Costa Rica and Nicaragua

1

‘Watch me. I stand alone. No, I do not long for compassion. This is my site, this my position in real life,’ she says. ‘May be you saw me before, perhaps on another spot. (Think f.e. of the water color W. Turner, classical landscape Finberg Complete Collection nr. CCLXIII-189) I am one of the many. I am so different you even don’t understand; you don’t see it either. My dress is made of soft organic material almost like velvet. Feel it yourself. Touch me tender. Out of the fog I am here in a sudden standstill like silence in dramatic music. Nearly a ghost but in a living body as most ghosts are. Emerging from nowhere, I am your scary dream and all of a sudden gone, though still here. I’m the beginning of the forest or the end of the woods, when all trees have gone for ever. Maybe I‘m the last one you should take care of, admire and revere as the old Druids did long ago. Almost a fossil I am, a remnant of the past. I remind you of something you never saw and though has always been present in your mind. A shadow without body, a body with no shadow. Your dream of last night. A dark blue deep sea where life wavers and thrives. Under water, deep down, life without shape or contours, just a density life passes through. But who are you and your camera? You remind me of Marcovaldo, the man of Calvino who left the countryside and moved to the incomprehensible city. His twin brother you are, I mean, who left the town in opposite direction and got lost in nature. Why do you roam this lonely place?’

 She once tumbled down. On this very site she beautifully hides. Like a queen she lies fully stretched and calm and royal. How many years ago she came down, I don’t know. Long enough to let herself overgrown, all over her body, smooth, lovely and incessantly but slowly and unnoticed as life creeps and seeps in her untangled and hideous ways. Mosses, lichens and spider’s webs all over and close to her secret spot everywhere. Her bark is a fine fur coat, a nursery for insects, ants, bugs, beetles. Occasionally bears sniff around for honey from her delicate skin. Look at the colors, the fine tissues and the tiny sprouts from her bark. A micro world of crawling life generation after generation constructing and destroying life she produces in an intense and inextricable symbiosis. A queen for ever in the cloud forest.

 Why is she that impressive and so untouchable real although invisible for the largest part? Imagine her height, all the foliage and the rustling in the mountain wind. She lives in different spheres, layers, up into the sky, the universe. By the way, what will be her age? Count the rings of her trunk inside. Imagine you have to climb her all the way to the top. A trunk that huge and wide as if the roots even want to protect her hidden head like a Buddha I once saw in an ancient city of the past. Growing high up in the sky, the skin hides the flow of life juices underneath. All the way as if there is no gravity, no force to keep her low. One needs high heels to admire her all over her fertile body and is still to short. And tall she is, indefinitely taller she will grow beyond imagination, beyond my time of life. She helps to grow herself by creating darkness around her foot and middle, striving for sunlight at the top. When dogs are still puppies one should look at their feet to imagine how big they will grow as adults. This is impossible for the queens of a cloud forest which cover the slopes of the mountains.

Who built this wide bridge so deeply in the tropical forest. You know the names of Juan, Julio, Sergio and maybe a Maria or Clara? They put the pillars, they layed the fundamentals, they dug into the slope of the valley sides. They got a lot of money or they had no money at all and no alternative as jobless workers. They labored and sweated, they made love not knowing anything of the children of the king who would never reach each other. The valley was too deep. Or a big company brought with loaders the mechanical parts and the mechanics connected the parts and disappeared as if nothing happened here and the birds came back to their nests and the trees restarted their eternal rustling. A cast iron frame under the high canopy, framing endlessly the passageway over the deep valley floor. It reminds me of my toy box and its mechanical parts, I played with for hours. A bridge was one of the most ingenious object to construct. Okay. Is this the end of the hike, the floor of the invisible valley too deep and that wide? What about the echo in this dense forest of the valley? Even the fall of a stone, a real big stone would not be heard. There is no floor? This is a floating world? Or is it the entry, the gateway without name to nothingness hiding under densely overhanging foliage. It is all too close, even your words vanish, the silence is in front of you, starts right at your feet. Maybe it is the beginning of a new life on the other side, the unknown. Perhaps you need wings to fly like angels have.

