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I remember a tropical tableau like scenes from an old South Seas adventure movie. Sultry purple nights in the open-air bar of a waterfront hotel, sipping rum with shady characters, watching palm fronds sway in the moonlight and listening to the raucous hoots of howler monkeys echo across the bay. Through the smokey haze I see Houston Bill playing poker at a table strewn with empty beer bottles. He gives the parrot on his shoulder a lighted cigarette to puff on and the other players let go with belly-laughs.  In the stillness of the wee hours it is only me and the bartender and one last shot of rum before I collapse naked in my sweat-soaked bed. This is how my stay passed like a dream at the Miramar Hotel in Golfito, Costa Rica. I wanted to hear Sam to play it again, but unfortunately there was no piano in the bar. Golfito is one of those strange little towns at the remote ends of the earth, unsophisticated and yet worldly in surprising ways. It used to be a banana town, but United Fruit Company pulled out in the 1980s, leaving the residents to fend for themselves in eco-tourism, fishing and faltering retail businesses. Some left for the capital city of San Jose and those who remained tightened their belts and hoped for better times. A movie was filmed there in the 90s and a cruise ship appeared once in awhile, but the better times didn't last long. A few turned to marijuana farming to stay afloat economically and this resulted in a raid by helicopters manned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Land swindles were commonplace. Americans thought they bought into large tracts of property to be subdivided into individual homesteads only to discover they owned no land, only shares in a land company whose president could sell out at any time without their permission. The municipal government of Golfito, desperate to replace falling revenues, condemned privately-owned property under the imminent domain provision of the law. But none of that mattered to me. I wasn't looking to buy land, I was there to soak up the tropical ambience and chill out from a hectic year. After reading up on the area, my only worry was the dangerous wildlife that inhabited the rainforest -- crocodiles, jungle cats, venomous snakes and frogs and insects. A friend who once lived in a remote section of the Golfo Dulce gave me this advice: "Stay on the beach. In the bush everything tries to eat or poison you. And don't go swimming in the ocean. It's full of sharks." What was a nature lover like me to do? If I took my friend's advice, I would be confined to drinking in the bars of Golfito. So I decided in advance to do both - drinking and risking the bite that might last forever. If I did the two things simultaneously, I might be numb enough not to feel the bite. After all, you only live once.

A view of the Little Gulf from the upslope "suburbs" of Golfito. Residents get their drinking water from small streams that flow out of the mountains.   A view of the Little Gulf from the mountains above Golfito. At far right is the outlet channel into the Golfo Dulce with the Osa peninsula in the distance.

"It crashed," he said without elaborating.

That gave me a lot of confidence, along with the realization that the DC-3 was probably built long before I was born. After the short flight, the plane began to circle what looked like a golf course. As it turned out, the landing strip actually was in the middle of a golf course.

I got my first glimpse of Golfito from the first Volvo taxi I had ever seen. It was a laid back town with a waterfront of ramshackle buildings erected on stilts. The November air was pungent and sweaty hot. The hills above town were carpeted with the luxuriant green of the dense tropical rainforest. The real tropics at last!
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Downtown Golfito with a sign advertising Imperial, my favorite Costa Rican beer.

After the first-class taxi ride, I was perversely pleased by the Miramar Hotel. The fan in my room moved slower than the mosquitos. The light bulb in the bathroom was so dim it couldn't have been more than 5 watts (I almost needed my cigarette lighter to see if it was on.) No hot water, but only a masochist could want that in the sweltering heat. When I saw the open-air bar, I knew the hotel was exactly what I wanted. The bar overlooked the Little Gulf and an uninhabited peninsula across the water. A handful of yachts were anchored in front of the bar. I sat down and ordered a "ron" (rum) from the pretty dark-skinned waitress. She was from Bluefields, Nicaragua, and couldn't believe I had actually heard of her home town. I told her I had once grown the type of banana that was named after the town because it was hybridized there. The rum was velvety smooth and I immediately fell into a reverie staring at the panoramic view of the Little Gulf. It was a tropical fantasy come to life. The owner of the Miramar Hotel was Houston Bill, an American ex-pat who turned out to be one of those unforgettable characters normally found only in fiction books. At least once a week he lost his temper and fired the maid or the cook or the bartender only to rehire them the next day, hung over and repentant. He complained endlessly about the difficulties involved in running a small hotel in the middle of nowhere, but I never saw a man embrace his "bad luck" with so much gusto. He also had a warped sense of humor. After watching me swim in front of the hotel, he smiled puckishly one day and warned me that the water was teeming with barracuda.

“Then I would have missed seeing this look on your face.”

During a monsoon one night, Houston Bill assured me it was the dry season, ignoring the two inches of flood water pouring across the bar floor. When the hotel electricity went off, he borrowed a flashlight from me to bypass the main fuse box with a piece of copper wire.

"Don't you have a spare fuse?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was crazy. "Where the hell do you think we are? They don't sell stuff like that out here in the boondocks."
When I reminded him that someone could get electrocuted if a short circuit occurred, he frowned and said: "You worry too much."
His favorite story was about the time a maid screamed when a large snake crawled out of a hole in the wall of a room she was cleaning. "It wasn't poisonous," he explained. "You're not afraid of snakes, are you?"

"I'd rather not sleep with one," I replied.

"They eat rats."

"I wouldn't put that in your brochure if I were you."

