Love and Adventure in Costa Rica

THIS STORY CONTAINS ROMANCE, ADVENTURE, HOOKERS, ANTS AND A MARRIAGE PROPOSAL.

For many years, my best girl Zoe was my traveling companion of choice. There was a point when I decided to start going solo because her crazy sexual energy tends to eclipse everything else within a five-mile radius, including me. She was with me on this particular trip to Costa Rica, however, and, as usual, in a matter of what seemed like seconds, Zoe had hooked up with the pick of the local litter: The hot hotel lifeguard/surf instructor, whom we nicknamed Puss in Boots because he’s like Antonio Banderas as the cat in Shrek. But her rendezvous with Puss was also beneficial to me. Maybe Zoe wouldn’t leave me hanging in her shadow on this trip. Puss gave us free private surf lessons on a secluded beach. We had to cross what he told us was a crocodile-infested river just to get to this secret beach. The adrenalin was pumping! Then my heart just about popped right out of my chest as Zoe went off to make sweet jungle love in a tree with her newfound Latin stud, leaving me stranded on my surfboard with an undertow so strong that I was slowly being swept out to sea. I thought I was going to die. But I didn’t. Puss eventually heard my cries for help, went into Baywatch mode, and towed me back to safety.

  

My and Zoe’s Central American trip wasn’t just about tropical romance. The first half of our trip included adventure! We were hypnotized by the beauty of the Costa Rican jungle. The draw of the waterfalls, the sites of the butterflies, and the sounds of the monkeys in the trees—we were living in the moment! What could be better? One with Mother Nature! We painted each other in volcanic mud masks, zip-lined through the rainforest (and I’m terrified of heights!), hung upside down repelling cliffs, and then there was the horseback riding where Zoe insisted her horse didn’t like her so she held up the entire tour group (over fifty people!) until she found a horse that didn’t want to buck her off. With the horseback riding behind us, we ended our jungle adventure tour with yet another one of my death defying water moments.

This time it wasn’t the ocean that would try and take my life, it was the Congo-like river. The tour group was forced to sign a waiver written in Spanish before this final leg of our journey. I can’t read Spanish but I’m pretty confident we signed our life away that day and couldn’t hold the jungle adventure tour company liable if someone became impaled or drowned going down the river.
The rapids were strong! I didn’t want to look like a chicken if I didn’t complete this last leg of our adventure—I had come so far! I felt like Indiana Jones. I psyched myself up and placed one leg and then the other into the inner tube, plopped down, and held on for dear life as the rapids pushed me down the river with what felt like lightening speed. I think I almost peed my pants. You know what, I probably did (a little). I should have been in a raft for crying out loud! Not a damn tube! This was white water rafting not some lazy river ride you find at your local water park. That damn tube became almost the death of me and also became my lifeline back to civilization. I lost sight of Zoe. I was scared. The rapids were becoming increasingly stronger the further down stream I went. When I went over the third waterfall my tube flipped over and I was stuck.

I imagined that this was what it felt to be inside a washing machine. I had a pocket of air I had to struggle to breathe into all the while the pressure of the waterfall was making it nearly impossible for me to turn my tube the right side up. Eventually, after what felt like hours, I managed to break free from the waterfall’s grasp and got dragged along the bedrock, but my tube was still upside down. I grabbed onto a passing stick and held on tight with one hand and used my other hand and feet to flip the tube over. I flopped back into the tube, bloody knees and all. I was exhausted. But hey, it could have been worse. One poor tourist went over a waterfall he wasn’t supposed to go down and when the tour guys found him a half hour later he had bumps, bruises, and blood from head to toe. Imagine if he had understood what that waiver read?

By now, Zoe and I had had our fair share of adrenalin-packed adventures in the Costa Rican forest. We decided that we should keep the rest of our trip safe and just beach it.

It was refreshing to have my best gal next to me on the beach sipping rum out of coconuts from sunup to sundown. I’ll never forget the machete-wielding coconut man on the beach! It was as if he were telepathic. Coconut man could read our mind whenever we needed a refill and was right next to us in the blink of an eye chopping open fresh coconuts with his very scary looking, shiny sword, and topping them off with a lot of booze! Fun times! However, my time with Zoe would be short-lived because Puss had his eye on her the entire trip. Remember, he also works at the hotel.

So once again Zoe left me for Puss for a few hours, leaving me by my lonesome. I decided to take a walk down the beach, where I met Gilberto, a local tour guide. We chatted for about an hour, and when Zoe and her man-of-the-moment finally climbed down from the tree, the four of us decided to have dinner together.