2

Standing on the windward side of the crater I breathe deeply as one does to prevent hyperventilation or when one feels enclosed in too small a room with too many people. An prescient breath as if to defend one self against an attack. Perhaps as the people did in the subway of Tokyo, when terrorists put poisonous gas in the deep tube. The other side of the volcano crater is closed today, forbidden to climb. It is cheaper to close down a rim side than to pay well equipped rescue workers. Do you hear the sirens? Clouds of sulfur would suffocate all life, yours included. By the way, did you forget that sulfurous openings in the earth and the ocean floors are the primeval birthplace of life? That is where the archaic bacteria thrived and still seem to do. That is where we will be deadly poisoned. Strange whims of nature which disturbs one’s linear idea of evolution of life on this earth. Look how barren these slopes are. Where ever you want to stand on the leeward or the windward side, it always depends on the wind and your love for life.

 A parking place next to the crater of the active volcano. A big place, a unique place for a thriller, a perfect murder in the poisonous air. It will be difficult to remember the cars, the drivers, the passengers one has seen although there are not so many cars today.
The possibilities of unsolved murder, however, are almost countless even apart from the sulfur itself and its untraceable deviling in the air. The volcano a real temptation and a challenge. A trail up the hill in the back to have a better sight on the crater is an escape of last resort. Smoke. All of a sudden the wind turns. People run back to their cars. The murderer is there, misuses the chaos? Do you smell the sulfur seeping into the lungs? Do you feel the tremble of the mountain the animals feel. There are no animals you say?

 Cozy vultures, black and big from close by, on the watch in the wind still trees, near the very top of the trees. They sit together for ever, on the watch but calm and stoic as old philosophers meditating the wind, the sky and the time. Although chased away from their nest on the sandy soil just a moment ago when we climbed to their nests, hiking through long grasses on the rather steep mountain slope. Now, we watch and they negate us as if we are air though their potential enemy, they know. A picture of lamed freedom, wide view. The camera clicks and another time. No movement in the body, no turn of the narrow, weird necks. Soon they will be back on the nest. Out of sight, out of the picture. They trust nobody, maybe Marcovaldo knows more about them, perhaps he is their friend and partner of natural conversation about rain, wind, the heat and the cold, the thin air, their weight and the indispensable vigor of their wings.

 I call you: gardens in the tree etc. No black bird, no early morning, no wind. I call you: beautiful – a variance of a Dutch verse (Jan Hanlo). I call you ghosts in the night, to continue in my way this verse, over which the wind brushes past. Slowly moving beings of the past, here present. Seen at daylight they remind me of Ireland where I have never been.

Prehistoric beings stopped developing, evolution interrupted. Desolated nests of big birds, flown away, disappeared, coming back next year or later. Too much sulfur in the air. I call you: beautiful.








3

A twin sister of the fallen queen.
A fairy tale about a double personality and schizophrenia in the woods, dangerous for nature lovers from the city, who adore indiscriminately everything outdoors. Dreamers, hikers, magicians of their own world. And she with the same age, same miracle of micro life. Twins are sensitive for unseen things, they say, clairvoyant a word for what we cannot see or touch or smell. And so it always begins, nothingness, the invisible and then we speak of creation or a miracle and we call it belief, how would we call it otherwise, nonsense maybe and you think that is really different or even better? A tree never walks away – as long as one does not read poems. Sometimes a tree falls down. Poor queen, poor reader. Marcovaldo does not like to leave the forest.

