The Old Prof

Horseback Ride

At Moteverde

In costa rica

We left our hotel and climbed into a van for the ride to lake Arenal, Monteverde and the eventual horseback ride.

After a while we noticed the the driver had his rear view mirror slanted for a more frontal than rear view of the women in the seat immediately behind him. I’m pretty sure that if he could have managed it he would have gone for the rearview view too.

they seemed aware and unruffled if not a little amused.

on arriving we got out of the van and walked down the long ramp to the boat. A pretty good sized craft carrying about twenty five people in a covered top but open-sided configuration with side by side seating and a central isle.

The lake and all scenery in sight was as is absolute in Costa Rica, beautiful.

The ride may have taken half an hour. I really don’t know. it was enjoyable so it must have ben fairly short.

When we had unloaded our back packs and seen them to the van that was going to take them to our final destination we continued up the slope to a four-wheel drive jeep like vehicle. Steve got the front seat and kent and I took the back one where we quickly, as soon as we started moving up a very steep, very rutted road, learned to set our backs against the front seat and brace our feet against the spare tire and hang on as the driver chortled at our bouncing around. I began fantasizing about what the Jeep would look like at the end of an inadvertent exit from the road and a journey down 1,500 feet of 60 degree slope. i tried to picture myself still alive and sitting on some remnant of the seat while muttering,”wow, that was some ride”. Then I , as in so many of our “adventures” simply took refuge in fatalism. i thought of last words. “tell em i died game”, was a favorite.

At the top we stopped next to four horses, saddled and ready. I wondered idly how this could go wrong. I mean, when I see rough water now i know that if i were to fall in it I would be unable to stand up and get out before being drowned, no matter how deep it is. Conditioning is, I think, the word.

When Steve and I started this “bucket List” i was only afraid of heights. Now, having done all that rappelling and Zip Lining. plus the white water rafting I am afraid of falling from a great height and drowning after being jounced off a horse on a cliff.

We mounted and being motioned forward by our guide, advertised as an experienced horseman knowledgeable about the local, but looking to be coming up on his 14 birthday and conversant only in Spanish and horse, moved off at a walk. Twice the guide urged the horses into a trot, only to be disappointed as I, making as much progress up and out of the saddle as forward and knowing that eventually I was going to come down somewhere other than that saddle, yelled “whoa!” and pulled my horses head into my lap. The kid learned slowly. The horse got it immediately.

Yet, it was pleasant, except for the downhill part where the slope was about 45 degrees on clay and shale and heavily rutted by ATV’s which is what the locals prefer to horses. After it started raining the roads became slick and at every steep down slope our horses stopped and looked it over and refused to proceed. A little disquieting, but, still, being threatened by the guide, swinging the butt end of a rope, they went on. A couple of times they even decided to run down the trail. i discouraged that pretty strongly. A couple of hours in the rain got so miserable that it got funny. in fact once we got the stirrups lengthened and my toes came awake again, i had a great time. it was mysterious in the mist; we were in clouds and rain, all beautiful and soft. Few things in life are not improved by being seen indistinctly through fog and soft rain. I was riding behind Kent and his horse and can testify to the absolute truth of that statement.

The ride went on and on in that green cloudy beauty. it seemed never-ending. In fact after four hours when the ride did end some of us were so into it that it was only with some difficulty that we got off the horses, and I might add, stood up straight and walked.

Posted by Old Prof at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

piecemeal progression

as i get the time and have the inclination

speaking of which:

Canyoneering in Costa Rica

Canyoneering! A pretty damn mild term for “Ok its only 185 feet to the rocks you can see between your feet, through the dark, wet slats of the platform jutting out over the precipice, there among the swirling water in the midst of the narrow, dark, steep walled canyon covered in elephant ear plants, ferns, 100 foot trees and various vines, blotting out the sunlight and hiding legions of leaf-cutter ants who would gladly carry you off instead”. “You are now hooked up; you cant get hurt; place your weak hand on the rope here, take the rope by your hip in a steady strong grip, turn around lean back in a sitting position with nothing under you but empty space,and drop off the damn platform to your inevitable death or face the contempt of all the old women and young girls who are going to or have already done exactly that, except for the death part.” I think thats pretty much what I heard. it may not be exactly what they said but ….

