BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH AND I went to Costa Rica last week.

Oh, wait.

You didn’t think People’s 2015 Sexiest Man Alive and I went there together, did you? Where do you get those crazy ideas?

We were in Ecotopia at the same time, but you know, in different places with different people doing different things. Separately. But we both saw a lot of green stuff there.

If Eskimos have fifty words for snow (yes, the myth is true), then Ticos should have at least a hundred words for “green,” given the vegetation soaking up hundred inches of rainfall annually.

I’m a professional artist, so I took up the green gauntlet.

When I travel, my pencil and sketchpad go too, providing hours of peace and solitude. (I even wrote about it for BACKPACKER.) Nobody dares to interrupt an artist, for fear of extinguishing their creative spark.

Shhhhh! I’m drawing jungle plants!

Actually, spark-extinguishing wasn’t a problem on this trip. There are no sparks in the rainforest. It’s so wet in Costa Rica that even the tree frogs wear rain slickers.

All those downpours make gardening a cinch.

There was a yellow-flag iris hedge at our lodge. Nobody bothered to prune it. That would just piss it off.

Artistic (and life) lesson here: You can’t draw the whole jungle all at once. So concentrate on the details

We also visited Chilamate, in north Costa Rica. It’s bisected by the Sarapiqui River, which winds capriciously through the undergrowth..

This hanging bridge replaced one that was battered and obliterated by a 2009 earthquake. Fortunately the green macaws (shown) could remain airborne until the shaking subsided.

My closest call with Bennie Cumberbatch (he calls me Petey!) came in the town of La Fortuna, in the shadow of the Arenal volcano. Sometimes I felt as if I could actually sense his presence!

Oh well. It wasn’t meant to be.

But I did meet this little cutie.

We both survived the encounter.

On second though, maybe I was in Costa Rica with Joseph Conrad.

This sounds very familiar:

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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