2004-11-13

IMPORTANT NOTES FROM JUSTIN:

I'm running a special sale on my CD for readers of my online diary. Check it out here.

And now, on with the show...

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Costa Rica Day 2, Part 1

We woke up at 5:30 AM to be ready for our guided tour. By tour they meant touristy hell ride. And, by guided they meant that we got to have a guy who shouldn't have been allowed to speak English churning out an endless stream of corny jokes over the mini–bus' PA system.

Our tour guide asked us if we wanted to tale this opportunity to actually touch some coffee beans. This led to us shouting out BEAN TOUCHING over and over as we fondled and groped bean after glorious bean. Oh, the lascivious joys of bean touching!

Turns out that coffee fresh from the source still tastes filthy, and not in the good way.

I have to admit, though, that we did get to see some amazing things. We walked through a cloud forest and got to stand on the rim of the second biggest crater on the planet. The Poas volcano had blown a hole deep into the Earth. A toxic–looking, electric blue lake filled the bottom of the crater.

The volcano wasn't the explosive, fiery kind that we had hoped for. The magma and lava hid beneath the crust of the planet and out of our view, but the underground seismic fiesta farted out steamy blasts of sulfur as a sort of hello world—reminding us that nothing was safe.

The five of us took pictures of one another and entertained ourselves by making fun of the accent of a tour guide to our right. His English was perfect and he had no Hispanic accent at all—which was odd because he was Costa Rican. Yet, he sounded exactly like a gay male muppet dressed as a nun doing a characture of a gay male muppet dressed as a nun. We giggled and did our best impersonations of him—repeatedly—before continuing on.

The vegetation in the surrounding cloud forest seemed to follow a very simple theme. Everything was big and everything was green. I expected things to be green, what with all the forests and chlorophyl and all. But, I had no idea plants could get so big. There was a leaf they called the poor–man's umbrella. Each leaf was from three to six feet in diameter!

Then there were waterfalls and hummingbird viewing areas. These things were OK, but being herded around with a bunch of boring, middle–American tourists in a bus tarnished the experience for us. We aren't the kind of people that like things spoon fed to us.

Back on the tour bus we napped—our heads propped against the bus' tall windows, dreaming dreams of volcanos and gay muppet nuns and a time and place where ultra–organized tour bus McTours would be outlawed forever.


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