"Brochure? You're a very funny man."
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Through a friend who owned a boat, Houston Bill arranged an excursion for me to the upper reaches of the Golfo Dulce. The panga (boat) captain was a thirtyish American with one glass eye and a gorgeous young Tica wife. We stopped briefly not far outside the inlet channel for the captain to don SCUBA gear and check his un-buoyed lobster traps. They were empty -- probably robbed by desperate locals, he said. Half way up the big gulf I was sitting on a hatch when the panga engine exploded, scalding my back with hot radiator water. The captain cursed a blue streak and then apologized. He worked on the engine for an hour or so, filled the radiator with sea water and got us underway again. He grumbled that the salt water might damage the engine and cost him a lot of money. The captain made up for it later. At a particularly beautiful cove I asked him to stop and he edged the boat close enough for me to wade to shore. We agreed to meet at his friend's homestead about a mile down the beach. After exploring the rainforest around an empty bush house, I watched a Tico man drying cacao (chocolate) beans on a straw mat in the sun. Back at the beach I was dying of thirst, having forgotten to bring a beer with me. Then I noticed the captain swimming toward me. He held an ice cold bottle of beer out of the lukewarm water while doing a backstroke. "Now this is what I call service," I applauded.

Cruising up the Golfo Dulce on the jinxed panga.

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His friend's place was a rustic clapboard house with a well-landscaped yard carved out of the rainforest. There was even a mowed lawn adjacent to the beach. We sat on the porch drinking beer and swapping stories for a couple hours. Later the friend and his wife walked me around the property. They grew cacao and vanilla orchids and I pretended not to notice the marijuana plants. The fleshy white pulp around the cacao beans were as sweet as candy, which is exactly what the local children used it for when they couldn't afford the manufactured variety.

On the return trip to Golfito the boat engine broke down again. The captain asked me if I was jinxed or something and quickly went to work. By that time I didn't care if we were stranded. The beach was only a short swim away and I was drifting in a pleasant groove. I stretched out on the deck and stared at the clear blue sky, sipping one of the last beers.

A few hours later Houston Bill was waiting for us when we pulled in front of the hotel just before sunset.

"How was the trip?" he asked.

"Great," I said.

"Screwed," the captain muttered.
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The view from El Picnic, a dance-hall bar in the hills above Golfito.

I gave him a bonus for the trip, hoping it would help with the cost of repairs, but he used the money to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. The prevalent attitude seemed to be live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. I kept hearing about a placed called El Picnic. One day I flagged down a taxi passing the hotel (they had no radios) and told the driver to take me there, expecting to find a picnic area. El Picnic turned out to be an dance cantina in the hills above town. It was morning and the place was deserted, but I noticed debris from the previous night: broken glass on the dance floor. I bought a beer from the bored bartender and took it to the al fresco balcony where I was treated to a sweeping view of the two gulfs and the Osa peninsula far in the distance. That afternoon I wandered around town doing a cantina crawl and I discovered the jail. I stood on tiptoes to peer through the barred window and saw three prisoners with their shirts off. The cell looked like a sweat box. An old man noticed me looking and ambled up behind me. "Looks pretty hot in there," I said. "Not so bad," he said. "Have you been locked up?" He smiled. "Many times." Back at the Miramar Hotel Houston Bill was feeling no pain and waxing frenetic with his second favorite story. When he bought the hotel a few years earlier, he had a problem with prostitutes. The customer would rent a room upstairs and the hooker would sneak up when no one was looking. Houston Bill finally got tired of it and removed the doors from the upstairs rooms "so they couldn't have any privacy."

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"How can you rent the rooms without doors?" I asked.

"I don't rent them."

"Isn't that bad for business?"

"I don't want that kind of business," he emphasized.

A sexual Puritan in the backwater tropics! And me with dashed hopes of sneaking a sweet young thing into my room for a night of unbridled passion. The situation was too cruel to contemplate.

I always left my passport in my room so I wouldn't lose it. One night I went downtown to drink and staggered into a uniformed young man who was armed with a rifle. He was a member of "La Guardia Civil Rural," the rural police, and he was not a happy camper at this late hour. In Spanish he demanded to see my passport. In my bad Spanish I tried to tell him it was at the hotel. He wasn't buying it and my thoughts returned to the jail cell I had seen. Finally, for no apparent reason, he relented and let me go. From that point on I carried my passport with me wherever I went.

Houston Bill didn't invite me when he and his wife drove to the Osa peninsula, but I wouldn't have gone anyway. I had heard that the rough dirt road was impassable in many places during heavy rain which could happen at any time. In the old days incorrigible criminals were banished to the Osa peninsula where almost all of them died from snake bite, fever or starvation. The trackless interior was now the center of illegal gold mining by men armed to the teeth and willing to kill anyone who bothered them.

Houston Bill returned from Osa covered in mud and spouting wild stories about the adventure. Judging from his enthusiasm, I suspected that some of the stories might even have been true, but I could never tell for sure with a yarn-spinner like him.

On my last day in Golfito I switched to soda to have a clear head for the flight back to San Jose. I had scrupulously avoided the hotel tap water after Houston Bill informed me that it came from a stream that flowed through the upper "suburbs" of town. As I waited to catch a taxi to the airport, I noticed a few dark flakes in the bottom of my soda bottle. I thought it was fruit pulp and didn't worry about it.

But on the flight to San Jose I was doubled over with intense cramps. I spent most of the day in the bathroom of my hotel room, wishing I had stuck to beer.

To contact Bill Click Here
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The poison dart frog is common in Golfito. When handled, the frog secretes a toxic substance that can kill if it gets into a cut or the handler touches his mouth. The bushmaster is an aggressive and highly venomous snake that can grow up to 13 feet long, making it the largest pit viper in the world. Although it is seldom found in towns, preferring the rainforest habitat, its bite can kill a person in a few hours if he doesn't get a shot of anti-venom. Marguays are much smaller then jaguars and some people keep them as pets. Ocelots and other wild cats are also found in the rainforests near Golfito.

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