I woke up at 7:30, which is comically late here in Boruca… to the point that Yaneth chuckled at me when I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. The church bell usually rings around 5:30 every morning, and things get rolling not long after that. You have to make an effort to stay asleep anytime after 6:30. I spent a couple hours doing laundry, which isn’t noteworthy besides the fact that it takes a shorter time to dry things in Boruca’s scorching sun than it does in an average dryer. I strolled down to the escuela to check my e-mail, and I found all of the teachers sitting in a circle of desks, apparently in a meeting that I hadn’t been informed about. I asked one of the cleaning ladies about it, and she assured me that certain people didn’t need to be there – the cleaning staff, the cook, and myself. Puzzled but not upset about missing an hour of unintelligible Spanish, I checked my e-mail in the lab. The windows are always closed to prevent theft and bugs, so it’s always hovering somewhere around 95 degrees. Facing a slow connection and an empty water bottle, I call it quits after a while and head home.
After lunch and some quality nothing-time, I decided to make something of the day and head to the waterfalls to take some long-overdue pictures. Camille, a girl from France who’s living in Boruca for a bit and working on a farm outside of town, lives in a rancho palma on the way (I’ll have to get pictures at some point… it’s like a decked out tree house), so I stopped by to see if she wanted to go. I met her waiting for the bus back to Boruca last week, and we have the natural connection of being two of the four people in Boruca who can speak English.
Pictures to go with words, since just words don´t cut when you probrably have Facebook open in another window (I know I do...):
Some pigs that were feeding next to the first waterfall. Not sure where they came from, but it made for a weird picture.
Shot of the second waterfall and the swimming hole it creates. I spent some time jumping off the little ledge that goes up on the right hand side of the photo (to the right of the last rocks that are dark from being wet). The highest I did was about 7 feet… the swimming hole is only about four feet deep, so I didn’t want to test my luck too much. The last time I was there, though, some kids were jumping from about
View from the top of the biggest waterfall, taken from the same spot as the last picture except turned around 180 degrees.
At this point, a group of 15 or so students from Rice University in Texas came down to the waterfalls, and I joined up with the tour they were getting from a few girls who live in Boruca. (It helped my ego that I spoke better Spanish than all but one of them.) They were in Boruca for a week helping to build some rancho palmas outside of town, and this was their one day to do “touristy” stuff. They were all really nice, and once again it was good to rest my mind a bit by speaking English.
We headed down a steep hill to the bottom of the big waterfall.
Picture of the big waterfall. To give you an idea of its size, there are two guys standing just to the right of the top of the waterfall – one in a white shirt, one in black – and the waterfall drops for another five or so feet past the bottom of the picture. I will not be jumping off this one.
We continued further down the slope, and the girls brought us to Boruca’s very own bat cave. I was never all that scared of bats to begin with, but I’ve become completely desensitized to them since moving here. One flies into the house every night, so I usually watch the news with one swooping across my face every ten seconds. Quite harmless. Couldn’t get any pictures of the inside of the cave, as the group was afraid that the flash would cause the bats to all fly outside and eat them. So, if you want to see the bat cave, just let me know when you’ll be flying down to Costa Rica to visit me.
As we were leaving, we found out that the guys at the top of the waterfall were part of a film crew that was shooting a documentary on Boruca. I headed home, did some work for school, then spent an hour lounging with our puppy Dooby on the hammock (PS – that dog loves me).
With the family all out of the house, I was reading quietly in my room when I started to hear drums. There’s always some kind of commotion going on outside of my house, but this was the first time I’d heard live drums. After a few seconds, I start to hear high-pitched yelps. I immediately recognized the yelps from a day I’d spent in the town of Rey Curre a month ago: Diablitos! Every year, Boruca (and on a smaller level, Rey Curre) have a festival called Fiesta de los Diablitos (little devils), where guys dress up like spirits (who represent the Borucans), get really drunk on homemade alcohol, and fight a guy dressed in a bull suit (who represents the invading Spaniards from the 1500’s) for three straight days with little to no sleep. Boruca is known for this fiesta, and I was lucky enough to catch the smaller version of it in Rey Curre in early February (Boruca’s is in December).
As it turns out, some Borucans were putting on a demonstration of the festival for the documentary film crew that was in town. It was on the street, literally ten feet up the path from my backyard. I was one of the first people out, but pretty soon half the town had poured out of their houses and made their way to the fighting. Pictures were tough because of the weird lighting that the film crew used, but I managed to get a few good shots (and stole some from Nick, another American living in Boruca for a couple of months), as well as a video that I’ll try to post at some point. The demonstration went on for about a half hour, and then I went back inside to end my day with some dinner and Family Guy en espanol.
That`s all for now. I`m in Palmar Norte for a day to get some stuff done, and I`m heading back to my amazing hotel to lounge for a while- pool, tropical plants, but most importantly... cable TV with the World Baseball Classic in English! At $15 bucks a night, I can`t complain. Hasta luego.
