World of Good: Hidden Jungle Beach House

Puerto Viejo, COSTA RICA
Feb.10-16, 2015

I'm still not in the jungle, but, apparently jungle and rainforest are used interchangeably by us commoners who don't always know better.

They say that like attracts like. After the sojourn in the mountains, I landed down on the Caribbean coast at the Hidden Jungle Beach House.

Puerto Viejo is a bit of a backpacker ghetto which attracts the young backpackers, families, young couples, older couples who were probably once young backpackers, and apparently solo women travellers. It is a colourful array of coffee shops and restaurants run by locals and expats from all over the world, surf stands on the beach manned by local Rastafarians, artist shops, tourist shops with your standard beach tourist-wear the same around the world, and jungle tour operations with big modern posters and banners draped around the shop.

This part of Costa Rica is different - a creole flavour with roots from Caribbean migrant workers who came over as cheap labour during the banana boom.

The Snack Shack (Jenny's photo)

(Jenny's photo)

The Hidden Jungle Beach House is about a three minute walk just outside of the town of Puerto Viejo, 50 metres up from the ocean - you can't hear the town raucous, but you can hear the waves. And the howler monkeys.

I'm using AirBnB to find budget places to stay - a recent tip from a friend at work. It's similar to vrbo, but could be anything from a private room in someone's house (with the owner there too), to a separate dwelling (like my casita in the Central Valley), B&B or small motel. You get a real sense of an advertised place from the reviews previous users have posted. The Hidden Jungle Beach House is a three-storey dwelling with the owner, an American woman from the southern States named Lisa, living on the top floor, four rooms for rent on the second floor, and an open-air shared kitchen on the main floor. I liken it to a "hostel for adults", ie. with grown-ups and private rooms.

The resident cat liked watching my iPad as I typed -
nice invention these two-way iThingy cameras

The back yard resident (for a day) ridiculously cute sloth
with baby

I met Jenny (from Sweden) and Marie-Soleil (from Quebec) my first evening at the Jungle Beach House, both near my age and traveling solo. For whatever reason, the Jungle Beach House attracted each of us and gave us exactly what we were looking for: our own privacy, but also the company of someone else also beating down a new path. Later on, we met Joanna (from Italy) while in town, and we became a force of four.

If you look at our human make-up, we are biological, electrical, consciousness/abstract, and a mesh of stories bridging one unit of time to the next. In school, I learned that a standard story is made up of a protagonist and antagonist(s), sometimes surrounded with other characters, moving through a plot situation which eventually climaxes and reaches a resolve, with the protagonist having undergone some sort of change. When you come across someone else's story which has one or more of those essecntial pieces with which you can find a connection or relate, it's like you've just found somebody who's on your side. Maybe it goes back to being a caveman, and learning that finding a common ground between two strangers removes that fear of the unknown, and therefore means one won't kill the other...

Stories were the docile portion of the week. We used the shared kitchen to make feasts together most evenings, Jenny perfecting smashed plantains while Marie-Soleil and I played variations on the guacamole theme. I made my first ever banana pancakes - bananas, eggs and cinnamon, that's it! In addition, my ribs and knees hurt from surfing, my need-to-be-doing-something muscles hurt from sitting on the beach, and my cheeks hurt from laughing.