Pixie in Paradise

aka Blue Cheese and Gold Swimwear

There is a rainy season in all of Central America but the skies will open up and flood you at any moment, even if the weather forecast says it’s sunny out. We went through such an intense rainy period in Caye Caulker I wasn’t sure it would ever stop. And now, living in the jungle – which much of the time can feel like rainforest – we still have a lot of spontaneous early mornings of rain showers. There’s pretty much nothing better than waking up before 6 am, listening to the Howler Monkeys warn us that rain is coming. I listen to them for a while, get up and feed the screaming cat downstairs, make hot water in the kettle for my coffee – and his cold oat milk – then proceed to sit on the patio watching the rain hit all of the jungle plants out my front door. That is heaven: coffee, a cat, jungle life, near the ocean. Then it clears up by 8 or 9 am and we carry on with another gorgeous day in paradise. My living arrangements are lush and somewhat shady inside the gated area I live in. Lush and full of trees and other foliage, there’s not even space to hang a clothesline in the sun so they’re all in the shade. The only real sunshine is over the pool and courtyard! This along with crippling humidity slows down the drying process. However, here at Casa Vikingo there’s both a washer and a dryer, which is quite the luxury in Central America. Turns out these two machines are really the unsung heroes of this fractured fairy tale too. 

I had been staying here in Playa Negra for four weeks and was about to start packing my belongings in anticipation of leaving in three days’ time for San José, where I was supposed to spend a few weeks before returning to the US. (If you’ll recall that didn’t happen, I stayed in Costa Rica and came right back to Casa Vikingo, my beloved beach and my beloved Mo). 

During my time living in this location, I’ve developed this unnatural and intense craving for buffalo chicken wings while living in Costa Rica. It’s not their national dish or anything (gallo pinto is), they just make amazing “alitas” – wings – at a restaurant near my house. They’re served creatively, on a rectangular piece of slate. Sitting on the slate is a small bowl of wings piled high, drowning in slightly spicy buffalo sauce, accompanied by an architectural masterpiece of cucumber and carrot sticks stacked in a cube shape. Most importantly, they didn’t forget the blue cheese dipping sauce, in a little pot next to the veggie stack. Blue cheese is a must for me with chicken wings. It even helps me ignore the fact that celery is sort of a deal breaker too if it’s not present, but wings served on the beach with cucumber instead of celery gets an automatic pass. We’ll live.

Where blue cheese is not a must, and is actually the worst, is in my clothing. Yes, you read that correctly. Since moving to Central America I’ve experienced extreme humidity combined with tropical heat and sunshine. Of course our temperature is hotter in Tucson, Arizona where I live in the US but there’s no humidity. I mean, I’ve seen 8% humidity there before. Is that even compatible with life? I’ve seen tropical-level humidity (80%+) while living in Dallas, Texas and even a few hot summer days with it, but nothing comes close to what I went through in Belize with the high heat/high humidity combination. Costa Rica is similar and maybe we revisit this opinion when I’m here during August (I arrived in October and will currently be here through April). So far the humidity in southern Costa Rica is as high as it was in Belize, but it never feels quite as hot. The climate is very tropical, Caribbean and warm here, but the sun was a little angrier over Caye Caulker, Belize. The conditions there made hanging clothes out to dry an easier process. Clothes dried quicker, provided they weren’t caught in one of the frequent early morning showers – Costa Rica has those too. Nothing was as cozy or enjoyable as hanging my clothes to dry on the second story clothesline on my balcony in Belize. My hammock was also out there. I could relax and cool off in the shade while watching my tank tops and undies drying in the breeze. 

There’s a lot of potential for mold and mildew in Central America. The level of humidity is so high that you can smell mold and mildew in a lot of places you don’t want to. Kitchen cabinets and drawers are so common for this. Sadly, it’s also in bedroom drawers and cabinets. The humidity level here is as high as Snoop Dogg at a Willie Nelson concert. I had not taken this fully into consideration as I started to pack my belongings.

