Lizards Eat Flies--The Law of the Jungle

It was truly a sad spectacle. Yesterday I sat on a hammock near a gurgling river and watched the brutality as a small lizard ate a fly. The fly was alive when it first found itself in the clutches of the lizards jaws, its little legs fluttered with each chomp. Forty five minutes later, it was all over, a satiated lizard darted away with a satisfied demeanor and a few fly guts left on the chair. The horror... the horror.

Yes, you know you are on vacation when you can waste a good chunk of time watching this spectacle. I'm writing from Esquinas Lodge, deep in the jungle and things here are magnificent. Yes we're still alive, and there's no snake bites or tarantula encounters to speak of. In fact there's barely any insects here at all: you can hear them, millions of them, but you're lucky to them. We saw some tarantula "dens" but they are a shy spider, worried the dreaded spider wasp will attack them, paralyze them, then lay their wasplings in their belly. Indeed, if I faced such doom, I wouldn't wish to expose my hairy body during the daylight.

We arrived at Esquinas Lodge early on Tuesday after leaving Don Carlos at 4:45 am. The flight was interesting, a small airplane packed the fuselage with travelers heading to the South and the forests and fish filled waters of the Golfo Dulce. Over Costa Rica it was dense forest virtually everywhere, quite different from Honduras and Nicaragua that seemed barren, with few pockets of trees dotted with plumes of smoke, the last vestige of slash and burn deforestation. We landed in Golfito on what could be described as a road and got off the plane in the humid air and curtain of tropical foliage. Yes, winter was officially over.

We arrived at Esquinas Lodge and promptly napped for two hours before exporing the grounds, lodge and pool. This place is incredible. I have few words, few metaphors, few adjectivs that can truly do it justice. It's a tropical paradise, everywhere you look there's long strands of colourful flowers, green vegitation and all encompassing sounds of the jungle, a caucophany of bird chirps and insect buzzes and bleeps. It's virtally impossible to make out the number of noises eminating from the forest. You could not design a more complete tropical lodge even with the masters hollywood movie set designers.

On day two we did what everyone would do, we went off for hike through the tropical rainforest, to learn of the flora and fauna of this forbidden land. We saw stately mahogany trees, figs, "panama hats", palms, banana and even a tree the locals call the kerosine tree: a tree, when cut, that emits an inflammable vapour. The animals were less obvious, a few birds, butterflies, termites and ants. The forest floor is ruled by ants, the hard working in leaf cutters, dilligently returning their leaf harvest to the mound and the ants that live symbiotically with a horned plant where the ants derive their nectar of life and where the pant get an army of aggressive defenders in the violent life of the jungle. Our guide, Jose, said: "Don't touch, ants are very painful." Good to know. We chose not to touch, but I was tempted to lick the poison frogs to see just how they tasted.

The next day we decided to strike out on our own...