When we arrived, the city, the whole city was watching the futbol (soccer) game between Mexico and Costa Rica. People sat in vigil around store window TV’s and shouting could be head throughout the streets as the game progressed. One solid scream of triumph containing the voice of every Costa Rican was heard when Costa Rica won2-1. People ran out of their houses and out of stores to jump up in the air and dance in the street. Horns were honking; people gathered in the streets stopping traffic and sang national pride songs, “Aye, Aye, Aye…Ticos, Ticos!” Such solidarity and pride.

And this is just a part of something much bigger. People are free here to express themselves and it makes me feel free. People sing love songs on the buses, on the streets…and the dancing-wow. The hips of men and women sway together smoothly as their feet tap out the fast beats of Salsa, Meringue, and Cumbia. It’s sexier than I can begin to describe, and it’s totally accepted here. Even eight your old know how to swing their hips to the music.

Naturally I wanted to get into this fun after class, my adult students have been teaching me how to dance. We blast the Latin music and they take turns showing the rigid American how to move sauvecito style. It takes time and a few beers to learn these dances. Americans look like such stiffs on the dance floor when standing next to Latinos. We may have wealth, but most Americans will never manage to dance like this.

I can’t truly describe dancing without describing Costa
Rican fashion. The men dress casual, but the women all wear the tightest clothing. They wear heels with pants that form themselves around the curves of the lower side. Many women wear a top that pulls tight against the chest and ties in the back with spaghetti straps. What I love is that every woman dresses this way. Skinny, short, fat, thin, young, old; it doesn’t matter, you’re showing off everything that you got.

There’s the Costa Rican walk that accompanies this look. They walk with their torso held high and straight, and shoulders rolled back. Their legs move forward in long casual strides while their butt sways back and forth. By American standards, most Costa Rican women would be mistaken for prostitutes, but that’s just the way it is here.

Ok, back to my favorite thing. Dancing. People, young and old, flock to the discos, and they’re so fun. Michelle and I have now traveled to Monteverde and San Jose together. We go to the discos at night and have no problem finding dancing partners for the night. Two weekends ago our dancing partners were Oscar and Julio, rural farmers. Last Friday night we were at our local bar when a group of men asked us to join them at their table. We agreed and as we sat they brought a candle to our table, and one of the men pulled out a guitar and serenaded us with Latin folk songs. Everyone in the bar started to sing along full out and tap rhythms on their tables and glasses.

Last night we first went to a tiny Argentinean tango bar where 70-year-old musicians took turns playing accordions and guitars while belting out songs of love and loss. One of the old passionate goats sang a song to Michelle and I about how sad it was that we were alone, “Que triste, mi pobrecitos estan solo.” Oh God. Then we went to a disco and danced the night away with an Argentinian magician and his friend. While dancing, the magician pulled a red cloth and feathers from his empty hand.

Es una vida loca aquí. Ciao, Laura J

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One evening, during a full moon, Sarah and I put on our headlamps and set off on a night journey. We met on the road and walked down the road with the moon casting a grey-blueish shadow and dimly lighting our way. The full moon cast a silver-blue hue over the tall rainforest trees. You could hear, and almost feel the restlessness that the moon was creating amongst the colonies of insects, animals, and plants of the rainforest. You felt yourself tucked inside its world amongst butterflies curled under leaves, Toucans perched on branches, snakes keeping warm under fallen foliage, alligators lying still in a pond with only their nostrils and eyes peering up at the moon. You weren’t alone in the rainforest-especially on a moonlit night.

As Sarah and I walked down the road in the quiet of the night, few cars passed. We didn’t make our usual stop at the local karaoke tavern, but dept on down the paved small road. This road was deceptive. One minute you felt comfortable walking down it and waving to the country folk in their simple homes, and the next, a Dole Banana truck would pass by you at 80 miles and hour coming so close to you that you felt the breeze it left in its wake. In the eight months that I lived in Sarapiqui, one drunk and two children were hit and killed.

After walking about twenty minutes in the dark, we spotted a dirt road off to the left that led past a hovel of tin roof shacks where illegal Nicaraguan immigrants lived. One time I visited an 8th grade student of mine who lived in one of the shacks. I was taken aback. It’s one thing to see poverty from afar, and have no real connection to it, but another thing to see a child that you know living with so little. When I stepped inside her house to meet her parents, they were sitting on chairs atop a dirt floor. In a separate section of the house were two beds atop the packed dirt floor, one for four children, and another for the parents. They also had a TV blaring in the shack. I watched them watching the TV, and tried to imagine what it must be like to do back-straining work all day, carrying and harvesting one hundred pound bags of bananas and then coming home at night and watching the TV- peering into a world of fancy cars, and big, comfortable houses.

We kept following the dirt road that wound around a hill. We turned off our headlamps because the dim light of the moon was enough to light our path. We reached the top of the hill, which was flat and littered with an old car, a fridge lying on its back with the door flung open, and the foundation of an old house that used to have a phenomenal view. From the top of the hill we could see the rainforest canopy below, the Rio Sarapiqui that snaked through it, the vast, open expanses of cut forest turned into cattle pasture, the points of light from the distant houses in remote regions, the rain forested mountain ridge to the south, and the full moon lighting it all in a phosphorescent glow.

Sarah and I didn’t speak for a time as we stood in awe of the beauty below and above us. The silence was finally broken by the sound of a few local kids coming up the road. They were kids that we knew from our after school program. One boy jumped in the old fridge and pretended that it was a boat that he was rowing out to sea in. Seeing that made me smile, and gave me hope that as long as a child had imagination, was surrounded by the purity of nature, had some rice and beans to eat, and a rusted tin roof overhead, life could be good, and magic could be made by a child playing in a pile of junk on a moonlit hill.

