“Es peliculas”
“Uh, no hablo espanol”
“Wool-eeee-smitz. Peliculas. Wool-eee-smitz”
“Is it a movie?” I gesture using the charades symbol, winding my hand in a circle around my ear, while making a tube with my other fist in front of my eye. I hope they have charades in Costa Rica, otherwise, I look like a real idiot.
“Si, wool-eee-smitz”
I lean across J, pushing myself out of the passenger seat and towards the two Tico men.
We’ve stopped our SUV at the side of a dirt track that circles the base of the volcano. Alongside, steamy jungle tangles across the landscape, broken occasionally by an open field dotted with herds of grazing skeletal cows. It is lush and abundantly green. Even the brown of the tree trunks is masked by the chaos of vines enveloping the foliage.
The unpaved, rock-strewn path snakes 25km around the volcano, which rises out of the forest, and towers over life below. Scars and battle wounds dot its flanks in the form of ash and cinder flows.
Normally, we would be the only car out here. Yet, like a mirage, a cavalcade befitting a President of a Very-Important-Country bears down on us and we find ourselves accompanied by a travelling circus of vans, lorries and buses. The back doors are rolled up to reveal some serious looking camera equipment – mikes, booms, lenses, stands and those white screens you see lackies holding to better illuminate every feature of the movie star’s face.
On the hill opposite, a lunar looking structure is under construction. A golden timber frame covered, in places, by cream canvas. It appears, to my admittedly untrained eye, to be a spaceship. So far, so normal, then.
The procession pulls up, and minions emerge to scurry over the dust, carrying metal poles, frames and risers. Some sport earpieces and official-looking badges on lanyards around their necks. Others are muscled and clad in tight white T-shirts. Arms folded, they guard the crash-landed rocket.
And then it dawns.
“Wool-eee-smitz”, the Tico man repeats.
“Wait, do you mean Will Smith?”
“Si! Si! Wool-eee-smitz!”
And sure enough, in rural Costa Rica, at least three hours from a city, we’ve stumbled on the latest Will Smith movie set.
