Puerto Jiménez – Day 2: Potatoes and Dolphins
PUERTO JIMÉNEZ
Day 2: Potatoes & Dolphins
January 29, 2023
Given that our tour of Corcovado National Park was no longer an option, we visited a couple of tour agencies and weighed our options – and by options, I mean one option – a sunset boat tour to see bioluminescence. Again.
Amelia had read that Puerto Jiménez is one of the best places to see it, so I gave in and we booked it. That said, we still had a long, free day ahead of us. And what better way to spend it? We went to a supermarket, splurged on food and alcohol, and spent the entire morning cooking.
We’d been so busy ever since leaving Utila that we’d barely had time to properly talk. That day, I learnt that Amelia had played the violin for about seven years and comes from a family of musicians. Apparently, Tiroler Kirchtagmusig – a fairly famous composer in Austria – is her grandpa, and he wrote a song just for her. Somewhat more surprisingly, she’d also taken cooking classes for three whole years while studying finance. This was hard to believe, especially when she put sugar instead of salt in the omelette. Her guac was kinda divine though.
As were my “fried potatoes”, which by the end had turned into mashed potatoes at best. Still, the food was great and we ate so, so much. I swear I’ve never eaten that many potatoes in my life. At one point, I quoted Amelia a line from a young Maltese farmer: “I have potato blood in my veins.” This used to be all the rage back home, with everyone making fun of him for his accent and ambitions. Meanwhile, I admired his passion and dedication and quietly scorned his detractors, wishing at least one percent of them felt that strongly about anything in their lives.
We spent the rest of the day eating and binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy – the perfect way to spend a day, if you ask me, especially since it was our last one together, at least for the foreseeable future. We did our best tried to reshuffle our plans, and though our timelines didn’t quite align, we’d do our best to meet up eventually – even if it’d be just for a few hours!
Dolphins, Gold and Violet Skies
Later, we headed down to the pier – scarlet macaws soaring overhead as if they were common roof sparrows (seriously, how is this even real?). Julio the captain and his boat were waiting for us. It was just gonna be the three of us, as if the universe had decided we deserved a few uninterrupted hours together.
Well, almost uninterrupted. We ended up sharing them with a huge pod of spotted and bottlenose dolphins as we cruised around the bay of Puerto Jiménez. I swear, I never get tired of seeing dolphins, whether they’re somersaulting in the distance or curiously swimming up to the boat. It feels completely unreal.
The captain told us there had also been sightings of false killer whales and pilot whales in the area, so naturally, we tried to “manifest”, as White Gurls would put it. It had worked for me and my quetzal, and for Amelia and the whale shark, so why not give it a shot? Unsurprisingly, it didn’t quite work. Instead, we cracked open a couple of beers, demolished the rest of our food, and had a long, easy chat with Julio.
He told us about the mountains of Corcovado, which are rich in gold. In the past, locals extracted it to make a living, sometimes finding nuggets weighing up to three hundred grams, until the government banned gold mining in 1986 and closed the park to the public in an effort to conserve it. Along with losing their primary source of income, many locals were forced to leave the area – compensated either with small plots of land nearby or modest sums of money.
It was around this time that Puerto Jiménez began to grow, having previously been little more than a sleepy village. Even today, Julio said, some people still sneak into the park at night to illegally pan for gold. When we asked why the government doesn’t mine it themselves, he explained that doing so would irreversibly damage the ecosystem and that the country benefits far more from the tourism the reserve attracts.
We then got to enjoy yet another ethereal sunset – great frigatebirds and dolphins cutting through the stillness of the ocean, all bathed in an unreal violet glow slowly swallowed by darkness. I swear it’s one of the most incredible sunsets I’d ever seen!
Once night fell, with only the moon lighting the sky, the captain fired up the engine, and the water around us ignited with glowing blue bioluminescence. Once again, we were told we wouldn’t see it along the shore. And once again, I didn’t mind at all. Seeing the blue light rippling next to the boat was more than enough o keep both Amelia and I mesmerised. Such a mystic phenomenon!