The title of this post is taken from a conversation I had with a tourist in Greece thirty years ago. I asked how she’d liked her tour of a remarkable ancient site. “Oh, you know,” she replied yawning. “It was just a bunch of ruins.”
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When I woke up I discovered I’d rolled like a sowbug into the sinkhole in the middle of my so-called mattress. Two birds flew from underneath my bed.
We hiked along the beach to Rio Sirena in search of bullsharks, which according to Jill are the ones they used in Jaws. Sure enough there they were, patrolling the mouth of the river, which they venture up at low tide.
A while later we spotted two crocodile brows poking out of the muddy water a little inland. Their owners were huge. We looked for tapirs, without success.
Did you know that leaf-cutter ants make trails through the forest? You can see their three-inch-wide swaths wiggling across the jungle floor.
We passed a group of Ticos wearing safari hats, high rubber boots and camouflage pants, and toting rifles. They’re park service rangers who comb Corcovado every day looking for peccary-poachers. They’d found eight today. I don’t know how they still had energy for that soccer match afterwards.
On an afternoon hike Jill and I walked under a canopy filled with invisible but extremely loud parrots. Apparently they didn’t want us there, because they started pelting us from 100 feet up. One walnut-sized projectile hit me squarely on the bridge of my nose. Impressive aim. From a distance we saw scarlet macaws in flight and heard toucans, but I never saw either. Later we found a few spider monkeys, one of whom looked down at me and rubbed its belly. What does that mean?
At the ranger station there are educational posters about the regional wildlife. I pondered the question posted on one sign:
Is the convergence of the riodinid genus Mesne on Eudulophasia driven by the visual selection of salticid spiders?
Under the heading “Morphological Correlates of Spider Mastery” there was this puzzle:
Do large tympanic organs in moths have a function in spider detection?
After our backpackers’ dinner of mashed potatoes mixed with dried soup, I washed the dishes in the dark. (The power is on for just an hour a day at Sirena, and I was saving my flashlight batteries for our upcoming hike.) I reached for the tub of dish soap and found it empty, so felt around for the other one I’d seen. Found it, snapped off its lid, peeled back the foil and plunged my sponge in. It was a strange consistency and didn’t suds up properly. I turned on my headlamp. Strawberry jelly. Ooops. I fled in shame before its rightful owner could appear.
On our long nighttime hike we saw all kinds of things.
- Two huge spiders whose hair looked like hoar-frost, the mammoth legs of a hidden tarantula, plus this big guy…
- Lots of insects (and their leavings) and the ever ubiquitous crabs…
- Amazing caterpillars and moths and frogs…
- Some of the reptilian and amphibious creatures make elegant jungle accessories. My little red-eyed tree frog rode on my head for about half a mile.
- A Baird’s Tapir! We watched her quietly for a while as she munched grass, and then she started to walk toward me. I didn’t know whether or not this was a good thing. She reached her long snout toward me, got a whiff, and quickly backed off. I tried not to be offended. As she walked away I realized that she definitely wasn’t a she.
When we got back I walked through the dark to my room, removed my muddy boots, opened my door “¦ and saw a man in my bed. And a man in another bed. For the second time tonight I fled, finding my real room one corridor away. There, I started to step barefooted on a well-fed grey mouse whose eyes begged for mercy. Yet again I threw myself in reverse.
I don’t think I could ever get used to these gaspingly cold showers I’ve been taking every night.
I crawled into my soggy nest and listened to the Tico rangers making loud animal calls — roosters, howler monkeys, macaws — into the wee hours.
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