Elsewhere in the News....

...David and I went on a photographic expedition - more correctly, an expedition to photograph - the other way down Playa del Coco,and took pictures until we exhausted our camera batteries. This was unfortunately far too early, given all the neat things we kept finding in the crevices of the rocks where the sand gives out. The ocean has been doing its best to wear down the rocks for uncounted millenia, and what it has achieved so far could have filled several memory cards, if we had the batteries to do it. And the cards.

It seems strange to find so many different kinds of shells each with the little soft living bit inside still there, and struggling to retain all its adjectives. Usually when I see them, nothing remains but hard and fragmented exosity, to invent a word. And there is a surprising amount of soft stuff calling these shells home too, something else I did not expect. It is a wonder how they get it all stuffed back inside.

The tide pools are not the only places teeming with life; there were so many things burrowed into the sand where the waves sloshed, with nothing but some tail(?) gill(?) derriere(?) sticking out for breathing that I could not put a foot down anywhere without stepping on at least two or three. I gave up and left the dribbling surf and walked up where the water didn't reach and the little blighters, if there were any around, had dug in so far that they might as well not be there.

As we were walking back, David spotted a dog that walked over to the waves and sat down with a self-satisfied look, so that the riffles of sea water were cooling its haunches. I think it knew we had no working camera.

We walked to the Supermercado thereafter along the stinky Pollo Crispy shortcut. I realize that this is a sentence that appears mostly sense-free. Even if you pronounce 'pollo' as poy-yo, (spanish for chicken) it doesn't help much, so I will start from the beginning. There is a little fried chicken stand on the main tourist drag , with a gap between it and its nearest neighbour, the terminous of a long strip of vacant land that runs between other properties and serves at the street end as a dumping ground for ... something unique in the annals of trash. There are no words, not because it is overwhelming, but because I have no idea what I am smelling. But the path is clear, if utterly primitive. At the end of it, like everything in Costa Rica, there is something unexpected.

A bridge...

and this house, for sale, and as elegant as anything here...


There are a few more run-down properties and you come out just up the street from the soda by Ed's place where we had lunch. On the way back from the store - I have described the shortcut as you experience it walking home, because it is the more dramatic this way - we saw a monkey in the tree by Ed's house. And we still had no camera. (Stinky shortcut photos are from early this morning)