 Out of the way, a hearse is coming up. Slowly, a kind of full speed ,appropriate for death like music changing from andante to vivace. When I was young the older men would take off their hat out of respect. Respect for the dead, for death? A man, a woman, a child, who knows, that is on its way, going somewhere unknown? See the man on the left, in front of the hearse, half turning away, with his mobile and plastic bag, see the horses and their knitted white blankets, the cab man in his jacket, the mourners, one with his bike at hand. They don’t take off their hat, they don’t wear a hat these days. They are all busy, in touch and think of tomorrow, when this street will be empty or crowded by people who go to the market. Yes, better think of tomorrow when death comes by. Who feels at ease when death is passing along? Life passes too fast. I miss the hats.

 Is it Saint Anthony or a local notable, a man of standing? The saint of the birds, the patron of the sufferers of pestilence? What is the difference, his holiness. Look, the way he listens to what we do not hear. Birds sing, prisoners call or shout, the earth deep down trembles and sighs, that is what he listens to so concentrated and far away at the same time? He holds his arm we do not feel the pain of. He measures the rhythm of life, his body, the sensation of the touch? He slavers the honor of his statue he strived for during his life? And is he happy that he cannot see the sculptured person around the corner? His colleague, competitor, his friend for ever now? He is proud to be in his company, both of them enjoy their own world, status and the people who admire them. Maybe he thinks why do you take a picture of me and not of him around the corner? Something shameless, not that much polite? You are a friend?

They look to be a group of laborers. Do they perform an act for the publicity of the bank? Or are they deliberating and preparing a strike. They smoke secretly, you assume, a cigarette outdoors and talk about the girl last night?


They look tough guys standing strong, shoulders, arms and hands strongly. They stand in front of a bank, white color workers? No women, apart from the living one who sits on the stairs. Maybe also one in the middle and one at the left hand side. Workers at least. Who brought up this idea of a collective statue? An old tradition or a new initiative to support the common people?

4

‘The man on the right side of the wall reminds me of Kafka, the famous author of Der Prozess. I wonder how the mural has been painted. By one man or a collection of street painters, a guild of revolutionaries, on order or free of charge. I did not know Kafka wears big glasses when overseas. Wherever I see him, I’m always jealous of his full black hair. It is his best protection against all odds and the source of his endless writing about man who lost his way in his own human and dehumanized labyrinth. His hair that stands for ever, gives his eyes a dreamlike, absent, almost staring look. No, a dreamlike amazement as if the world will never end and does not show where it begins. Clearly, Kafka is lost and nearly bewildered although restraint just like the fat woman with her shopping bag is in front of him on the sidewalk. Not knowing she is fat and lost. Waiting as the boy and the man in the side alley. Waiting as if nothing happens in town. As if there is no process going on, for decades and even almost a century.

The mural is his dream. A colorful, dynamic and vital dream, turning over and over in his unconscious mind. It is the man on his back on the stone bench beneath the mural who is the core of the picture. He is right in the middle however not intrusive. Look how calm and motionless he lies on the bench. His name and his secret is Marcovaldo? He is lost in his dream of the countryside, the land and the animals. Or he is just tired of his job as a night guard in a ten stories apartment? Soon he will awake, stand up and walk into the street, into the crowd. It will be too hot in the sun, the dream will be over. Who will recognize him, when he enters the big building and says hello to his wife even when she is not at home. He will turn on the music and think of his dream. He will try to remember what the dream was about. When the rain comes down like a drizzle, the paint will drip, the dream be gone?

I see the bells swing in the tower. No, that is a lie. The first thing is the sound of the bells I hear when I walk over the square. Then I see the swing. A man asks me where I come from. I love the church taken too close by and the bells hanging still. Somebody in the tower has a duty to ring bells every hour. He will be deaf or become deaf of the bells. Or he is blind as many muezzin are? The church is too big for the small digital camera? I like the thick walls and the dark entrances which cover the people who come in and will loose their soul for a moment. The dark will veil your sin and open your heart. The holy is separated from the secular by the dark entrance. Will I climb the stairs? I love the paint and plaster coming down from the walls. It makes the church even more solid and absorbs better the sound of the bells. Nobody minds what I think.

