Welcome to the Language Barrier

In case you are wondering, we have been in Puerto Viejo the last four days staying at Pagalu, a hostel that does not offer wifi, just internet. This translates to mean there is access to a couple of shitty house computers which are being used most of the time but no internet for personal computers. At the moment we are using the wifi at Veronica's Place, a super excellent vegetarian restaurant and our current home away from home. I highly recommend the veggie (seitan) "steak", mashed potatoes and gravy. Perfect comfort food when you've got the rainy season blues.

So far, although we hiked through some pretty real looking jungle, we continue to avoid a run-in with a sloth. At this point, one more day and we're safe. We rented really shitty bikes the day we got here and rode the hell of them, including beating it back to town through a pounding tropical rain storm at dusk along a pot holed jungle road dodging trucks, cars, pedestrians and other bikes. As with all our travels, this trip has not been a lovely excursion to controlled, prefab environments where we enjoy invigorating yet soothing memory making downtime. They are more like some kind of quasi-spiritual boot camp trek designed to purge the fantasy that life is a safe garden in which I can order up my private version of happiness. Everything is real, pressing, fragile, terrible, beautiful, necessary and inescapable. Dogs standing in the street, nowhere to go but where they are. I cannot forget them. Throw in love and hope and stir.

We leave on the bus in the morning and, if all goes as planned, arrive in Nevada on Tuesday around midnight. Well, my battery is nearly gone. Hasta luego.