A Day in the Life: Puerto Viejo

Olympia, WA

I open my eyes and pull myself to my feet. I'm bleary eyed but not to worse from the wear of last night. I wade through the sea of hammocks trying to get to the front desk to see what time it is. I neglected to bring anything that gives time and had accidentally woken up before 9:00 am the last two days. Hmmmm. The clock says 10 till 10, well ... all right. That's more like it.

Walking down the main drag of Puerto Viejo I'm frustrated with how crowded it is. It's Semana Santa and it appears that most of the country has shut down and come to the beach. I run into a couple from San Diego that I met on the bus a couple of days before. We sit and eat breakfast: Pineapple, banana and mango drowned in yogurt and granola. We sip on watermelon juice and gripe about the fact that the stupid reception clock was wrong and it's actually still only 8:30 in the morning. Oh well, nothing to be done about it now. We hurry back to our hostel to get ready to go to the beach as a procrastinating sloth peers down at us and seems to say "Whoa, now...slow down and take it easy."

We take the sloth’s advice, ease our way down the jungle trail to the beach and prepare for a day of sloth… the sin, not the animal. We laze on the beach, once in awhile getting up to use the boogie board I rented or to play Frisbee with Chancho the German Sheppard who seems to be waiting for us (or perhaps the Frisbee) at the beach everyday.

After a hard day at the beach we retire back to our hostel for a little nappy-poo. This truly is one of the nicest hostels I’ve ever been in. Tile work and mosaics decorate practically every square inch of walk way and walls and when there’s no tile work, there some other work of art. The place is jam-packed for Semana Santa with the afore-mentioned hammocks and tents that cover every available blade of grass. Beautiful girls wearing little more than a skimpy sarong and a bikini, lazily drape themselves over any available piece of furniture.

It’s not easy, but I do manage to get a few winks in amongst the reggae music and the general revelry. There’s a Norwegian a couple of hammocks down who I haven’t seen out of his hammock all week and I get the general impression that if I were to return to Puerto Viejo in a couple years, he’d still be there with his little iPod and speakers and joint hanging out of his mouth. Well… I don’t want to end up like that guy, so yet again I pull myself up to my feet.

I find my new friends and we play a few rounds of an entertaining card game with the unfortunate name of “shithead”. As we play we sip a fruity beverage that the owner of the hostel has whipped up. Its sweet taste belies its strength, but we take no heed.

Later we leave the hostel and walk into town. This place reeks of reggae. It looks like it, feels like it and definitely smells like it. Heavy-lidded Rastafari saunter up and down the streets, a joint dangling precariously from their lips as their heads bob up and down to the Marley beats.

We grab something to eat, perhaps a casado (the national dish that consists of meat, rice and beans and a some veggies) or maybe a pizza and down some Imperial beers. Afterward, we head down to Bambu, the reggae disco, but it’s too crowded. The place is overflowing with the melange of high dread-locked locals and drunken sunburnt tourists.

So we head back to the hostel. There’s a huge bonfire on the beach, around which people are belting out truly horrendous versions of bad songs. Perfect. We sit down and join in the off-key crooning of such classics as Hotel California and La Bamba. Finally, however, my eyelids tell me that they’ve had enough for one day and I pick my way through the slumbering masses to my hammock and fall asleep content and ready to do it again the next day.

A quick note, before I get any more hate mail. This is a retroactive email. I’m actually home now in cold and rainy Oly. So please, no more death threats. Peace (and I mean that), Moe.