The tiny hamlet of Cocles is the place we were staying at during the last weeks. It’s not a village as such – it spreads out along the main road which leads along the carribean coast. There’s a small supermarket, a school and some bars, hotels and resorts as well as private houses of relocated foreigners and local people. The main road ends in Manzanillo where there’s a nature reserve lying between that village and Panama. Also it only takes you 20 minutes by car to reach a river in the mountains which marks the border between Costa Rica and Panama. We’ve been told that there’s one spot along that river with a shop on the other side in Panama. The shop will take you across the river\border for free in their own rickety boat. In said shop one can buy e.g. alcohol for half as much as in Costa Rica or some german sweets and other imported goods from everywhere then. Due to the Panama canal that country offers some very cheap deals. It’s more or less like duty-free shopping across that river. It just might not be strictly legal and there’s always the risk of the police catching you. This would at least mean handing over the alcohol or even looking at a steep fee or a ‘propina’.

We did quite some exploring of Cocles and the immediate surroundings during the last weeks. Most days we woke up around 6 to 6:30 am and usually went for a walk with our camera before breakfast. Some pictures have accumulated which didn’t find their way somewhere into our blog yet. So we’re just showing them here in random order.

Also there’s a small story to tell about some excitement at Manu’s house last week. A deadly visitor had wandered into the garden in the afternoon. It was a coral snake which is rather small and beautiful to look at but which is also pretty fast and very poisonous. It’s bite can kill you within hours by breathing paralysis. It usually only goes exploring at night and normally prefers to flee when running across humans though. It does only attack when you leave it with no other choice and then gives you a warning first, too. Even if it bites you it doesn’t necessarily poison you. Their neurotoxin takes some time to be produced by them and if they have just eaten they might not have any venom available at all.

There are more than 160 different kinds of snakes in Costa Rica of which 22 are poisonous but none one of them is big enough to eat a human so they don’t ususally bother trying. So it’s not as if we we’re living in mortal peril here all the time really.

Manu and his local worker Victor apparently had startled the snake when they were cleaning up the garden. (Removing dead leaves on the ground around the house is a good precaution against running into snakes unexpectedly at night.) They killed the snake right away. Manu has his small kid Ricki running around outside all the time so I guess he wanted to be on the safe side. They’ve also kept the snake and want to preserve it in alcohol now. We don’t like to post a picture of a dead snake so we’ve found one for you on wikipedia.

PS: The dish in one of the pictures is typical for the area. It’s gallo pinto – rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, patacones – fried plantain and some salad on the side. It’s often eaten for breakfast with fried eggs and it’s delicious!