Stuck in the Mud

Crooked Tree

After four days of relaxing and talking about the kids, the grand kids, the economy, retirement, health, you-name-it, we dragged our rolling bags through the sand and boarded the 6 am Richie's bus to Belize City.  After so many horrendous taxi rides, I was relieved to be on the bus.

In Belmopan we had a short potty stop, and Verda and I went to find the bathrooms.  Yuck!  Why can't people in the Latino cultures ever keep anything clean?  How hard is that?  This place looked like it hadn't been cleaned in 5 years!  Plus you had to pay to use the toilets.  After that, Verda started saying she didn't want to take any more buses.

When we arrived in Belize City, we would have had to find a bus going to Crooked Tree, figure out how to buy tickets, fight the pushy crowds and endure another two hours on the bus.  Unbeknownst to the rest of us, Ron found a taxi driver who agreed to take us all the way to the Lodge at Crooked Tree for $50 US.  He must have known we were about to have a mutiny.  The car was the typical wreck with no suspension at all, and no a/c of course - at this point we had learned to be grateful if the damn car could make it to our destination.  So off we went.

The driver had indicated that he had been to the Crooked Tree lodge before but when he missed the turnoff, we thought that once again someone had simply told us what we wanted to hear.  Finally we arrived at the causeway out to the village.  In January of this year the floods were so bad they nearly wiped out the causeway.  In fact, we read on Trip Advisor that our hosts had picked up visitors in a boat to transport them to the Lodge during that time.  Creeping along the 2 miles at 0 mph, we finally drove into a small village with multiple trails going off in every direction.  Our driver asked every person, from a middle-aged woman to a 10-year-old boy where the Crooked Tree Lodge was.  Obviously, he had never been to this place before.  Finally we headed down the last set of ruts toward the buildings in the distance.  About 100 yards short of the main lodge, the road turned to mud and puddles.  The driver was reluctant to drive into it since the car was dragging bottom even on the dry parts.  We told him to stay put and we would walk ahead and see what's what.  Sure enough, we were welcomed by Mick who quickly went to help carry our luggage from the car up to the lodge.  Even the crocodile in the small pond by the bridge seemed to smile and say "welcome to Crooked Tree!"

More to follow.

Searching for a Sloth

You can be bitten by the travel bug in ways you never expected.  In my case, it was a conversation I had with my friend in Virginia.  She told me that her grand-daughter had spent three weeks in Costa Rica doing some environmental work with her university.  Dani told her grandmother about the beauty of Costa Rica, how marvelous the people are, how natural and healthy and inexpensive the food is, not to mention the coffee, and how little money it takes to visit there.  My friend sort of casually said, "We should go."

That's all it took.  Before you could snap your fingers, we had set a date, and were looking for flights.  Because both our husbands had birthdays in October, we decided we could more easily convince them to go if we said it was a birthday trip.  I don't remember now what sites I checked, but I am sure we bought the cheapest tickets we could find.  Although the best travel site on the web, Kayak, started doing business in 2004, I doubt that I knew about them when we were planning our Costa Rica trip.

I can't recall the details of planning the trip, but I do remember that both pairs of travelers bought travel books and began reading about where we wanted to go and what were our "must see" destinations.  I have read many different guide books, mainly from the library, but my favorite is Frommer's.  From our separate research we agreed that we wanted to visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the Arenal National Park, and Manuel Antonio national Park.  The Virginians wanted to see as many species of birds and reptiles as possible and, top of the list was seeing a three-toed sloth in the wild.  I was both excited and afraid to sleep in the shadow of an active volcano.

So, on October 29, 2005 we set off on our first trip to Central America.