Cahuita: days on the beach, nights in mosquito netting

This weekend, five volunteers and I went to the quiet Caribbean town of Cahuita- home of quiet beaches, the Aviarios Sloth Sanctuary, and not much else. But don't let this description fool you into thinking it was a dull weekend, the weather was beautiful and sunny both days, and I finally got the perfectly uninterrupted beach day I've been hoping for for weeks.

Catch of the day: a local fisherman wheels his bounty to market.

The bus ride there was another standing-room-only affair, but I'm more than used to this by now. It just makes sinking onto my lumpy hostel mattress seem even sweeter after those six or seven hours on the road. Our hostel was called Cabinas Atlantic Surf, run by Califonia native Javier and his Tica wife Wendy, both of whom are extremely friendly and accommodating. Their guestbook was filled with enthusiastic comments and letters from past guests, including one Canadian traveler who apparently sent them a bottle of wine as a thank you for "helping me when I fell down and knocked out my teeth." You can't make this stuff up.

My mosquito tent- I wish I had one of these every night.

My weekend thankfully did not include any such mishaps, just lazy days on the beach and a night (or I should say an evening, as I was still in bed by 9:30) out on the town. The beach in Cahuita is very narrow, since it is a wilderness beach. The sand backs right up to the forest, and during high tide there is usually only 10 feet or so of shoreline. The beach is part of a national park run by the people of Cahuita, so they ask for a small donation before you enter the park, and there is always a guard in place to make sure people swim in the assigned areas and don't bother the coral reef (one of only two living reefs in the entire country).

I didn't get to see the reef, since a brief morning rain shower thwarted my Sunday snorkeling plans. But I plan to try again in Manzanillo this weekend. The water was great for swimming, and I got to see a live sand dollar, which is a very strange animal. In life, they are brown and have millions of tiny hairlike "feet" on the bottom. If you watch closely, you can even see them breathe.

The beach at sunrise (on a very cloudy morning).

My other big animal sightings came in the form of two different kinds of monkeys. When Morgan and I got up early to see the sunrise over the ocean, we saw four or five white-faced Capucin monkeys in a tree. When I pointed them out to a fellow sunrise watcher, he seemed unenthusiastic, to say the least. "Yeah, they're cute, but they'll steal your iPod," he cautioned. Duly noted.

Adorable primate, or petty thief?

The second monkey sighting was on the beach later that day, when we followed the sound of howler monkeys into the forest and saw several of them hanging around in the trees. They had woken us up that morning with their howling-- even just a few monkeys can create quite a cacophony.

 But I didn't come to Cahuita to see monkeys- I  was there to see sloths! The sloth sanctuary was only 10km from our hostel, so we decided to take a taxi there. Unfortunately, there were none to be found. We enlisted the help of a friendly drug dealer (everyone in Cahuita will try to sell you either marijuana or a fish, maybe both), and inadvertently started a contest between him and another not-so-friendly drug dealer over who could find us a cab the quickest. The not-so-friendly won the race, and came down the street shouting that he had found us a ride. His jeans and dirty denim shirt were soaked with sweat, and his eyes were rolling around sightlessly in their sockets, probably because of the half-empty bottle of vodka he was clutching. I thought there was no way I was going to take any ride that this guy found me. Until a tiny woman pulled up in a surprisingly clean silver SVU. I figured the three of us could take her in a fight, so we climbed into her car and agreed to pay her $10 for the ride. I don't know who this woman was, but there were at least four cheap bottles of booze (in varying states of emptiness) rolling around on floor of the car as she sped along the highway, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel along with the beat of the merengue on the radio. The drive turned out to be surprisingly uneventful, and we were at Aviarios within 20 minutes.


And that is a story for another post (you didn't think I was going to give up the sloths that easily, did you?) Until next time...

"I can hardly stand the suspense!"