We moved to an upstairs room in the Hotel Lucy. This was a nice airy varnished wood room with a balcony overlooking the sea. By 10:00 hrs. the heat was oppressive, so we abandoned our plans to assault the north face of the waterfall canyon and headed back to Playa Grande.
We arrived panting and sweating and began to devise a way to suspend Declan’s hammock without a rope. After some ingenious scrobbling with bits of wood we found some nylon rope in the debris washed up along the beach.
We strung our hammocks in the shade and while Declan dozed, I researched South America in the Lonely Planet guidebook. We interrupted our idling for a brief splash around and body-surfing session in the Pacific Ocean, then it was back to some serious lounging about.
The only other activity was moving my hammock in order to stay in the shade. At 16:00 hrs. we packed up camp and headed for the ice cream stop. Here we met a young Swede who was having trouble with amoebas and scorpions. The 49-year-old German, Peter, was also here with a buxom 15-year-old Costa Rican girl.
The temptation of a cold bottle of Bavaria Gold Pilsner was too much so our next port of call was Chico’s Bar. A quick livener consisting of a few bottles of German-style beer brewed by Cerveceria Costa Rica in San Jose stretched into an evening meal and an enthusiastic rum-drinking session.
We tottered back to our room after adding a few “unusual” photographs to Alaskan Linda’s (Hoss) camera. We slept like the dead despite the loud crash of the surf outside the door. Prior to sleep we listened to the sad music of Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings, Op.11 by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Described as "full of pathos and cathartic passion which rarely leaves a dry eye", we enjoyed this music brought to prominence again, in the aftermath of a gun battle, by the movie “Platoon” in 1986.
Adagio for Strings is a work by Samuel Barber, arguably his best known, arranged for string orchestra from the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. Barber finished the arrangement in 1936, the same year that he wrote the quartet. It was performed for the first time on November 5, 1938. This added a cultural aspect to our evening of drunken debauchery.
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