When Bob Payne first visited Costa Rica, at age 16 on a solo bus journey along the Pan American Highway from Mexico City to Panama City, it was a place where the highway’s Paseo de la Muerte, or Passage of Death, still meant something, and accommodations other than tents usually involved sleeping with some form of livestock. By the 1990’s, though, when Payne explored Costa Rica for a story in the November 1996 Outside magazine, even the rugged Osa Peninsula, on the southwest Pacific coast, had become tame enough so that pitching your own tent was a necessity only if you’d arrived with a circus.
Still, to this day Corcovado National Park, which covers most of the Osa Peninsula, is home to a variety of reptiles and thousands of insects, many available for viewing in your bathroom sink at night. And, as Payne said in his Outside piece, if you’re preparing to brush our teeth one night and find a scorpion in that sink, leave it there. If the scorpion can’t scale the sides, it can’t curl up in your boots or your bed later. And spitting toothpaste around most arachnids is an easily acquired skill.
In addition to his story on the Osa in Outside magazine, Bob Payne’s sometimes humorous travel writing about Costa Rica has found its way into print in, among other places:
The San Diego Union October 29, 1989, where after surviving a white-water rafting excursion on the rugged Rio Reventazon he unwisely proclaimed, “Bring on the big water.”
Bob Payne is the Costa Rica Correspondent for the humorous travel writing website BobCarriesOn.com, which has been bringing readers accurate travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.
BigStock photo.
