“Itchy bights and sea monsters...”

The rational mind has no place inside a heavily bug-bitten body. The brain knows that scratching a plethora of bights will result in only temporary satisfaction at the expense of broken skin and continued itchiness. One careless sunset, taking pictures on the beach was definitely not worth the hours of torment spent trying to ignore the itch on the feet, the legs, the hand, the back. Where had these bights come from? I give in to the temptation and scratch a bight here, a bight there, thinking, okay, just a little bit to feel better and then that’s it. But it doesn’t end; a little scratching becomes like a drug as you need more and more to satisfy the urge. There is no satisfaction. The more I scratch, the more I itch. It’s a never ending feedback loop that drives a person insane. So I continue to itch and scratch until the thin layer of skin between my overactive immune response and my fingernails gives way and the blood starts to flow.

This is the torture that I endure across the Nicoya peninsula, on our way from Santa Teresa and Mal Pais up to Tamarindo. And fortunately enough, we are out of Benedryl, the one remedy to help stop the itch, and when we arrive at our destination, all the pharmacies are closed. I focus all night, trying to distract my mind from the ever-present urge to tear the skin from my body, but the urges always win. So I scratch, and scratch some more, and continue scratching until the morning when the pharmacies open up and obtain the only cure. The urges stop, but the scars still remain.

We left Tamarindo this morning, driving Skay to the Liberia airport for his flight back home to Calgary. It was a great week having some company, and now we still have Nicole with us on our adventure for the next couple of weeks. We dropped the two off at the airport while we continued along the road a couple of kilometres to the Aduana to get our car import permit problem looked after. The last police check stop upon leaving Playa Hermosa had resulted in us not getting a ticket if we promised to get my name added as an additional driver on the permit. So we quickly took care of this, and at no cost to our surprise, and were back at the airport before Skya had departed. We said our goodbyes, and as he got in line for customs we headed back south towards Dominical. Promises of bad roads between Quepos and Dominical from both the Lonely Planet guide and our friend Peter whom had visited the area in the past had us wondering whether we would make our destination before nightfall. We stopped briefly at the crocodile river just before Jaco, and continued on south.

To our delight, we were treated with one of Costa Rica’s newest highways from Quepos all the way to Dominical, and made short work of the trip. With only two small sections of gravel where they were installing new bridges, the rest was prime new blacktop with very little traffic. So we arrived in Dominical just before 5, and quickly found the Spanish school that Nicole had arranged prior to our arrival. While she was checking into the school, Denielle and I went to find a place to stay for the night. We quickly secured a thin-walled room in front of the beach for 20 dollars a night and went to enjoy the last bit of the sunset. This was a great sunset with lots of fun shaped clouds and good colours. One really becomes a sunset connoisseur living on the beach for a few months, and this one was definitely a dandy. Watching the mediocre waves come in for a while I spotted something large further out in the water. Some kind of sea monster for sure, I alerted Denielle and pointed out the general direction and depth in anticipation of seeing the beast surface once again. A few seconds later we saw what appeared to be a large dolphin, or dolphins, arching above the surface. Very cool indeed.

As Nicole would be living with a Spanish family for the week, we decided that we would travel south for the week and return for a week after in Dominical. Our destination would be Cabo Matapalo, on the southern tip of the Osa Peninsula, next to Corcovado national park. This is really the middle of nowhere in the heart of the jungle, and truly a wilderness beach. The waves and surfing promise to be great there as opposed to the tiny closeout waves here at the moment, and we can really live feral for a couple of days with no giant mansions on the beach, and only monkeys and anteaters to share the view with. This is supposed to be one of the last great untouched areas of the country, so we’re really excited to take it in for a while. After that, when the water and food run out, we’ll be heading back north to Dominical, where we can already see that the humidity is approximately 3.6 gazillion times greater than the Nicoya Peninsula we just came from.

Welcome to the jungle.

Tyler.