When you have lemons make lemonade

8 December 2008

Puerto Limón, Costa Rica

Today is the second last time I’m going to be able to get off the ship until Nuku Hiva, a distant 11 days from today and an unknown distance across the largest ocean on the planet. Even though it is Puerto Limon today, not one of my favourite ports, it’s that time and distance until I’m able to put solid ground under my feet again that made me keen to get off this morning. But before I could walk down that gangway other things had to happen.

As part of the frequent and ongoing training schedule for crew, my life raft, and a couple of others, had refresher training on fires and extinguisher use. There were a couple of professional firemen (sorry, fire-fighters) from the US that ran us through all of the usual causes and effects and what to do in the case of fire. Always a handy thing to keep running through because if there is one thing that you do not want on a ship at sea it’s a fire.

After the training I was free to disembark so I grabbed my pack and headed into town, walking through the stalls set up between me and the street, keeping my head down and just smiling and saying “no thanks” to all the offers of tours and merchandise. I had no firm plans for what I wanted to do, only to get off the ship and walk for a while. The only sure thing I wanted was food and I headed back to the same little restaurant that I’d eaten in the last time I was here. It offered local food and for the princely sum of $4. I got a plate of mixed local food (rice, beans, vegetables and a mystery meat) and a glass of fresh mango juice. The meal was filling and the mango juice had that true, unsugared taste of real fruit rather than something processed. I sat at a table in the window and ate my food slowly, trying to make the most of the moment and a meal where the earth wasn’t moving under me. After I finished I grabbed a couple of extra cokes and a couple of pastries from the glass display case and headed down to the waterfront.

It’s not raining today, or at least it wasn’t raining when I was off the ship although there was that moist feeling in the air that surpassed the normal humidity and puddles of water in the streets. It had rained earlier but as I walked through town it was warm and the sky was battling to become the blue that it undoubtedly normally was.

I made it to the waterfront and the rickety wooden boardwalk that I remembered so fondly from the last time. Then I just sat and watched the ocean pounding onto the shore. The pastries were good and the coke went down easily. It wasn’t really a moment in the sense that I have come to mean the word but it was certainly a moment to reflect. Tomorrow we hit the Panama Canal and then the Pacific for a stretch of uncharted water for me. It’s kind of a strange feeling to be headed home in such a different way and to just be “passing through” my own home.

Having eaten, drunk and cogitated (which is far more innocent than it sounds) I headed back to the ship. I’ve been trying to save money but I fell off the wagon. There were so many cabbies parked outside the port, all offering tours that I decided to splurge.

I found a guy who offered to show me around for a price and, having already said the best thing to do in Puerto Limon is a tour, I jumped in the passenger seat, groped for a few seconds for the nonexistent seat belt, and then we headed off. His English was excellent and he had spent some time working on cruise ships so we established an immediate rapport.

I wasn’t interested so much in the usual tourist spots and when I told him that he just laughed and said that one of the problems he had was the lack of real places he could take tourists. There were a couple of spots, drop off places for things like boat tours up rivers to look at the wildlife, but we ended up going to other places. We drove through plantations, stopped at a bar where I had a local beer and he had a coke. We drove up to a roadside stand that seemed to be set up on a crossroads in the middle of nowhere and bought a type of Cornish pasty filled with vegetables and what I took to be shreds of chicken. We drove up to a highpoint above the town and I took a few photos looking down at the port and the ship. We drove through some of the seedier parts of the town and some of the more affluent, obvious for the increased security and barbed wire on top of the walls. We talked about life, travel, Costa Rica and the world.

I gave him the fare and a tip when we got back to the ship and I probably got a greater appreciation for Puerto Limon in the hour or so that I spent in that cab, with a driver that wasn’t trying to impress a foreign tourist but felt free to talk, than I had from my first visit here. Okay, so it may not be too close to the top of my list of places to go back to but today has reiterated the idea that a place is more than the buildings or the scenery, it really is about the people.