Costa Rica

1990 -- We only really went to the one place here, and it was in this very protected bay. It was a weird one—one side of it was always wet and rainy, and the other was the side that got the sun and actually looked other than gloomy. Most of the time we were there was spent on the rainy side, for that was where the town was.

My brother and I made friends with the locals, again; one was a boy called Ian from the restaurant we were near to. He had one green and one blue eye, which both of us children found intensely fascinating. I believe that his parents were French immigrants of some sort; at the very least, they spoke French fluently.

One of the bad things of being on that side of the bay is that sores did not heal cleanly—even little ones that we expected to disappear without a trace. To this day I have scars from what were little scratches, but because of the humidity, festered and then became large scars. All of the locals showed evidence of this—ungainly scars on their bodies from what were most probably the smallest of scratches to begin with.

There was a little bridge there, with an underpass at the bottom. Underneath was sectioned off into two parts by a large brick wall. We children got together and put a barrier across one section of it, so that we had a dried patch to play in, and made sure that the water went across into the other part of the bridge. Once that was done, we went up the creek, and got what debris we could find—this included a bed—and put it there. Once, my brother and I got curious and walked as far as we could up the creek, to find that there was an open gutter and sewerage that went into the creek; yet still we played in it. There was also a rather impressive collection of paper pornography that we collected from up the river. It was probably a haunt of men having fun with themselves. When there was a rather spectacular amount of rain, everything under the bridge was swept away -- which was just as well, considering.

On the other side of the bay, there again was a fair amount of rubbish littering the shores. However, there was not the mud and rain and general dreariness of the other side of the bay. We went visiting a naturalised local who was once a yachtie, and spent about a day there before taking off again.

Outside of the mainland, we visited a little island by the name of Christmas Island -- yes, another one. It was very beautiful; we visited the uninhabited side of the island, which was more protected from the sea than the habited. It was a volcanic island, and as such there were many signs of old lava and strange types of soft rock. For a great deal out there was coral, so we had to anchor out aways, and rowed in to see the land. There was a fresh spring of water where we stocked up—very clear, the likes of which I had only ever seen once before, and that was in Turkey.

When we left there, however, we found that we were leaking copious amounts of seawater, and then changed our course from French Guiana to Ecuador. Pampero had succumbed to worms, and the wood was rotting away.