I was glad I decided to take the bus to meet up with the tour to Isla Tortuga, even though the bus driver forgot where I wanted to stop even though I asked him three minutes before we got there, and somebody else also pressed the next stop button. Having to walk back about 15 minutes was not how I wanted to start my day. But it cost 450 colones (less than $1), and when I took a taxi back from a closer spot where they dropped me at the end of the day, that was 4500 colones.
When I got on the coaster for Calypso tours, we had that thing that happens, with beginning of day tours, where no one talks to anyone else and everybody acts like they’re on the way to the first day of school and no one is quite sure how all the cliques are going to fall out yet.
We stopped for breakfast and then stopped at Puntarenas to get on the catamaran. And this is when I found out that sometimes I am like an old lady. There were about 30-40 students from an American university. Oh man, they annoyed me so much. Every other sentence in my head was something that could’ve started with “Kids these days.” It didn’t help that my stomach was upset and I hadn’t slept well, and so wasn’t in the best mood anyway. But they had that group dynamic, and while all the students I talked to individually were polite and nice and interesting, together they were one big swarm of noise and hormones and rudeness (I told you I’m an old lady!).
When I went snorkeling, I almost killed a few of them—there were already too many people in too small of a snorkeling area, and the visibility was already poor, so then when some of the people were yelling to each other “Look at this!” so loudly that I could easily hear underwater, it pissed me off. I even, when a couple of the students complained that they couldn’t see anything, jokingly pointed out that fish don’t like noise. They said, oh, sorry, and were quiet for 2.34 seconds.
I was about to call the whole snorkeling thing a wash, but then . . .
I was swimming, killing time, wishing everyone would shut up so I could enjoy the snorkeling by my old lady self, when this school of fish, a greyish lavender with yellow markings, swam up under and over and around me. So, I was enjoying that, when I was also surrounded by a flash of lightninging neon quick-flying fish. They swam up over and around and under me, darting in and through and around the other swarm of fish. I could even feel a few of the fish bumping in to me or nibbling at me. It made me so happy and calm.
When I got back to the beach and the excellent lunch, I started talking to Trisha and her grandmother Maryann—we had bonded earlier in a bathroom line—and we had lunch together. After lunch, Maryann and I went hunting for the awesomely brightly colored crabs that were hiding in these piles of grassy-rooty things. We wanted to photograph them, and photograph them we did. WHEE!
When we got back, Trisha was talking with Arthur, an Estonian man living in New York, who had many entertaining stories to tell us. Mostly about driving,* but also we talked a little politics, a little world events. I put my foot in it at one point by saying, when talking about how Malawians frigging loved George W after he promised to up USAID money to Africa, that he was no one’s favorite president. I think I saved the situation, though.
After that, it was time to return to the boat, then to the coaster, then to catch a taxi, then come back to Maria’s to switch rooms and eat dinner and take a shower and pretty much fall asleep.
Somehow I managed to avoid sunburn. Yay!
*Polish people in Boston, whose names on their Polish driver’s licenses are incorrectly written down on tickets as “Driver’s License”; People using their foreign driver’s licenses when they are pulled over in America (with an extra thick accent), and their American licenses when they are pulled over in Europe. to get out of tickets (it works).