I opened the large suitcase and laid it on the bed. My closet doors were always open and it irritated me how I would stir up a family of mosquitoes every time I reached for a hanger with a clothing item on it, but just assumed it was part of the tropical experience. You can’t have this luxurious humidity that makes skin look glowy and youthful looking without the animals that love it too. This includes not only the cute jungle mammals, poisonous but brightly colored reptiles and huge and rather frightening bugs. I’ve seen mosquitoes so big down here I thought they were tiny robots. If they are tiny mechanical robots spying on other countries listening in on my conversations, I’ll bet foreign intelligence is having a field day listening to me and Mo argue over how many times is appropriate to feed a cat in a four hour span. (Newsflash: it ain’t once per hour, Mo).

As I started to pull clothes out of the closet, that blue cheese smell got stronger. I turned a hanger of black leggings around and saw a spotty layer of white fuzz on them. I was in disbelief. I pulled all of the items from the bottom shelf of the closet and found more mold covering partial surfaces on ALL of my belongings! The two packing cubes that held all of my swimsuits and undergarments, beauty bags, backpacks, EVERYTHING, smelled like blue cheese.

It was late in the afternoon the day after Christmas and I needed to figure out what to do with these clothes and be completely packed, on a shuttle bus for San Jose in 38 hours. Not the tightest deadline, and thankfully we did have one washer that worked, but we had other guests who might also need their laundry done. This wasn’t even the rough part.

Most of us have favorite items that we carry around with us or keep in our house: they’re either useful or bring joy. They might be keepsakes or reminders, even down to the clothes and jewelry we wear or accessories we carry cherished items in. This has always been true for me but I never realized just how important some things are – and some things aren’t – until this last year. Unless it is a living being, things are just that: things. This statement is certainly not an invention of mine nor is it the first time somebody has pondered the topic but here’s one instance of how that concept has been demonstrated in my life. I’ve learned the value of that lesson a few times during this walkabout and it’s so interesting how each time I learned the lesson, it became clearer and more impactful. Let’s face it, what lessons haven’t been impactful on this journey? Holy shit.

The hardest part about discovering mold on the few belongings I had with me in Costa Rica, is that they were the most important, most vital items I grabbed quickly when I left northern Central America and headed south. Even my paperwork smelled like blue cheese, for fucks sake! I let anything not made of fabric air out for a day and we just dumped every item of clothing along with bags and backpacks into the washer with a shit ton of detergent and hot water. Less than three hours later there was decidedly less blue cheese smell and I could continue packing, but that experience shook me, a little, emotionally. After all, I left behind ⅔ of all of my most cherished belongings on that small island in Belize in order to make a fast exit to Costa Rica (a story for another time), and now the ⅓ that I had left to my name had been invaded by something that makes cheese (and chicken wings) taste delicious but clothing smell puke-y!

I now just have the necessities, and a few lightweight packable items I saved to make this journey, that solely bring me joy. For example, when you’re trying to safely cross into another country is it absolutely necessary to have a see-through mesh, gold, full-length spaghetti strap dress with tiny stars on it? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Hear me out: the adorable gold swimsuit was coming with me no matter what and I’ll be double dipped in snow cone syrup if I separate the suit and matching coverup dress. Plus, the dress is very thin and sheer and took up zero room while packing. I knew as impractical as this line of thinking was, I would do a photoshoot that would require both of those items someday soon. Sure enough, I did.

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(Side note, and completely unrelated, I’ve started dreaming about eyelash vipers at night. Go figure. Not an easy dream to get through, and causes quite the panic, but it’s obvious where I live if the snakes I’m dreaming about are so oddly specific as to be a regional phenomenon. 

And in other news, my Spanish is getting worse! How is that even possible? It feels like it’s getting worse anyway. If I’m being completely transparent something really strange just happened. I was going to look up a sentence in English to translate it to Spanish for Armin, something about our new guests arriving. I didn’t realize until the sentence was in the translator and I was talking to him that I had just put the Spanish sentence in and asked it to translate to English. You may have to sit with that one a while. I know I did).