Abercam Pool Adventures

One of my favorite features of the Abercam resort over the past two months has been it’s delightful pool area and open air cantina.

Guests of the resort have 24 hour access to the well-maintained, delicately heated pool. Depending on their preference, co-owner Tim Abernathy will adjust the temperature up or down. Foreigners like the water warmer, Ticos prefer it tepid or even chilly.

In the afternoon and evening hours, all enjoy free drinks at the bar. Abercam’s rum punch is the most frequently requested drink followed closely by Imperial beer.

Most visitors are between the ages of thirty and fifty, with well-planned active vacations. They indulge themselves in moderation at the bar and engage the poolside daily.

Those who do not wish to stay overnight may enjoy a noon to dusk pool pass for about $10. This includes towel service and a single drink from the bar. Locals, including many expatriate Americans, take advantage of this option.

Costa Rican vlogger Michael Skofield and his partner D’Angelo frequently bring friends up for an evening. Every other week, a group of men from nearby San Ramon visit, numbering from three to seven depending on their availability.

The machismo of Costa Rican men is more subdued than in other Latin-Catholic countries. There is an easy-going appreciation for the mechanics of sex and the body and a feeling that these pleasures are universal regardless of their object.

As a result, many Ticos are hetero-flexible or bisexual. They are reluctant to identify themselves as openly gay. Many have children and all have varying degrees of accountability to their wives and families.

Venues like Abercam are more important in this cultural climate. Men from locations where gay communities are more public and ubiquitous tend to lead skinny dipping and casual consenting touch. In return, the Ticos provide dining and entertainment tips and conversation in Spanish.

My favorite days at the pool were those rare hot and dry afternoons when Arenal and it’s plumes of sulphurous smoke were visible in the distance.

My favorite nights were those between guests with hosts Abernathy and Wayne Campbell playing Carly Simon and the Rolling Stones on a boombox and sharing anecdotes about their experience of gay life in Florida during the late seventies and early eighties.

Adventure in the Old House and Old House Cooking

The house where I am staying is referrred to as The Old House as it was the first building on the Abercam property only ten years ago.

Tim Abernathy and Wayne Campbell, my hosts, stayed here for two years during the construction of their four villas and their own lodging, located in the heart of the resort above the open air bar.

The Old House is constucted of sturdy rainforest woods. Slats of a dry, heavily knotted cedar-like wood are layed front to back to create walls. The roof is made from black cane, covered on top by recycled polymer shingles, a federal requirement. The floors throughout are tiled with red Spanish clay.

On the walls, Tim and Wayne have hung a collection of yard long African masks, carved from ebony wood. Two are painted green, red and gold. Two are fringed with jute shag hair!

The house is a beautiful hideout when it rains. Dry and secluded and dimly lit.

Latice work and four hatch windows provide ventilation. There is no glass. Screens are layed over the openings.

A pentagonal porch stretches out for fifteen feet over the front of the house. It’s shadowed by orange halliconias, a yarrow-like flower that produced a poisonous blackberry, pineapple bushes, and orchidae. Ferns and moss and regional curiousities like wild cilantro over the ground

There are three hummingbird feeders which provide entertainment. The foremost of which is a small bird who jealously guards one feeder. He perches on a support the gardener built and swoops in to scare away those birds who dare to dip their beak in his artificial flowers.

I was very angry with the house cat last week when, while the bird was perched on something low laying, she pounced and caught him in her mouth. She strolled with him between her teeth for a dozen paces before the bird fought back and finally escaped.

I was sure the bird was mortally wounded.

He was back at his post today. He lost a few feathers and looks battered but is just as feisty and still getting his way.

My “feeder” is the tiny, blue tiled kitchen. I have a pie safe, a refrigerator, a hot plate, two stock pots, a large frying pan, a rice cooker, and a blender.

I have one menacing looking all purpose knife. The Ticos use the word “cuchillio” for everything from a butter knife to a machete. Groceries typically have a spare cuchillio for cutting plantains and other fruits from hanging stalks.

There are several cooking spoons, kitchen sheers and a spatula. Plenty of plates and tableware

Because of the potential for ants and flies, anything that is open must be wrapped in a sealed plastic tub or wrapped the refrigerator. You can not leave food out and you must clean up immediately after every meal. Tico kitchens are clean!

The freezer is mostly filled with ice. The only frozen food universally available here is ice cream. This is prohibitively expensive (about ten dollars for two pints), of modest variety (there are several different takes on vanilla), and of marginal quality.

It is also tough to find 100 percent butter here. Brown eggs are cheap and plentiful but rarely refrigerated. There are very few kinds of cheese and they all taste a bit gluey.