They look square as they are. Townsmen, officials, bureaucrats or doctors Marcovaldo would think.
See how they wear their costumes, look at their shoes.
It makes them cool. It is a privilege to look at us, they seem to say. They communicate with each other as they always have done, no emotions and reticent upon common people.
This is a well organized society with a hierarchy of professions and persons, important and less important. We are the intellectuals, we wear glasses. Backs turned to each other, they transform the space into a square and shape their mind and their manners. Gentlemen of standing, impressive and strict. They dislike noisy street life and boisterous men of the street. They are honored not loved, I think.

5

Sunset in town. A market place. One hears the drums from the back streets. Little boys come around the corner and jump up and down.
Time to make music, to earn money, to make the people happy and to forget all troubles of the day.The night will bring music and dance.

The boys bring tall and glamorous ladies to the marketplace. They carry the ladies with care and joy. Well dressed in red and beige, tall as the arch of the church entrance they are. The ladies swing left and right, they go for a dance. They bow and greet the trees and the houses and the church around the marketplace.

 They smile and the birds become silent looking straight into the smiling faces of the dancing ladies.And, please, watch the fine woven window on a secret spot in their dress.The drums grow louder and faster. The tall ladies dance and smile. Innocent, peeping boys?








6

The crowded bus we took you do not see. Neither the reception we got at the entrance of the hot springs nor the troop of young guys and girls tagged to us. We pay an entrance fee. We choose a guide. So, they all guided us, told stories by turns. Here is the mud of sulfur and bubbles, the earth breathes red. The boys and girls jump from hot stone to hot stone. To show they understand their profession and they care for us, our money. They stir with a long stick in the pulsing blood of the earth. Melted, red iron from the stomach of the earth. In the far back a smoking volcano difficult to reach if not impossible.The children still fight to be the only and exclusive guide. The losers start already to curse and use their stick trying to hurt the others. They become angry, shout in frustration. Money is what they want, money they all need. I don’t remember if they all got money or some of them twice.

The bus does not stop for the beach. The bus goes all the way to the end of the small peninsula. We are halfway the afternoon and it is still hot. For miles the beach is on the left behind a row of houses, behind gardens and trees. Sometimes we get a glimpse of the flat, greenish sea. Women step down from the bus, colorful dressed women climb the bus on their way home. The beach is a promise. At this hour, this day of the year there is nobody on the beach. No girls to look at, no guys to play baseball, no bars for a drink or a snack. Are we disappointed? The beach is long and broad, the beach is light to dark sand in front of empty hotels and empty terraces.This is not too bad, it is a privilege. The sun begins almost unnoticed somewhere its setting and all of a sudden we get company on the beach. A lonely swine walks black and slowly on the beach. He enjoys the beach, the sunset, lonely as he is. One never knows about the next day, particularly not a fat swine.

 Miraculous island in the lake. The immense big lake once robbed of its very fish, the name I forgot, by a president who was more interested in money than fish. Fish sold to Japanese for their never stilled taste for fish. However, beautiful lake, I will sing a song, a song of your volcanic beauty and your stillness. Behind the border of the lake, a strip of land is a small pond in the woods. The water shallow and dark. Closed in, a kind of small moor, no a muddy pond as I said. A fallen tree out of sight serves as a bridge to the other side, the invisible trail through the woods to the meadows, the horses and the cows. But, stop and look. Here on the spot. Incomprehensible sunlight between the trees, red and white reflected by the pond, the dark water and a trunk of another old tree fallen down. Secrets of illumination, the breaking of materialized light. Camera obscura and infra red at the same time.

The day ends, the night comes, I happen to be here. No thoughts no worries. A floating house covered with straw on an iron frame.To fish or to live in. Not a living being to see. This is the sea and the shore, endlessly stretching behind what we see. However, no Hemingway or his old man, no Anaïs Nin in her glass boat. Nor my old aunt who lived in a so called living boat during the War. A boat amidst reed, her apartment in the main city an address to hide her beloved brother, my role model as a stoic man who took all pleasure and pain for granted. And she taught me to walk over a narrow foot board, later to keep my balance in life. This is a quiet place. On the left, almost on shore a shining object, a car on its side or an unrecognizable machine. They are part of the scene. They are indispensable. The picture will be ruined when one of the objects will be removed.