Pictures of me doing that show “a very serious face”. I am so glad that abject terror shows as serious that I can’t begin to tell you. The crashing, roaring sound of falling water cascading off rocks all the way down added a certain piquancy to the proceedings too . And so resigning myself to my inevitable doom by falling (my number one most disliked method of dying , unless its drowning) I rappelled down the waterfalls, remembering to keep my knees together, kick back and drop rapidly in a manly way down the “new ropes which are a little slicker than old ones and applying pressure may not stop you as quickly as old ones would. Oh, and aim for the center of the whirlpool there about halfway down.”

I was surprised to find that it wasn’t really a whirlpool, but rather just a place where the river was splashing off jutting rocks, and that while you could drop about thirty feet straight down, that the five foot wide basalt chute we were plummeting through , took about a ten foot right turn, letting you drop straight into a couple of very hard impervious pointy but big rocks that must have been accumulating skin all day. I happened to see it coming and kicked out and over and just hit the rocks on the other side. A fortuitous thing. By then a little blood just seemed manly. I was getting into the spirit of the thing! The spirit of the thing was something like “Oh the hell with it. Lets do it. it’ll be a good story if we live.” That is the tag on every one of Steves adventures. This was just another one.

so platform after platform, “hold here, turn backward to the chasm, sit back, go!” I’m proud to say it never lost its terror but that we all did it, young and old, male and female. Clever that. There was by the way just something awe inspiring in looking down between your feet to rock and water 100 plus feet away. I seriously think my fear of heights added a little sauce to the proceedings, for me, if for no one else.

I finally just let it go and slid so fast and so far i got a round of applause.

And by the time we had made the last rappel, After an hour or so of one rappel after another I’m proud to say, I have to tell you… it still scared the hell out of me.

Posted by Old Prof at 02:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Costa Rica

We went to Costa Rica

a preliminary post

When Steve told us we were flying Taca Airlines I thought he was making a bad joke. On the contrary and in fact, the planes were new and fine.

We had a very nice hotel in San Jose. the Hotel Del Oro or someting similar. Very professional, beautiful and well done.

We decided to walk down town and look around. The idea was fine but the execution was something else. i tried to cross a street. Ohhhhh myyyy helllllll. it was more dangerous than white water rafting. if I hadn’t heard my friends screaming at me i would undoubtedly have continued my fat and happy stroll across the intersection into certain death under the wheel or over the hood of various busses and private cars that increased their speed when they sensed I was new in town. I wont drive that fast on the freeway. I’m sure my car wont accelerate from zero to 80 in the few seconds it took them to almost kill me. i wish someone had clocked me on my return sprint back to the curb. nothing but hunters courtesy stopped them from coming up on the side walk to finish me off. Apparently “fair is fair”.

We were up town partly to pick up some equipment we needed for our overnighter in the Cloud Rain Forest alone in an isolated hut in jaguar and boa, eyelash viper and… etc. country. We wanted a knife. When after half an hour or so we couldn’t find a knife Steve approached a police man; well, I guess he was a police man, he had a pistol stuck in his belt over his left hip, When the man didn’t seem to understand Steve made stabbing gestures with his hand. i was trying to step back and disassociate my self from him when the man smiled in an almost amused way and gestured “follow me”. i figured that we might be being led to jail. We followed him for some time and every time we passed another policeman he made amused looking comments to them and continued on. But when after about fifteen minutes we ended up in front of a gun-shop i decided we had just provided him with a welcome break and a good story. You could have outfitted a small guerilla army from that store. Mossburg pump shotguns with pistol handles? In the City? The rats must be hell!

We got our knives. i have never owned a switch blade before. It does give you a certain sense of security. A Jaguar would have to think twice in the face of that gleaming, chinese made, shining thing of beauty. I did throw it halfway across the hotel room trying to get the blade to “flick open” the first time. It proved to take a certain deft fillip to open correctly. Well, you have to expect a glitch or two the first time with anything. And so I was a little annoyed at Kent’s reaction but in all fairness i guess it did almost hit him. But the blade, truly, wasn’t really fully open. And the whole thing, blade and handle, hardly weighs a full pound.