I’ve been making black beans and rice (the national dish), instant potatoes, lentil stew, and bread slice pizzas. In the mornings, I sometimes eat oatmeal. More often than now, I eat fresh fruit cured with limon juice. It’s hard to find proper lemons or limes, but the sour green limon is a worthy substitute.

There some unusual common fruit juices. Orange-carrot is very common. So is pineapple-guava. Fruit punch is typically orange-pineapple-guava-papaya.

For a refresher, I’m enjoying pre-sweetened agua frescas that you mix from a powder in envelopes. Today I’m drinking passionfruit, but I’ve also had hibiscus and soursop flavors. I find I need to drink about 1 liter a day on hot days just to keep hydrated.

Costa Rica Animal Adventures

(image courtesy: Dirk Van der Made, wiki commons)

Today I took some time out to review a book of Costa Rican wildlife. There were lots of photographs, much better than I could take. I had no difficulty identifying the creatures I had seen.

The most notable and noisy species was the howler monkey.

I hiked Tuesday along a dry river bed full of stones on the property neighboring Abercam.

The river bed made the hike easier as few plants could push through the stones and the ground in the "green season" is heavy with moisture. I passed guava and lychee trees barren of fruit and then came across "signs of animal life" (poop) that didn't come from one of the neighborhood's free grazing cows.

I walked toward the sound of rushing water and heard rustling at the tops of some mangrove-like trees with curly dangling vines.

Soon, a male howler monkey made his loud warning call.

The first part of the call sounded to me like air rushing into a huge hoarse vaccuum or a frat boy with a 20 inch mouth belching into a megaphone.

The second part is a rythymic exhaling version of the first part that sounds a little more like what you'd associate with a monkey.

I could see the howlers clearly, though they were above me by about 20 ft.

The howlers make a third noise which I heard at a distance as I passed them in route to a twin waterfall - a more cordial howl to one another.

Birds that frequent the Abercam property include Costa Rica's national bird, the clay robin, chestnut mandible toucans, montezumas, yellow bellies, and hummingbirds.

The clay robins are as familiar here as red brested robins are in the United States. They are a powdery rust color all over and fight aggressively with one another.

Of course, I expected toucans to look like the bird on a box of breakfast cereal. All toucans do share expressive eyes, a similar mandible shape. and a like size.

The ones flying about Abercam have white, red, yellow, and black markings with brown and yellow bills.Their eyes are a light green.

Ironically, they're not big on "froot". They prefer eggs, small rodents, and young squirrels. Today, I caught a pair eyeing a male squirrel making a lovenest in a tall tree: future lunch!

They make two calls. One is a clicking sound that immitates the gecco.

By far, the most impressive vocalizer is the montezuma or pendulum bird. It's call is seven notes long.

The call flutters up a chromatic scale by half-steps. Two half-steps, pause, repeating the second note and another half-step, pause. This pattern repeats two more times until the bird holds the top note and slurs down all the way back to the first.

The montezuma also creates nests that hang like long baskets from trees. It's roughly the size of a hawk, and has a trim of bright yellow feathers on it's long black tail.

The yellow bellies, have, well, yellow bellies. They cackle and tumble over one another in midair like the parrots of Telegraph Hill.

The broad variety of hummingbirds here impressed me.

Most all of them have the same irridescent green somewhere on their bodies, like the red breasted hummingbirds in my backyard in San Francisco. But there are some with violet ears, some that are all green, and a peculiar species with a hooked bill designed for sipping liquid from inside the clawlike flowers of haliconia.

The species of butterflies are also amazing. The biggest ones I've seen are about the size of my hand and as fleet as bats.

In English, we distinguish between butterflies and moths based on whether we feel the creature is colorful or ugly. In Spanish, size is a the determining factor between mariposas and pollios.

I have not yet seen Costa Rica's national butterfly, the blue winged morphos, but I have seen a "postman" butterfly, a large yellow species, and a species with a long body that resembled a wasp with monarch-like wings in four sections.

I was initially concerned by the presence of two large wasps nests near the pool, but I soon learned this species of wasp principally eats mosquitos. Instead of buzzing around your soda and sandwhiches they cluster near their nests listlessly waiting for their prey.

Unlike these surprising wasps, not all the Costa Rica creatures are changing my mind about what constitues a pest.

Tonight, I got up for a glass of water and came back to a squarish orb spider about as big as my palm dragging a dust bunny across my headboard.

I stayed up for a while writing across the room. I made my bed and the spider regrouped, cowering beside my pillow.

The standoff finally ended when I threatened to trap it. First I tried to trap it under a bowl, but the spider jumped. Two feet high and three feet out!

I was startled, but I laughed too. For someone who has a dangerous level of fearlessness this spider was freaking me out.