7

This reminds me of the paintings of Dennis Hoppper.The clear planes of color, the straight lines, the horizontals of the chair without end. Painting with a stop watch. The magic touch to immobilize and to bring to a standstill the things he paints. The fixation of things and people. The excommunication of movement. All things ready made, smooth, material, finished, unchangeable.
Just there, for ever. It is late in the afternoon, the sky is gray all over the place, the wide open place. The sky is cloudy, fully covered, too damp, we will not get a sunset. This chair on the beach, that ‘s it. Emptiness, okay. A concrete object made abstract, on a lonely beach. Emptiness and a desolate evening. I do not dare to go there and sit in the chair - thin as air. Soon it will rain again, Marcovaldo, you know.

 I interrupt my walk, stay stand still on the trail, left and right under wood and trees. My legs stop, my breathing slows down, my eyes focus. So close to the eye, so dangerously near to the spider. Who is afraid of whom? First I see the green leaf, then the spider and finally ‘spider eats spider.’ An order of observation, an order of the visual, the logic of observation and the mind. That is how it works, without hesitation, spontaneously and surprised. Or the other way around. Curiosity that alerts, registers every movement, opens the eye. A scene of a murderous embrace, sneaky, cruel, tasty or just nature at work? The spider as victim and victor, the endless transformation, mutation, the law of survival and fate. The jungle, they call it and I think of wars and wars. The leaf is eaten and then the next and the next and the next spider.

 A long walk today. We pass a hamlet and another hamlet all different and alike. In the last hamlet we see him. A family in and around the farm.


Tall trees and a grass field in front. A man on a horse rides into the house, the stable where they live together. We greet, wave hands, we pass the farm. Some minutes later. I hear a sound, I hear a trot, turn around and there they are, the young guy and proudly his horse. You see the white blot on his nose, the dead trees in the back. My camera just in time. A living statue. No neighing. Admiration of vitality and daily courage. This is just his start in life. Oh young man. The beautiful years to come and the horses and the girls.

 Be careful, walk slowly and with prudence. It looks to be your trail you walk. Look at your feet, your big muddy shoes. They are invaders, the ants you do not see, will think. You cross their path, spoil their route, destroy their meticulously walked out streets to the other side. Incessantly they march from right to left and back. Or they form two armies, do they build two ant hills? I do not know where the queen hides. It is not plausible there are two queen so close to each other. Hidden behind the leaves, the ants industriously cross the path, our path? Continue to look at them and you will be remunerated: they move slowly, well disciplined, the greenish leaves as their camouflage as long as they move at pace. Soldiers with a firm belief, a strong will, spurred by the scent of the queen. Being on their way to become a hill, food in the storage, child–ants, movers of leaves? Cleaners of the forest, the ground, trails and restless builders of hills. Recycling leaves and life.

 My kingdom for a horse. Incredible. I do not believe my eyes. I zoom in and there is a horse that bends its neck forward, tastes and carefully sips salt water from the almost flat sea. It explores its realm. A new kingdom is born. I feel like an intruder. Imagine. I tell somebody a story about a horse.

Once upon a day a horse decides to go for walk and for a drink to the beach. It took some time, the horse however found the beach all by itself. It tasted the water and said this is exactly what I was after. And the horse established a kingdom and lived for ever along the beach. Nobody would believe it. Look. A small white surf in the back shows a silent, windless afternoon.

8

A rock in the light surf. Black or dark, greenish or dark blue its color depending on the reflection of the afternoon sunlight on the water. An immobile and quiet image. Perfection. For a while I forget where I’m. In Costa Rica, in Thailand, where rocks are scattered along the limestone coast. In no man’s land. No horses, no people, no sails. Below the surface may be fishes swim in circles or straight lines after fishes in circles and lines. Perhaps sea grasses wave forward and backward. A labyrinth to play tag, to keep the fishes in shape and sexy.