Spanish seems to be a more melodic and poetic language than english. For instance when in the mountains above lake Arenal in Costa Rica a foreman called a heavy equipment operator a “fat assed bastard” for arrogantly, dismissively, holding up traffic on a little dirt mountain road, it didn’t seem offensive at all. While no vote was taken, i think we were all in total agreement. Yet, let my wife say the same thing in English and I have often found it offensive. (It was bound to happen. my wife read this and pointed out that she had never actually called me a fat-assed bastard. Ok, I will give her that, though I regard it as a quibble. It’s not like she wouldn’t have if she had thought of it. People can be so picky)

One evening in Costa Rica, with the “stars shining and the shadows falling”, at a tourist trap in Santa Elena called the Frog Pond we found that there were no more guides. if we wanted to see the hundreds of frogs on display in their multi glass fronted, banana fly ridden, over grown, small ponded, display (you can’t tell the frogs without a guide, you can’t even find them to look at them) cases, we could pay our money and just wander around if we wanted. I enquired about the possibility of just sneaking up on the groups that did have a guide and secretly listening. The teller cum director explained, in a shocked voice, that that was strictly forbidden and impossible. Well, with nothing else to do in a small rural town, we had already walked down main street, we paid our money and sneaked up on a group with a guide. Frankly it was much easier than the “director” had supposed. After all, it was dead dark and thus easy to spot the guides flashlight as he pointed out the otherwise invisible small amphibians hidden under bark and leaf.

We had a great time kibitzing from our hidden position, in the dark, in the back. It was even better when the group from Texas joined up. They were perhaps a little racus, even crude, but great fun. When the guide pointed out that one form of frog did not touch one another during reproduction some one muttered, “how like my own dear wife”. The return volleys got to be better than the guides lecture, which often didn’t rise above, “and now this frog is a little green one which comes out at night, likes water and is small”. I figure “you seen one frog, you seen em all”. None of them seemed to have teeth or be flesh eating after all. By that time in the trip we had come to expect a little more excitement. Now if the frogs had been six feet tall and revealed looking hungrily down on us from the trees, their great saucer eyes gleaming orangely in the moon light, that would have been something else entirely.

When it was all over, as it was, all too soon, and we were back in the curio shop where they sold the tickets and various trash, the guide came up to one of our group and while ‘mad dogging’ him said, “One should not join a group of which one is not a member. it is forbidden.” He received a sweet smile and was told, “I’ll remember that next time I’m in Costa Rica”. It must be a cultural thing because he seemed “taken aback” and paused in some confusion and then “about faced” and marched off.

More later if I get feeling better. I see Dr sully at 3:30. I “May have picked up a little bug”.
Its not all bad. I figure this new delivery system may save me hours a year. it is very efficient.

Posted by Old Prof at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It may not even be the beginning of the end

but its surely the end of the beginning (I wish I had thought of that but Churchill was born earlier)

Today, with even my eyelids sweating, I drove over to school and picked up the courier delivered “Urgent” document from “the down town office”. if it hadn’t been for a very helpful Dean and a Secretary both of which went way out of there way to be helpful I would never have figured this out or gotten the documents on time. in fact i have been helped all along the line by friends and friends of friends. i wonder if it would even have been possible to have begun this process un-aided. (The district has several 80 and 90 plus year old teachers who probably can’t figure out how to get out and just resignedly roll out of bed in the morning and go to work)

Took it, the document, to social security. That office is on De Soto, almost camouflaged by a big tree out front and its location in the midst of various stores. I completely missed the first day I searched. The guard said that, yeah, he had recommend that they cut the tree down so people could find the office but no one listens to him.

i went in with the documents they had requested and taken by surprise somehow found a document i didn’t know I needed, indicating I really was eligible for retirement from the place I had been teaching for 38 years.

I quickly ( ok, they quickly) finalized my application for medicade and medicare. I wandered out of the office in a daze, not believing that just three visits had accomplished that. But those guys were unfailingly polite and competent and kind. Truly. I even complimented the guard as i left.

Both the college Dean and the secretary said I might like to see the Benefits Office. I really didn’t want any more hassle today but…Drove over to the “Benefits Office”

Well, I didn't drive directly to it. I drove into two dead ends before I found the street

it was on didn’t go directly thru to Topanga Canyon. It was educational.

Wandered around the parking lot looking for the name I had been given and settled for something else that turned out to be the name they are doing business under and the building in which they are doing it. Handed in three papers i thought I had had to mail to someone, which handing in Alfredo told me now buys me a 90 day extension to finish up this whole process of retirement and allows me to begin submitting by mail various other documents (which I have already filled out) And I can continue using my regular medical benefits.

It would have been easier to have died in harness.( At least I think so but I guess no one will blog that information from a position of knowledge) it’s still not over but I have bought a little time. To retire, that is. its too late for the other, though we are going to costa Rica and rappelling waterfalls, zip lining the forest canopy and viewing the active volcano right outside our hotel window.

Speaking of which, trip, Steve just called and needed information from my passport. it gave me pause when he asked what my expiration date was.

Posted by Old Prof at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)