that we had not missed the 12:00 bus that finally came by at 12:40, and the driver was slow and kind of stupid and bossy and I had to stand for maybe the first half hour, raining sweat, and popped another half lomotil just in case, and Orlando drove us in his unlicensed cab from Quepos to their hostel in Manuel Antonio where Julie and Chantel were already set up, but the dorm was an oven and they wanted 30 for a private and I found a place closer to the beach for 20. He told me that if I wanted to stay tomorrow night, I’d have to move rooms. I told him I didn’t yet know if I wanted to stay tomorrow night. And then I saw the beach and I very much wanted to stay tomorrow night and until Monday even though this is incrementally more expensive that Montezuma. But now, at the end of the most expensive day of trip, where I only ate lunch and a banana, sitting here on a terribly thin mattress listening to the rain outside drown out the noises from my grumbling stomach because all of the restaurants here are closed at nine except for ours which closed at 8:40 which I found out when I tried to have dinner at 8:42, as well as the only market, in a town packed with money spenders, I am not so sure. RAIN? The lunch I had here was amazing and a bargain, and I’d order it for breakfast tomorrow, but the breakfast is even cheaper and Jarred and Athena and Morris/Norris and Antonia have all stopped by to eat and drink and chat. Antonia is Morris/Norris’s sister, which is not what any of us expected to hear. And I don’t know if staring at her bellybutton on the beach is now more, or less, appropriate. The beach is amazing. The late lunch I had here was brilliant and cheap and they have three dollar margaritas all day long. I’m long enough now without a lomotil to think that whatever plagued me earlier has passed, a term that made Isabelle laugh. Odd bird, her. Great person and roommate, though, and I’m glad she asserted herself because she saved me some money in a town with options so scant that Steven and Tim had to share a bed, too. She is terribly smart, but seems to have no sense of irony, and I love to twist that knife, and even funnier was her failure to get a single one of my TWSS retorts, but I let her use my laptop to check email and she sent herself a facebook friend request from my facebook account and seemed out of sorts today as she watched the guy she called her bodyguard on the day we met get in line to get on the boat. She is 30 but you’d never guess it, has one bikini she wears to play in the waves and another she wears to the beach if she goes, has as nice of an upper back as I have ever seen on a woman but laments that the glory days of her body are over and found it odd when she woke up to me doing yoga in the small space between the bed and wall. When I say yoga, I have a group of about 10-15 poses, stretches, movements, whatever you wanna call them that I like to do, hold, whatever from somewhere between 15 to 90 seconds and I think yoga mats are dumb and paying for it is dumber. I don’t consider it exercise, I consider it an obligation to my future 18 year old kids to not have a beat up old man with a bad back. But I am enjoying the space and privacy even if the low rent accommodations have a high rent and a wafer thin mattress. This rain has got to go. I can’t figure out what any of these places have against having hooks in rooms for you to hang things on, and I hope they don’t mind that I punched a small hole in the wall with the awl of my Swiss Army corkscrew that I left stuck in to use to hang hangers from. There is a long clothesline outside my room but things rarely dry outside in the night time heavy air of breezeless humidity where cigarette smokes collects without rising or blowing away. The main point of this place is the namesake National Park that wants 10 bucks to enter. Beer is 10% more expensive. The rum is worse. But it is cheap to get into and out of and will make for an easy travel day on Monday. Watched the sunset from El Avion, and it was weird to watch it from a bar on the hill rather than on the beach. It is a building built around a plane that Reagan bought for the Contras with money he got from selling arms to Iran, the beer is expensive, and I can’t believe I forgot to take my camera.
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Diary Photos
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