I remember a tropical tableau like scenes from an old South Seas adventure movie. Sultry purple nights in the open-air bar of a waterfront hotel, sipping rum with shady characters, watching palm fronds sway in the moonlight and listening to the raucous hoots of howler monkeys echo across the bay. Through the smokey haze I see Houston Bill playing poker at a table strewn with empty beer bottles. He gives the parrot on his shoulder a lighted cigarette to puff on and the other players let go with belly-laughs.  In the stillness of the wee hours it is only me and the bartender and one last shot of rum before I collapse naked in my sweat-soaked bed.

This is how my stay passed like a dream at the Miramar Hotel in Golfito, Costa Rica. I wanted to hear Sam to play it again, but unfortunately there was no piano in the bar.

Golfito is one of those strange little towns at the remote ends of the earth, unsophisticated and yet worldly in surprising ways. It used to be a banana town, but United Fruit Company pulled out in the 1980s, leaving the residents to fend for themselves in eco-tourism, fishing and faltering retail businesses. Some left for the capital city of San Jose and those who remained tightened their belts and hoped for better times. A movie was filmed there in the 90s and a cruise ship appeared once in awhile, but the better times didn't last long. A few turned to marijuana farming to stay afloat economically and this resulted in a raid by helicopters manned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Land swindles were commonplace. Americans thought they bought into large tracts of property to be subdivided into individual homesteads only to discover they owned no land, only shares in a land company whose president could sell out at any time without their permission. The municipal government of Golfito, desperate to replace falling revenues, condemned privately-owned property under the imminent domain provision of the law.

But none of that mattered to me. I wasn't looking to buy land, I was there to soak up the tropical ambience and chill out from a hectic year. After reading up on the area, my only worry was the dangerous wildlife that inhabited the rainforest -- crocodiles, jungle cats, venomous snakes and frogs and insects. A friend who once lived in a remote section of the Golfo Dulce gave me this advice: "Stay on the beach. In the bush everything tries to eat or poison you. And don't go swimming in the ocean. It's full of sharks."

What was a nature lover like me to do? If I took my friend's advice, I would be confined to drinking in the bars of Golfito. So I decided in advance to do both - drinking and risking the bite that might last forever. If I did the two things simultaneously, I might be numb enough not to feel the bite. After all, you only live once.

Through a friend who owned a boat, Houston Bill arranged an excursion for me to the upper reaches of the Golfo Dulce. The panga (boat) captain was a thirtyish American with one glass eye and a gorgeous young Tica wife. We stopped briefly not far outside the inlet channel for the captain to don SCUBA gear and check his un-buoyed lobster traps. They were empty -- probably robbed by desperate locals, he said. Half way up the big gulf I was sitting on a hatch when the panga engine exploded, scalding my back with hot radiator water. The captain cursed a blue streak and then apologized. He worked on the engine for an hour or so, filled the radiator with sea water and got us underway again. He grumbled that the salt water might damage the engine and cost him a lot of money.

The captain made up for it later. At a particularly beautiful cove I asked him to stop and he edged the boat close enough for me to wade to shore. We agreed to meet at his friend's homestead about a mile down the beach. After exploring the rainforest around an empty bush house, I watched a Tico man drying cacao (chocolate) beans on a straw mat in the sun. Back at the beach I was dying of thirst, having forgotten to bring a beer with me. Then I noticed the captain swimming toward me. He held an ice cold bottle of beer out of the lukewarm water while doing a backstroke.

"Now this is what I call service," I applauded.

I gave him a bonus for the trip, hoping it would help with the cost of repairs, but he used the money to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. The prevalent attitude seemed to be live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself.

I kept hearing about a placed called El Picnic. One day I flagged down a taxi passing the hotel (they had no radios) and told the driver to take me there, expecting to find a picnic area. El Picnic turned out to be an dance cantina in the hills above town. It was morning and the place was deserted, but I noticed debris from the previous night: broken glass on the dance floor. I bought a beer from the bored bartender and took it to the al fresco balcony where I was treated to a sweeping view of the two gulfs and the Osa peninsula far in the distance.

That afternoon I wandered around town doing a cantina crawl and I discovered the jail. I stood on tiptoes to peer through the barred window and saw three prisoners with their shirts off. The cell looked like a sweat box. An old man noticed me looking and ambled up behind me.

"Looks pretty hot in there," I said.

"Not so bad," he said.

"Have you been locked up?"

He smiled. "Many times."