 The beach close to sunset. A moment of the day you do not recognize when you consult your wrist watch. I do not have a watch since I do not work anymore. The locals live of tourism or drugs. It depends and makes a difference. It sometimes isn’t needed to repair things anymore. The mind of the last ones in disrepair. This man repairs a hammock. He rents rooms and tells about his travels in the Caribbean. He is an honest man, you see. I like his face and the palm leaves. A serious face and a bit sad, I don’t know why. Even more serious is what you do not see in the picture. Nor you hear the sound, the dim bum on the stony floor underneath the hammock. A man fell out of his hammock. At my age, it takes quite a time to become fully repaired.

 It is the crowded city, the hurry, being on the way. To the market, the office, the church, the cemetery and the circus. Women with bags, civil servants,clowns, priests – I forget the order – undertakers as finalists. Here again the camera as stop watch. Look at the leg of the shopping woman, her foot up in the air, her walk interrupted. She is the example for the statue, made bigger and more inevitable. Unmistakable this is a woman, in bronze and solid from the outside. Big, mighty and vigorous.


No need for helpers, for men, no jokes about emancipation here? A stand in the way for pedestrians or a reminder not to hurry in the middle of life. Look at her breasts and big thighs, her powerful performance. She is untouchable?

 An explosion of the sun, new suns are born, it seems.
The sky mysterious and threatening. What will happen? A volcano exploded and ashes spread over the sky? Right, it rains and is still raining, it drizzles. Fine raindrops on the lens of the camera. The sea in blue horizontal planes and contours stretching endlessly wide and for ever.

Almost a painting thanks to the rain, the digital technique and the clumsiness of the camera man. Photography as art or the beginning of a new art, to double and redouble reality, to color and discolor the world, to fix the flowing and streaming, to cut to pieces and paste collages, to endlessly repeat and re-create, to start anew and then we see again the explosion of the sun.

9

Finally, that’s what we are here for. You forgot, the hike became a bit more comprehensive with all those detours, pictures and words.The blue balustrade to sit on and to turn your back, that is the perfect way to show he is a bit indignant. He would have been really angry if he knew we went first to a natural history museum of frogs and toads. Let me call it a ranolarium.



We were that afraid to miss them. Now he is here, in the wild, on his balcony. Taken in the dark of the night. Flash lighted. We will never know if he was that fast to turn in time. Afraid of the flashlight or of red eyes. May be he slept already or better is still asleep. He is not very interested.

This one is more of a vain character, not afraid and slightly undisciplined.
He doesn’t feel threatened. Now I am here, he says, look at me. My narrow eyes are not regular. They express my inner emotions and my self respect. My skin is well shaped, colored and dotted, sensitive and vulnerable, but tough and flexible. I do not hide here. Admire me and tell a story about my appearance when you are back home. My color is just slightly different from the leaf I sit on. Mark my words. As soon as you leave me, you will hear from me.The night just starts.

It is the last day, an organized tour and rain and clouds on top of the volcano. It is cool. A cloud forest is not a contradictio in terminis although we feel to be at the end of the world, its last, final, end terms. The forest shows its clouds – to honor its name - and not much more. Okay, the trees breathe dampness, fog, mist. We recognize the majestic queens we love so much. Paved roads and pebbles and wooden framed stairs.


Nearby there should be a lake, a famous colored lake. Watch the signs and the information board. Here we are near the crater of the Poas Volcano in a national park not far from San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Read the text. This picture is what I call framing reality.

Hotel Cortez Azul. Last night. One dog, two keys, two locks, many more cast iron bars, one frame? Do you here the early morning frogs, Marcovaldo? Or is it the plane?








Copyright: Photos by Derk Cools and Ivan Nagelkerken