I’m sitting in the dark in a treehouse 80 feet in the air in the middle of the jungle in the Gandoca Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge. Lightning is flashing on the distant horizon over the Caribbean and there’s the low rumble of thunder. There’s not a speck of light in any direction. Bats are whizzing by in the high canopy and a three-inch spider sits on the awning overhead. Molly and I are the only souls for easily a mile. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I got up at my usual-for-Costa Rica early hour and went for coffee in the hotel lobby, a tropical thatched roof affair, and waited for Molly to wake up, which she did around 8:00. We went for our free breakfast and then packed up and caught a taxi a couple kilometers up the coast to tomorrow night’s lodging where we stashed our heavy bags for the night, and departed with overnight backpacks. We walked to the bus station and bought a couple of tickets back down the coast to Manzanillo. While standing there waiting in the intense heat for 45 minutes, an elderly Afro-Caribbean man with a bucket filled with fruits and veggies walked up and offered me a couple of what looked like lychee nuts (Molly says it’s mamón). I’m always suspicious of people. No one gives something for nothing, right? Wrong. I held the fruit in my hand, just waiting, and he grabbed it back, dug his fingernails in and opened one for me. Hoping his hands were clean I obediently ate the gelatinous fruit and thanked him. A few minutes later he said he would be right back, and left me in charge if his produce. On his return, he handed me a small package of sweet biscuits from the store. Para mi? I wondered aloud. Indeed, he had brought me a little present, and expected nothing in return.
The big bus finally appeared some twenty minutes late and wound us down the coast to Manzanillo, a tiny beach town that was overrun by people enjoying the hot sun on this long holiday weekend. There, we waited for a man named Peter who is another one of these expat-following-a-dream people. He’s from Slovakia. He has an inexplicable love of climbing trees and a background in structural engineering, and so he has built his dream house here, which just happens to be high, high in the air. This is not the treehouse of childhood. It’s two concentric circular platforms connected by very steep stairs. On the first floor are hammocks, a composting toilet, and a shower and sink fed by rainwater. On the second are two beds under the ubiquitous and necessary mosquito nets. And lo and behold, you have an AirBnB lodging, which Molly discovered in her Internet research.
So Peter met us at a soda (a small, informal restaurant) and drove us a little ways into the jungle, and then we began a strenuous, steep climb across streams and up muddy, rock- and root-strewn paths. Luckily, Peter’s pace was merciful, as he stopped every few feet to show us some natural wonder or another: a brilliant green iguana, Talamanca rocket and poison dart frogs, and lots of monos (monkeys). After about an hour, we arrived at our destination. I looked way up into the canopy and saw it.
The only trouble with this abode is the way you get to it. It requires rope and harness. I don’t know how to describe the process, but it involves using your arms to slide up knots in the rope, while your legs in rope stirrups provide the leverage to give you elevation. I was, of course, scared, as I am of everything, so I went first to get it over with, and I made it to the top where another man, Jason, awaited to pull me through a hatch in the floor. Once Molly made it up — piece of cake — Jason showed us how to operate the toilet and everything else, and then at about 3:30 vanished down the hatch on the rope to leave us to our own devices.
We walked around in circles taking pictures of the place. Mine didn’t come out well.
Part of the floor is made of panels of wood and the outer edge is steel mesh. I was afraid to step on the latter. There’s something disconcerting about looking 80 feet down under your feet.
I sat down to write a little. I soon found out that the three-quarter-inch ant that Jason called the “harmless yellow-butted ant” was not so harmless after all, as it gave me a hearty sting under my big toe, which stayed with me into the evening.
At 5:00 Jason reappeared up the trail with a backpack full of goodies: dinner, beer for me, rum and coke for Molly, sheets for the bed, and water. He quickly departed so he could get out of the jungle before dark, and we were totally alone in the middle of nowhere. By 6:00, as usual, it was full dark. Needless to say, there’s no electricity here, so it was dark-dark.
We hung out listening to jungle sounds and smelling jungle smells. Every time Molly would walk somewhere, the whole treehouse would vibrate, which I found exceptionally unnerving. This place is built without nails and I don’t understand how it stays up.
At around 8:00 we heard a distant hissing sound that rapidly approached: rain on tropical leaves. We were treated to a full-blown thunderstorm, during which rain got onto my bed, followed by the emergence of a gorgeous full moon that cast the rainforest in white light. I retired to my mosquito net and tried to sleep, with only sporadic success. At 3:00 a.m. another and more powerful storm moved through, and it did occur to me that lightning likes trees, but in the end it didn’t bother ours.
Next day: Up at 5:30 wth the monkeys, despite having had little sleep. I watched parrots in a neighboring tree. I’m so glad Molly is mellower than I am. I started to have worries about what would happen if Peter and Jason were suddenly to get sick or hurt and couldn’t get to us to help us down out of the tree, and we would be stuck up there forever, and we’d eat the papaya that we had up there and then would starve and the vultures would come pick our bones. As you can see, I had it all planned out. P and J were due to the treehouse between 8:00 and 9:00, and when they weren’t there at 9:15 I became more certain that that was to be our fate.
But at 9:30 the boys arrived and were a welcome sight. Jason hoisted himself up, bearing coffee, granola, mango, yogurt, scrambled eggs, toast, avocado and of course rice and beans. We all hung out up there for another hour, and then came the dreaded moment: going down. I was so nervous I was shaking. Jason and Molly worked on soothing me, and then opened the hatch and down I went. Terra firma was a welcome feeling and Peter, on the ground, a welcome sight. He is very handsome and charming.
We shouldered our backpacks and left the way we came in, along steep slippery mud paths, spotting several types of poison dart frogs by the side of the trail, and a pretty lizard.
Peter was kind enough to give us a ride to our next destination, Hotel Pura Vida in Puerto Viejo. On the way he pulled over on a gravel road and Jason jumped out, grabbed some immature coconuts that were hanging by the roadside, smashed them against the trunk of the tree, and gave one to each of us to drink the clear milk. At our destination, we all hugged a fond goodbye. The whole trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for which I am grateful.
