Spiders, Snakes & Reggae: Tales Of The Caribbean

Cahuita village sits neatly on a small rounded headland jutting out into the Caribbean from the lush green jungle, with two very different beaches either side of its centre, Playa Negra and Playa Blanca. As the names would suggest, one consists of black volcanic sand, the other the pristine white sand of tropical paradise, the latter inside the national park. In between the two, rocky deposits of dead coral form a natural barrier.

After a couple of false starts we find some properly tasty Caribbean food, our enjoyment of which is enhanced by the live music of a local character nicknamed the “Latin Hendrix”. We’d actually read about this guy before we got here and he is at least as much fun as his reputation, although the moniker “Hendrix” is a bit misleading given that his repertoire is made up entirely of reggae and calypso.

Sixteen kilometres and a cheap bus ride south of Cahuita is the slightly larger town of Puerto Viejo, which is such an interesting place that we are entranced on our first visit. If Cahuita is where Tico meets Afro Caribbean, then Puerto Viejo is where Rasta meets the surf crowd. Long hanging dreadlocks vie with sun bleached blonds, locals sit beneath the trees while visitors soak up the sun, the men play dominoes while the boys ride the waves. 

Puerto Viejo is just about as cool as you can imagine. Picture the tranquil nature of the typical Afro Caribbean and place it alongside the outlook of a surfing beach bum. The mix is a beautiful one where smiles rule and peace reigns; here it would be as easy to meet new friends as anywhere on Earth, whether it’s by supping booze in its reggae filled everything-is-cool bars or just chillin’ by a tree.

Pride in its history is as evident as the cool vibe itself, with memorials to the first settlers from Jamaica dotted all over town, alongside tributes to those who strove for the good of the community and battled for a better deal for black people. Stories of their time are told on boards in streets and on the walls of bars: the feeling here is that even now, Jamaica is the homeland. Indeed, Puerto Viejo did not exist at all until the original Jamaican settlers, a certain Ferdinand Patterson and his wife Josephine, built the first wooden house by the sea.

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Their son Edwin was to become a man of great local influence, growing the Jamaican expat community, developing Puerto Viejo and establishing its churches. By pure good luck we find ourselves lunching at Tamara, a restaurant now run by descendants of the Pattersons, where the authentic Jamaican food is as delicious as anything we’ve eaten since arriving in Costa Rica over four weeks ago.

Puerto Viejo remained a largely inaccessible outpost until pioneering surfers found their way here in the late 1980s, followed later by backpackers and then by other paradise seekers. Its consequent hedonistic reputation has waned due to the pandemic, and now it is exactly what we’d hoped for from this part of our journey through Costa Rica, matching pretty much precisely our thoughts of what it might be like here.

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Further south along the coast from Puerto Viejo lies Manzanillo, another place with a reputation for paradise beaches and great surfing. The paradise beach bit is definitely true, and though we can’t vouch for the surfing we can say that Manzanillo is very quiet to the point of being short on amenities, when compared to its two neighbours.

We’re chatting outside a ramshackle ticket agent when we first meet the guy known locally as “Boa”, a nickname he apparently earned when as a very small child he would pick up snakes and lizards with his bare hands and bring them home to show his parents. He now has a degree in biology, a qualification in ecotourism and works as a guide around Cahuita. He’s just about as animated and restless as a lizard, too.

“First”, he says, on our night hike, “take a bite of the lemon”.

It is, of course, so sour that we pull faces.

“Now”, says Boa, “peel this bean – we call it miracle bean – then suck all of the pulp off the stone. Next”, he says, when we’re ready, “take another bite of the lemon”.

Fascinatingly, if predictably, the lemon tastes as sweet as an orange. Boa explains that the “miracle bean” is a blocker, blocking off your tastebuds for both sour and bitter and leaving only sweet detectable. This is fine until a bit later when we go to Coco’s Bar and the damned “miracle bean” has made our beer taste like 7-Up!

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Boa though is a brilliant night hike guide, taking us with boyish enthusiasm into a world of insects, snakes, giant grasshoppers, tree frogs, caiman, tarantula and all manner of other nocturnal surprises. We are left thinking how we must walk past a million unseen creatures every time we go out at night. It really is a revelation of a hike.

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Dog tired after a day hosting cruise ship visitors in Limon and then night hiking with us, Boa still finds time to join us for a beer or two and talk us through everything we’ve seen – his love of wildlife and of the world around him is totally infectious as well as impressively well informed. He thumbs through the text books, compares his photographs, promising to share all of his photos via WhatsApp.

As if all this wasn’t enough to endear him to us, he signs off by introducing us to a local tipple – a delicious coconut rum with an almost milky consistency……….

And so we come to the end of this section of our Costa Rica tour, though we’re not finished with the Caribbean just yet, our next journey promises to be a little different as we head northwards up this amazing and beautiful coastline. Somehow we’ve managed to spend seven days in one of the wettest parts of a tropical country and avoid the rain – the only rain we’ve had at all has been overnight, with some glorious hot dry days in between as an unexpected bonus.

The snakes we saw with Boa weren’t our only snake sightings in Cahuita, as a cunningly camouflaged vine snake was pointed out to us in the national park too, on one of our own walks along the trail. 

One night here in Cahuita, as we lay in bed talking about all we’d seen and done today, something was slightly different. It took us a few minutes to realise that the flickering shadow on the ceiling was actually a bat circling our room. 

Ah the joys of the jungle…