I swaped the bowl out for a steam cover.

Then I figured, if I came at the spider from above and behind, it would stay low and move in the direction of the front door.

I guided it as far as the kitchen, trapped it, and set it free on the front porch to eat beatles another day.

Earlier this week, I found an unpleasantly fat tick. I saved it in a bag in case I came down with something.

Oddly, I was nauseaous, had a mean headache, and even some shortness of breath. But none of my symptoms corresponded with the tick diseases I'd read about in my guide books.

I'm guessing the overplus of prophylactics the SF travel health clinic introduced to my bloodstream have taken the wind out of any tick germs I got.

No scorpions or snakes so far.

Wayne says the scorpions at this altitude in Costa Rica can fit in a spoon and give a sting no worse than a bee. Still not anxious to experience that bite!

Snakes are detered from the property by the presence of over 300 minature bamboo plants around the perimeter. According to Tim, snakes get tangled in the dense sticks and turn back.

Everywhere I go, leaf-cutter ants are stripping some tree of its green.

They are fun to watch. Little bits of leaf marching single file over the forrest floor. Cute!

And people love the story of leaf-cutters. These ants survive by eating a unique fungus they create in their nests from moldering plant material.

Did I mention their queens live up to eight years! That's five years more than drag queen Pollo del Mar will reign as longest Miss Trannyshack.

However, the leaf-cutters are a nuissance to a well-manicured property. Geraldo, the gardener here, follows them and burns out their nests.

The ants seem to be worst on Wednesday.

That's Geraldo's full day off. The leaf-cutters seem to know.

Costa Rican Gay Resort Adventure - Abercam, La Fortuna

(image courtesy Abercam, La Fortuna)

Abercam La Fortuna doesn't have an address. "Grande Tapio Blanca, Circa de Cataracas" or "The Big White Wall on the Road to the Waterfall" is how the locals know it.

As you might expect from a gay resort, it is a discrete location. What goes on in the pool or on the grounds is visible only to other guests: the property is bordered by vacant lots on all three sides.

But Abercam is not so remote as to be unreachable.

A 15 minute taxi ride from the La Fortuna bus station costs $5. Local restaurants deliver.

Though proprietors Tim Abernathy ( the Aber syllable) and Wayne Campbell (the Cam syllable) keep a post office box in town, a mailman occassionally travels the steep twisting grade to deliver a care package with hard-to-find items from the states.

Presently, a Halloween party, for which there are already 20 guests, including a posse of deaf gay men from Alajuela, is demonstrating this challenge of living in Costa Rica. Halloween is a favorite gay holiday around the world, but the Ticos have no tradition of masquerade. There are no costume shops or spooky decorations.

"If you want something special it would be best to have it shipped 3 to 4 weeks in advance," Campbell says.

Whether there is a bowl of bite-sized Snickers or not, partygoers and long-distance bookings are unlikely to complain. Abernathy and Campbell have pulled together a suptuous environment dedicated to pagan pleasures.

Every inch of the property, which rolls over two acres from the Tapio Blanca to a dry ravine, is landscaped and maintained with native cultivars by a full-time gardener. Brown, yellow, orange and blue, butterflies are lured by the hibicsus and plumeria. Hummingbirds sip from the purple buds of Jamacian snake grass.

Along the clean brick paths, orchids are hung over driftwood braces. The scents of cinnamon trees and frangipani close around the visitor. Noni, guava, grapefruit, orange, and a half dozen other fruits are available for visitors to pick and eat in season.

The guest villas, each with a private balcony, are positioned to face active volcano Arenal. The property is legally as close as any resort can get to the lava-loaded giant.

"The nature that surrounds Costa Rica is alluring and can stimulate the senses on many levels," Abernathy observes, "The mist we have here and the exotic flowers lead to a heightened sense of yourself and others."

Another perk of it's location: the Abercam property is the lowest property on the hill that recieves it's tap water from the resovoir that feeds La Fortuna's famous 70 m waterfall.

"Crystal clear, pure and sweet. It's like drinking nature itself," Campbell asserts.

Originally from Florida, the pair began looking for a place to start a bed and breakfast in their mid-thirties. They explored the north of Georgia, parts of Dominica, and Guadalajara, Mexico before settling on Costa Rica.

Once they had made their choice they rented a car and drove every road in the country searching for locations. After a stint in Capos, they spied their current property and set out to develop it, opening just one year ago.

"We have met some very special people and made some wonderful new friends," Abernathy noted, "that's the best part of the resort for us."

As a means of saying thanks to the gay community for their support, the pair often offers discounts and special incentives. Be sure to ask about their current and future specials when making your reservation.