Costa Rica: A City Girl Braves The Jungle, Almost
By Rachel Tompa

I had been reading and sweating in front of the creaky floor fan in our hotel room, trying with little success to shake off the stupor brought on by the morning’s four hour bus ride. I don’t know when the tarantula showed up. I only know that at some point I looked up from my book to see it crouching motionless over the doorway. There was no missing its furry brown mass against the lurid green wall. I sat clenched on the bed, afraid that any movement on my part would jinx the standoff between us.

I called to Jon that if he wanted to see a tarantula up close, now was his chance. I was proud to hear how nonchalant the words sounded coming out of my mouth. Suddenly, though I hadn’t taken my eyes from its spot on the wall, the tarantula was gone. One of us shrieked like a girl and yelled, “Where is it?!  Where IS it?!” Jon edged toward the door and reported that the tarantula had made its way from the wall to the floor, seemingly by bending the space-time continuum.

The standoff and any pretence at bravery were clearly over. I decided my next best move was to bury my head under a pillow and wait it out. A few minutes and some scuffling noises later, the tarantula was outside, and the door shut and bolted. I haven’t asked what transpired in those moments. I figure there might be some truths a new marriage can’t handle.

I’d like to say that this incident on the first day of our honeymoon in Costa Rica toughened me against any further creepy animal encounters. Maybe it did. A week later when Jon shook a scorpion out of his shirt in another hotel, I was able to calmly watch from my vantage point in the far corner of the room. I was even the one who suggested that he might find a shoe useful for squishing it. At our last hotel a moth the size of my hand scuttled around our table in the dining patio. I could see how beautiful the markings on its dusty brown wings were although I thought I might appreciate them more in a picture. But at night as the walls of our various hotel rooms proved unequal against the steady invasion of moths and giant ants, I might have whimpered, just a bit.

They say that compromise is the key to any good relationship. After several weeks of listening to Jon’s excited chatter about everything we would see in Costa Rica – monkeys, coatis, agoutis, macaws, three-toed sloths, anteaters, turtles, and basilisk lizards – I was starting to realize that we had very different ideas about what our honeymoon would entail. My vision included lounging on a pristine white beach in a comfy chair, trashy novel in one hand and fruity drink in the other. Jon’s vision included regret that we had not brought a machete. No matter, on a two week vacation there would be more than enough time for both beach lounging and jungle exploration.

Our first nature destination was the Rincon de la Vieja national park in the arid northern region of Guanacaste. Volcanoes are the main draw of the park. Jon sold me with promises of natural hot springs and mud baths. Soaking in a hot spring didn’t sound too far from lounging on the beach to me. Maybe there would even be a fruit drink stand near the springs. 

We never made it to hot springs or volcanoes. We had booked three nights at the aforementioned tarantula-infested hotel (in my mind, any number of tarantulas higher than zero qualifies as an infestation), which was right down the road from the park. As soon as we climbed out of the air-conditioned bus into the sweltering dusty heat, we realized that sitting in a steamy hot spring might be all well and good in foggy Northern California, but in this climate would be akin to one of Dante’s outer rings of hell. 

We next attempted to brave the wilds of the Cabo Blanco nature reserve, a privately owned park near Mal Pais at the southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula. On the guide books’ insistence, we’d rented an off-road vehicle. The books also contained encouraging phrases such as, roads in this area impassable in wet season, or this road may ford several rivers, it is impossible to know ahead of time how many. As a naïve urbanite I could not wrap my mind around these sentences. How could a whole area of roads be impassable during an entire half of the year? How did people get around? How could nobody know how many rivers a certain road crossed? Surely modern cartography is more advanced than that. These had to be typos.

I now know that the road to Cabo Blanco fords at least three rivers. At a certain point our vehicle got stuck in a giant patch of mud going up a steep hill and started sliding slowly back to the third river. The brakes were too coated in mud to work.

After we managed to stop the sliding and scraped gobs of mud out of the wheel wells, Jon forbade me to get back in the car while he tried to turn it around. I had a vision of myself chasing the SUV as it rocketed down the hill and capsized into the river. “If you die,” I found myself yelling, “I want to die too!” Jon shot me an exasperated look from behind the wheel and explained that the mud was all on the right wheels, so the less weight on that side, the better. I clutched my muddy water bottle and wished my pre-wedding diet had been a little more successful. Jon inched backwards down the muddy slope that I was convinced would soon be known locally as the widow-maker. Several vivid red, orange and blue butterflies fluttered indifferently at the side of the road.

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