Gilberto and I became a twosome, too. My second night out with Gilberto, we left Zoe and Puss behind for what Gilberto billed as a drive “into the wilderness.” I figured that because he was a tour guide he knew what he was doing, so we drove and drove, and then he pulled his car onto a deserted road off the beaten path by the beach.

We got out of the car and made out under the pale moonlight. What could be more romantic?

Turns out, just about anything. Almost the minute our lips touched, my skin began to itch and burn like crazy. I was covered with ants, and they found me even tastier than Gilberto did!

At least I hope they were ants, and not some rare poisonous tropical insects that will nest in my bloodstream for the next twenty years and manifest in some rare form of malaria.

Gilberto tried to count just how many ant bites I had sustained, but there were so many, he lost track. However, an exotic insect attack was only the beginning of our tropical adventure. As I stood there scratching furiously, we suddenly heard what sounded like a couple of guys walking on the empty beach.

Gilberto immediately clamped his hand over my mouth (my hands were otherwise engaged with the scratching) and whispered to be quiet, as men appearing in the dark on deserted stretches of Costa Rican beach usually come with weapons.

I thought I was going to die. Then again, considering the agony I was experiencing, it might have been a mercy kill.

But there was no beachside shakedown, and no kidnapping for ransom. Gilberto got me back to the hotel safe and sound, albeit a little itchy. Zoe and I succeeded in counting the bites. It turned out there were sixty-four of them. After a good night’s sleep, or as good of a night’s sleep as a person can have while covered with fresh ant bites (thank God for calamine lotion!), I was ready for another round of fun and frolic with my new friend the next night.

This time, I met Gilberto at the end of the mile-long road that led to the hotel exit. The area outside of our hotel was all tropical forest, so I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. He drove us to a small, shack-like dwelling where he rented an ATV from a local. I learned that Costa Rican “businessmen” typically wear more than one hat. Our friendly ATV-rental guy was also the regional pimp, complete with a notebook full of local ladies of the night that he offered for rent by the hour.

We got onto the ATV and Gilberto whisked me away through the dense tropical forest, complete with monkeys in the trees. It was incredible. We saw a herd of 100 cattle pass us by, crossed little streams, and finally arrived at the cutest out-of-the-way bar hidden on the beach where we watched the sunset over the crystal blue ocean.

It was so romantic. Like a postcard—only we were in it!

Next, we hopped back on the ATV to head to Flamingo Beach, a popular tourist attraction because of its beautiful pink sand. This wasn’t another quiet, picture-postcard encounter, though. Unless you like postcards featuring a fat, greasy, and shady-looking American guy standing on a tropical beach.

Turns out, the chubby American was a friend of Gilberto who owned a condo in the area. Because the sun had gone down and we were an hour-and-a-half of dense jungle away from my hotel, it looked like we would be bunking with Fatty for the night.

Of course, what fun is a double date with only one girl? Before we could head for the condo, we had to pick up his friend’s girlfriend.

At least, I thought she was his girlfriend.

We pulled up in front of a ramshackle old motel with a seediness level that was absolutely off the charts. There, to my complete surprise, out walked a very beautiful woman.

It turned out that she wasn’t his actual girlfriend. She was his girlfriend-for-the-night. Sort of like a pizza to go, only much, much hotter. I wondered if Fatty ordered her through the ATV guy’s notebook.

I was a little freaked out. Here I was in a foreign country, in the middle of nowhere, an hour and a half from my hotel, with a man who had just picked up a hooker. This couldn’t possibly be legal. What if we were pulled over? Never mind that—what if they were planning a whole new career for me?

My fears were calmed when we made it to Fatty’s condo for some cocktails (I made mine a triple). We listened to music and just hung out, and the beautiful call girl turned out to be really nice. We all just chilled and I minded my Ps and Qs until Gilberto and I crashed in the spare bedroom and he could drive me back to my hotel in the morning.

The next morning, we watched the sunrise. It was my last Costa Rican sunrise. That was the day I was due to fly out—and for my tropical romance to come to an end.

Gilberto turned what could have been an ordinary trip into a real adventure. Even better, he was totally smitten with me. On one of our last nights, he got down on one knee and fake-proposed to me with a glass ring he bought on the beach. It was so sweet that he actually believed something could happen between us and at the time I thought maybe it was love! I’m always the hopeful romantic…

I blamed it on too much time in the sun and an abundance of cheap rum.

The reality is, you can’t take the jungle out of the boy. Gilberto is a true native who needs his natural habitat to survive. For that matter, so do I! New York City! It’s always fun to look back on that amazing week.

Except the ant bites. Those I could forget.