Dodging Heat

March 04, 2020

Dodging Heat

Heat.

That’s the bad thing about the tropics - well, bad from my point of view. They’re hot. Though the iguanas seem to appreciate this.

One can escape the heat to the highlands and mountains - and on the shore the air usually moves so that the heat is somewhat more bearable. Even so. I’ve taken to carrying my umbrella (paragua - for water) and using it as a parasol (for sun). The shade is a small one, but since the sun shines at zenith from directly above, I’m covered, head to toe.

As the reader may deduce, I am no longer in the hills, though at the end of the last entry I promised to be heading for new mountains. And I did.

Before arriving here on the Pacific coast at Quepos, I stopped for a few days in Santa Elena and Monteverde.

This is a region of cloud forests, good treks and wind.

I don’t remember ever having been in a place as windy as Santa Elena, which is surprising, since Santa Elena is inland from the sea by about 50km. Santa Elena is reached by winding dirt roads, which are not wide enough to let a car and a bus pass eachother on a curvy bit. So the 42km trip by bus from Santa Elena to the Pan Americana highway took around 80 minutes and required a lot of cars to reverse, when they hit a curve at the same time as our bus. This happened frequently, since the road was mostly curves.

Now I’m working my way gradually back to Panama. My original plan was to go from Santa Elena to San Jose (5 hours by bus), muck around twiddling my toes for hours waiting for the night bus to Panama City (17 hours). But in the end common sense won and I decided to make the grand trip back in installments.

Quepos caught my eye as a suitable stop-over since it is on the doorstep of Costa Rica’s most visitied national park, Manuel Antonio. It turns out that the town itself has its own charm. For once, it’s not particularly touristy. On the first day I had a lovely swim in a pretty bay with only the Costa Rican coast guard as company. They were doing life-saving exercises, with somebody pretending to drown and the others rushing into the water to save him. It felt rather like being in an episode of Baywatch, but at least it was a very safe place to swim!

Especially charming was a stretch of the village, which could only be reached via ferry. It had a stunning stretch of beach, on which locals were swimming and fishing and dogs were enjoying the heck out of life. The beach came equipped with the usual stunning sunset views.

When attempts to dodge the heat to higher ground fail, the only way to beat the heat is to start early, do the strenuous walking before it gets really hot (around 11 am latest) and hide in the shade or swim around in the sea until it cools down again arond 3 pm

I nearly nailed it today at the Manuel Antonia National park. Like most national parks so far in this country, this one had good paths - more like garden paths than the slip-sliding in mud of Panamanian treks. But the views were quite lovely.

And as before, the park was full of life. Not just humans, though admittedly they were the most numerous species.

But howling monkeys, deer and the ever active and cheeky white faced capuchin monkeys

A mother was lovingly delicing her young, when a world-weary-looking male made his entry,

insidiously manouvered closer and closer along the branch

until the mother’s attention was diverted from her baby to the long-suffering male.

The male then resigned himself to her tender ministrations. The babe was understandably less impressed with having his pruning interrupted and tried to take revenge on the male by biting his head off.