George Ellard

Why Red is the International Symbol of Danger

By George Ellard ⋅ March 14, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

On my second visit to Costa Rica my group and I decided we would seek out the land less travelled by most tourists and go to the country’s east coast to visit the hippie/rasta paradise in Puerto Viejo (Province of Limon). Luckily for us we were travelling with a native Costa Rican senorita which as it turns out was a blessing in disguise as this side of the country is quite a bit less tourist friendly and can be pretty intimidating for the first timer.
This portion of our trip actually started in Guanacaste, which for anyone who has a vague understanding of Costa Rican geography knows is on the Pacific coast. So yes for the first time in my life I could say that I went across an entire continent in one day!! (the drive across the country is another interesting story but I’ll save that one for a later date)
Our first stop on the Carribean coast was in the capital city of Limon. Limon the city is… well… just plain ugly (I don’t know if I’ve ever said that about anything in Costa Rica before?). Strangely enough I was told that this port city, where you see thousands of discarded empty freight boxes from ships and trucks as you enter and the downtown looks like something out of a Spike Lee joint (that means movie or film in Spike’s vernacular, but yes there was plenty of those in Limon and elsewhere on this coast as well), is where many of the large Cruise ships dock when coming to Costa Rica (note to Carnival, Royal Carribean and Princess cruiselines: find another place in Costa Rica to take people who are spending absurd amounts of money on their vacations).
As I entered the city and got to what they call the downtown area, I was quietly thinking to myself that this place could best be described as a cross between perhaps downtown Detroit at the height of American urban blight of the 1980’s and what I would assume you would find in many Sub-Saharan African metropolises: filth, extreme poverty, drugs and suspicious looking characters.
Apparently, the reservations we had made at a hotel here in Limon were no longer valid when we arrived and the clerk decided to try and put us up in some less affordable accomadations. Given how enamoured we were with our first impression of Limon we decided we would forego this portion of the trip and begin making our way south along the coast towards Puerto Viejo in the hopes of finding something a little better and cheaper. Unfortunately for us it was pitch black now as our journey, which had started at 7am on the Pacific coast, was now entering its twelfth hour.
Also unfortunate was that our Costa Rican connection was not aware that places on this side of the country close a little earlier than expected. We found ourselves driving along this coastal jungle road (yes that’s right coastal and jungle at the same time) in the darkness and looking for a single light outside of our car’s headlights. A light that would indicate to us that there was human life forms in existence here and we would not have to pull over somewhere, lock the doors and try to have four people get some sleep in a compact car. It’s not that the thought of spending a night in the middle of nowhere in the jungle or on the beach disturbed any of us as we considered ourselves adventurous people. But the bottom line remained that we had just spent the better part of twelve hours in a car driving and we were all looking forward to the prospects a nice bed would offer us.
After numerous stops in sleepy towns like Cahuita to ask if anyone had room at the inn for us, finally, as if by divine intervention, we found our single solitary night glowing in the distance on this jungle highway. We quickly pulled over and found a middle aged French gentlemen with some quaint little cabins for us to rent. After some short haggeling with the nice man and some mechanic work on the car (for some reason the car’s lights wouldn’t turn off so we disconnected the battery), we turned in for the evening a slept like newborns.
We woke up early and made our way to Puerto Viejo, a little coastal town famous for its combination of great surfing and its aforementioned Hippy and Rastafarian culture. We checked in to the Pimp Suite at Rocking J’s (I did not make either of those names up, check it out for yourself: http://rockingjs.com/spots_pimp.php), and noticed that the pimps that would use this suite would have to have some pretty ugly women who obviously were not paying up. But what can you expect at a place that rents hammocks for six bucks a night.
Our first point of business was a trip to the nearest beach and maybe a nice dip in the Atlantic Ocean after swimming in the Pacific two days previous to this. This novelty soon wore off as I noticed the type of water on this coast is not quite as friendly to swim in as on the opposite side of the country. As I walked along the beach I noticed a red flag stuck in the sand and that the only people that were swimming weren’t actually swimming. They were surfing.
The beach was not empty by any stretch of the imagination but very few people were going any further in the water than ankle deep. As my best friend and I left our girlfriends on the beach to check out the water we saw that it was perhaps not the temperature that was keeping people away, the waves must have been conservatively somewhere close to twenty feet high. If it was the height only that was intimidating I could live with that but these waves were ferocious and powerful. My friend and I decided to pet our individual manly egos and we ventured out further little by little. Soon we were unvoluntarily quite a ways out and my friend made a comment that now was the best time to head back closer to shore. As I pondered that momentarily, I was almost immediately crushed by a massive menacing wave and my body went limp in the water. Saying that I was thrown around like a rag doll would not do justice to the feeling of helplessness I had at that moment. After swallowing a gallon of salt water I was thrown back up to the surface and realized that I was in trouble. No amount of swimming was going to get me back to shore but I struggled against the current relentlessly anyway. I looked to my friend who was only a few feet away but standing in waist deep water and yelling brilliant pieces of advice like “go to the bottom”. Believing he was thinking straighter than me in my panicked state I tried and soon he was more than a few feet away from me as I was pushed further away from shore.
As the fatigue set in and I gasped for breath and struggled to keep my head above water, I can honestly say that I began to say my prayers. My family’s faces began to flash before my eyes and I began to ask God for forgiveness and thought only that I knew my life was now in his hands. I guess in this life I will never know if it was divine intervention or just shear dumb luck but one thing I can say with certainty was that as my body began to tire and I said what I thought then was my last prayer, almost in the same instant I was pushed forward by another mammoth wave and all of a sudden I was standing in waist high water again gasping for my breath looking at my best friend who told me reassuringly “I was waiting another 15 seconds before coming in after you”.
We walked back along the shore to our girlfriends partially in disbelief at what had almost happened. We past the lifeguard on the beach who had apparently also been watching this all unfold and had a wry smile on his, as if to say “you were pretty lucky there dooffus.”
Beside where the lifeguard was standing was the red flag in the sand… we looked at eachother dumbfounded and thought: That’s what that means!!