Costa Rica Part II (was She's baaaack!!!)

Ok. So, after my friend's second and my first ride, we came home and ate like starving wolf bitches with a dozen pups each. I have no idea what I was eating much of the week, but the food was universally delicious. They seem to eat a lot of pork and beef, tons of fruit, a good amount of veggies, and have some cool desserts. Once they realized we were would eat anything they seemed to get more exotic in the cooking--including a dish made from the flowers of yucca plants. After dinner we caught bugs for the toads on the porch, read a little and fell asleep REALLY early. Like 9pm. I typically go to bed between midnight and 1am--I was in bed asleep by no later than 9:30pm every night, and up about 5-6am each morning. We had a lot of noisy cows, chickens, etc at the hacienda.

Boundaries of inside/outside are very fluid--no screens on the windows, but bars for the critters. The house is a rectangle with a covered porch on three sides, all tiles for the flooring throughout. No rugs except to wipe your boots. The main hall goes front to back, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms set on a square pattern, then a long thin kitchen on one side and eating space on the other. Walls from the kitchen to the outside are honeycombed cinder block, so that they are not solid but open in a lattice pattern. There were ants in the bathroom, which I just got used to brushing off the toilet seat as needed, and I saw a scorpion in the hall the second night. Huge frogs came and hung out on the porch every night and ate bugs, and geckos chirped from inside and outside as they nipped around the walls and caught bugs. Sometimes they would get into a turf war and screech at each other half the night. Very gentle black bees hung out with us whenever we had fresh fruit on the table (three meals a day, just like the rice). No phone, no TV, ceiling fans in the room and low night humidity made it very comfortable. The shower was just one temperature, no hot or cold. We kept a huge bottle of spring water in the hall way on the table and kept water bottles filled and frozen--we always took at least two on every ride. I probably drank 6 big bottles of water a day, plus a lot of really lovely fresh juice. You did NOT walk in the yard at night in sandals, even the night the horses got loose we all went in and got covered shoes before trying to catch them. There were tarantulas in the yard, as well as snakes, scorpions, etc.

In the morning, the cowboy caught and hosed off all the horses (a twice a day thing--before breakfast and then after we rode them). To feed, groom, and tack all the horses were tied by rope halters to trees and branches and left to hang out in the shade. The corral was old wooden boards/posts and barb wire with a deep cinder block trough. We always offered water to the horses before and after every ride plus when we crossed streams and rivers. I have a lot of photos of me sitting on Rosita in a stream because that was always a good time to hand someone my camera and ask for a snap.

The saddles were sort of McClellan/Aussie stock type affairs. I found them comfy once I got the knack of sitting a bit more back on my *** with my leg a bit more in front of me than I do in my own tack. Rosita was narrow as a lathe and very quick, but once I got the hang of being in sync with her and my tack sitting all the trots and canters was quite easy. Rosita and Juliette went in rope hackamores put over their rope halters, and all Rosita had a string tie down as well. I photographed all the tack, and the way the horses were tied to one another, so when I set up the pics on shutterfly I will have a category for horse handling/tack. When we had a spare along it would be tied to the tail of the cowboy's horse.

So. Sorry about the digression there. Back to Tuesday. Tuesday was a wear a lot of sunscreen, bring some with, don't need a bug shirt, just DEET, and ride to the beach sort of day. It was hotter than all get out but there was a good breeze so the lack of shade was not so bad. We also drank a lot and I did a second sunscreening with my 50 halfway through the 5 hour ride. I burned some anyhow. The beach was black sand from the volcanic source of the sand, which was pretty cool. Gorgeous. Saw big crab holes but no crabs, tons of birds again, and of course lots of cattle and horses on the way down and back. Costa Rica has a strong middle class, and a lot of people seem to live pretty well in spite of some differences in typical house size and gizmo amounts. The roads are a mix of nice modern ones and some quite rough dirt/rock roads. We did quite a bit of trotting down rocky roads, easing to the right side so vehicles could ooze past. A lot of the working cow horses had cropped tails to keep them from getting nasty or hung up, depending on the type of work and the amount of bush on the farm where the horse worked.

After a five hour loop to the beach and back to the hacienda, we wolfed down a delicious lunch of something I didn't recognize and then headed off by van to look at two local towns--one was Orotina, where there are sloths and black and white owls living in the center park. We took a peek at them, wandered through the market, and then headed over to Caldera Port for a walk on a long wooden bridge over the estuary. Got great sunset photos!

OK. Off for dinner . . . another installment to come soon!

Eileen Morgan
The Mare's Nest
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