Paso Canoas is Ugly

I left Pavones around noon, huffing and puffing on the steep, winding dirt road over the coastal range to Conte. The air was very hot and I felt a bit delusional. My surroundings took on a surreal quality, and topping a particularly demanding hill in the middle of nowhere, I beheld an awesome sight. A solitary house, no larger than a garden shack, stood next to the road, hanging precariously over a great cliff. From somewhere within the house played ¨The Wizard¨ by Black Sabbath at top volume. The only person in sight was an old woman sitting on the porch.

Knitting.

A sign on the gate read ¨Cuidado: Perro Bravo!¨ and at the base of the sign, as if orchestrated for a picture postcard, sat a pocket-sized lap dog, smiling preciously at me as I rolled by.

I stopped and rubbed my eyes. I stared. I laughed! I laughed until I cried, so absurd was the desolate scene. It tickled me to the core to see such a thing.

The gods might be crazy, but they definately have a sense of humor.

The road dropped down into Conte, and then a small town called Bella Luz de La Vaca (literally, ¨Beautiful Light of the Cow¨). The air reeked of dung, the sharp odor of water apples fermenting on the roadside, and a sticky sweet smoke wafting from the oil-palm factory. The ride was pleasant and totally uneventful, aside from the occasional midday shower driving me to seek shelter in the nearest cantina or soda.

I considered my agenda.

What was I doing here, wheeling around like a jerk in the middle of nowhere?

My trip, I concluded, is Sal Paradise meets George Washington Hayduke the Third, Easy Rider meets Siddhartha, Forest Gump meets Moses, Baba Ram Dass meets Harold and the Purple Crayon. And while it may be difficult to iterate my motives outright - indeed, I may not even know exactly what they are, yet - I sense that something good must come of all this. It will amount to something, form a cohesive whole.

This must be the basic assumption behind any meaningful life, I knew, for without even the vaguest, most unspecified optimism, we truly have nothing.

With this thought I rolled into Paso Canoas, the ugliest place in Costa Rica (besides San Jose). Located on the border of Panama, Paso Canoas resembles Tijuana concentrate. You get the feeling that youll end up with hepatitis if you stand in one place for too long. Everywhere vendors shout crass advertisements for their wares: sunglasses, pirated mp3 discs, washing machines. The border is loose to the point of non-existance - basically a hodge-podge duty-free stripmall where one can pass freely from country to country through the incadescent shopping frenzy. I wandered unknowingly from Panama to Costa Rica and back several times in search of a decent room.

The next morning I went to the immigrations window. I was told to put on a shirt and was then bounced between windows and lines in no clear order until finally, hours later, I was allowed to proceed to Panama.

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The Beloved wants no lord, no master -
She wants anstonishment and devastation!

Im like a monk, safe in my cloister -

She wants me to give up everything
and roam the world like a dervish!

-Attar

written by  chaddeal on January 22, 2009 from Canoas, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited
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