Counterattack of the Dreamer

I’m on vacation this week with my family, enjoying my first foray into the tropical climate of Costa Rica.  It’s actually my first trip to Central America, or rather my first trip anywhere in the Americas south of Mexico.  Pretty awesome.  The highlights of the trip have included the tropical staples of impossibly beautiful beaches, delicious local cuisine, and breathtaking jungle.  The downside of the trip is simpler to describe: bug bites.

I have been fortunate enough to travel in tropical destinations in the past,  like Hawaii and Cambodia, but never have I experienced a relentless onslaught of ravenous insect invaders like this week.  I stopped counting the bites once they numbered beyond 50, and that was three days into our week-long extravaganza on the coast.  While earlier this week I held hope that I would solve the riddle of how to avoid the cutaneous massacre, I have since resigned myself to returning to the US in red, itchy defeat.

During the day the hordes of insects barely register as a mild annoyance, and even on expeditions into the jungle you can get away with forgetting the bug spray.  One must sleep, however, and during the night the devil bugs become virtually inescapable.  I have experimented with numerous different strategies: the installed mosquito net (obvious, perhaps, yet largely ineffective), cocooning beneath the sheets (too frickin’ hot), lavish quantities of repellent (temporary relief from non-spider attackers along the lines of 2 hours), and long pants and shirts (no more effective than the mosquito net, too frickin’ hot, and too frickin’ not-covering-my-face).

And so we are a deranged Swiss Family Robinson, a haggard bunch of bedraggled misfits absentmindedly scratching at chins and earlobes like homeless crack junkies.  It’s going to be difficult convincing people back at home that we stayed in a nice rental on the beach as opposed to roughing it naked in the Amazon jungle for a sadistic reality television program.  In the end, however, I have made my peace with the legions of biting flies, spiders, mosquitos, ants, and no-see-ums.  My left cheek may be swollen larger than my right, but you can only really tell if you are looking for it.  My ankles and forehead are riddled with lumps like a bad case of the chicken pox, but I was flying hundreds of feet above the ground through the canopy level of the jungle on a zip line the other day, and that’s more than a fair trade.  I just swatted something crunchy away from my temple, but it didn’t faze me in the least.  Take that buggies.