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To get to Bocas Del Toro I took a bus from San Jose, Costa Rica to the border of Panama. From the border I took a local taxi that brought me to a boat launch where boats leave hourly to take tourists and locals out to Bocas Del Toro.

On the boat ride to the islands, we first followed a narrow canal with tropical trees that hung overhead. We passed by the wooden shacks of “campesinos” (country folk). After a half-hour of winding through canals, we left the canal and glided for another half hour over the open ocean to reach Bocas Island, one of many tiny islands in the chain.
When the skiff pulled up to the dock at Bocas Island I noticed a small group of tan-skinned local islanders looking my way. Once I got off the boat and walked passed them I could hear a little hiss, whistling, and “hola macha” (hi, blondie.) As a North American woman this type of thing brings up some conflicting feelings. The feminist in me says, “Shut up you chauvinist pigs,” but the woman in me says, “I’m sexy and someone finally sees it.”

The island life also attracts retired men from North America who build their dream get-aways in the tropics, buy fishing boats, and drink beer from sunrise to sunset. The only problem they seem to encounter in their new dream-life is that on the island their dating pool shrinks to the size of the tiny islands they stand on. If they haven’t found a young, tropical girl to take care of them, they become as pesky as sand fleas to any new woman that comes to the island.

Walking past the island storefronts painted in sunshine yellow, mango orange, lime green, and sea blue, my traveler’s reserve started to melt. I looked around to see which hotels were charming, but affordable. I came across Las Olas, (The Waves) a three story building which was built over the ocean. On the second floor there was a balcony filled with wicker chairs to sit in while you look out at the sailboats anchored out at sea.

It was a very romantic place, which is perfect if you are traveling with a companion, but saddening if you’re traveling alone.

When I went to turn in the key to reception, I noticed that the staff were a group of dark haired, dark eyed, broad shouldered masculine creatures speaking in an unidentifiable foreign tongue. I handed the key to a young man that looked like a Trojan warrior with his broad shoulders, olive-toned skin, and thick brown curls. He winked at me as I turned and walked away. I perked-up in an instant. Romance at least seemed possible, if only in flirtation.

That night I barely slept and thought obsessively about women with families and how I didn’t have one. I even wished for a second that I were sitting in my room watching cable TV with a husband. I imagined that he would turn over in bed, initiate sex, and I would politely say “sorry not tonight hon” as I turned away from him and fantasized about the Trojans running the hotel. However, the thought of passionless companionship still seemed better than the single life where passion is still possible, but companionship often unavailable.

The next day I woke and drank dark, rich coffee as I sat on the balcony and took in the sun sparkling on the ocean. I self-consciously turned my key into yet another handsome man. I asked him where he was from, and he said Israel. He told me in English that he spoke Hebrew and that the group of men and women running the hotel were all from Israel. I found it odd but interesting that I had stumbled across my first community of Israelites on a tiny Panamanian island. They were all so handsome. “Perhaps they really are God’s chosen people,” I pondered.

I set out down the one street of Bocas wearing a long purple, turquoise, and yellow skirt, and a halter top, with my long blonde hair flowing loosely down my back. “Que Linda” (how pretty) some men said softly as I passed by. I was surprised that they noticed me, because in Latin America far sexier women than I display their cleavage as if they were serving the men a full coarse meal on a platter. Latino men are constantly complimenting the eye-catching bright red bloom of tropical women, but to my surprise they equally complimented the far subtler wildflower blossom of the North American woman.

As I walked down the street I heard locals from black Caribbean decent and Latino descent speaking Spanish, English, and Gauri Gauri (the local Creole language of Bocas Del Toro).
To get to the public beach I walked past the main drag, past the grass field that is used for small incoming planes and for local boys as a football field, past the worn-down pastel colored wooden shacks, and past a cemetery with a white washed archway and cross. I reached the white sand beaches where only one other North American couple, and a few local kids were playing in the waves. I jumped into the waves and swam around a bit. After splashing around in the waves a bit, I got out, laid back on a log, and relaxed. A young Caribbean man with black skin, defined muscles, and dread locks was staring out at the ocean just down the beach from me, lingering about. I must have looked like a cliché to him; young single woman traveling alone, and lonely for some young dark surfer. I ignored his attention, and he finally gave up and walked away.

Living here in the tropics, I’ve seen a constant influx of North American women that come here and fulfill their fleeting beach fantasies with young local surfers. It becomes a routine for the local boys. I imagine them showering on a Saturday afternoon, splashing some cologne on, and readying themselves for a night of dancing and sex with yet another starry-eyed tourist. Seeing the routine of it all makes me avoid contact with the tropical beach boys.

I walked back to Las Olas to wash off the sand and salt water. That night I asked the tan-skinned Israeli at reception for an early morning wake up call. “Sure” he said glancing into my eyes. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, a nice moment of casual intimacy. He said goodnight in a soft voice, and I went back to my room alone, thinkng that maybe I wasn’t the only one sleeping in this hotel wishing for the comfort of having someone beside me.
Early the next morning I boarded a skiff with a full load of tourists from North American, Panama, England and Australia. We skipped over the smooth morning ocean toward the mainland, and in silence we said our good-byes to the islands of Bocas Del Toro as they faded behind us.

The only romance that had transpired on Bocas Del Toro was a love affair with the shining turquoise water, the sun warming and caressing my skin as I lie on the beach, and the passion of fantasy with the olive-skinned men in Las Olas, (The Waves).

By Laura Dulin
Laura Dulin is a contributor at Costa Rica Addicts. You can see her personal blog at http://lauradulin.blogspot.com

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