Everything Has Beauty, Not Everyone Sees It : Costa Rica

8/3/17

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. 

Man is the only being who knows he is alone." - Octavio Paz 

And I'm off to Costa Rica! I can't wait to get out of my comfort zone again.

This time, I'm heading to a part of the world I've never been to before, where they speak a language I don't know. My best friend Brie suggested that I go, and she always knows best. 

A rough itinerary of my route includes:

La Fortuna/Arenal volcano, Monteverde, and Manuel Antonio national park area

I've been in PA school for a year now, and this is a much-needed break. I'm so used to studying and being in class all day that I can't wait to change my method of thinking and focus on being resourceful, on my own, and without a schedule.

My connecting flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Jose was delayed, and I met a few people in the terminal who would be going to the same place that I was. I met a new friend from Peru, but living in Costa Rica. He gave me a fortune from his lunch that said: "everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." That little slip of paper was incidental to him, but special to me.

We soon learned the flight was delayed due to missing pilots. In fact, the whole terminal was missing pilots. They called in the reserve pilots, who had 2 hours to arrive. If they didn’t, we’d have to wait for the next one to arrive in a new 2 hour period. I sat on the airport floor with fellow solo travelers.

            When I finally arrived in San Jose, most all of the buses to La Fortuna that I was planning to take were long gone. I no longer had an idea of the bus schedule, and I knew that any bus option I could take now would be hours longer. I found my way to the taxi terminal of the airport to reach the Alajuela bus stop a few miles away, which would take me to La Fortuna by bus. At the local bus terminal, no one spoke English. Through a lot of hand motions and writing of city names, I bought a ticket to take me to a hub in Ciudad Quesada, where I could catch a connecting bus to La Fortuna.  

I sat next to a 17-year-old pharmacy student, and she gave me some travel tips and wrote down Costa Rican specialties for me to try. She also called about five friends who were in school with her (but their hometowns were near the places where I was going on my trip) and asked them where I should go. Due to language barriers, we couldn’t speak about much, but we did connect over her chemistry book and could communicate our common interest in science and pharmacology. 

my new friend

We rode for hours on the windy mountainous roads. I was in shock at how green the landscape was, and how dramatic the cliffs went down from the side of the road. We overlooked gorgeous fields and mountains.

My new friend was so sweet to wait the 45+ minutes with me to make sure I caught my second bus. As it became nighttime, the second bus was two times as full of people and had absolutely no airflow, imagine sweating people crammed in like sardines for hours of winding dirt roads with mosquitos and other bugs crawling on you. There were cars rushing past us, even getting on narrow one-lane bridges...

          
I finally arrived in La Fortuna and navigated to my hostel among the downtown. After spending more time in the town, I learned that safety is not a terribly high concern there, but you never really know and should always assume that a place is unsafe.   If there’s one thing I’ve learned to do in this type of situation (arriving alone in a foreign city at night, not knowing where you’re going, with all your possessions on your back), it’s that you walk quickly and ask innocent-looking people directions instead of pulling out your phone or a map and being unaware.

            Settling into my hostel, I met a girl from Alberta, Canada named Nicole. We got so quickly into talking about our routes in Costa Rica, planning fun adventures we could do together, and what we each hoped to do in the next few days that we forgot to even ask each other’s names! That night we went to dinner and enjoyed a pitcher of sangria. Our waiter at the restaurant repeatedly asked Nicole and me to come with him and his friends to the ‘hot springs,’ and we both got a taste of the Costa Rica male 'forwardness' we would be dealing with for each of our trips. 

8/4/17 

My first morning in CR, Nicole and I got breakfast at the hostel and planned our day. First, we went to meet with Danny, a tour-guide in the area who is a friend of Nicole's friend from her previous travels. He gave us great tips on what to do that day, where to find the local swimming holes, and some deals on booking our ziplining adventures, and the ‘two volcanoes extreme hike’ we would do the following day.  He also told us about ‘Magic Mountain’ bar, where the locals love to go for dancing, and gave us full access to the hostel he works at and invited us there for drinks that night.

Downtown La Fortuna

            Nicole and I set out to hike to La Fortuna Waterfall knowing it would be a long trek. It was so incredibly hot and humid, and a good 6 miles (all uphill) to the top of the waterfall. 

A "shy and sensitive" Costa Rican Fern Plant

Jaguar Crossing...

            We met some  dogs on the way that took a liking to us and walked with us, including a  puppy that Nicole and I could barely part with…

 

            Just before arriving at the waterfall, we stopped at this little restaurant and both got frozen coffees with ground mint leaves in them.  I’m not sure whether it was the fatigue, jet lag, or extreme heat talking but it was absolutely incredible. 

            Sitting in the restaurant, my contact tore and became displaced in my eye. I spent about 40 minutes trying to find it in my eye and couldn’t. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I didn’t really have any options and had nothing to fix it with because this has never happened to me before. We kept hiking, and I asked a local to borrow her visine drops (desperate times call for desperate measures…). Even a visine wash didn’t help, and then it became a team effort with Nicole to find and remove my lost/broken contact. Nicole had just met me the day before, and now she had to pull something out of my eye. 

            If you wear contacts, you know that wearing just one of them will mess with your depth perception and you feel a little bit intoxicated.  

So, what would be the most ironic thing for me to have to do at this very moment in time? Well, it would probably be me having to go, without my vision on one side, down and back up 500+ slippery wet stairs next to a waterfall...

La Fortuna falls is truly amazing. It’s ~100m high and so powerful that you can hardly swim in its wake.  The water is crystal clear and it’s surrounded by jungle and vines. 

Next we went to El Salto, a local favorite swimming hole. Some of the locals were doing flips off the rope swing or riding it upside down. I went off a few times and loved it, it was such a gorgeous river to land in.

finding my way out..

We trekked over a mile back to the hostel and then had dinner at a soda (a local and very affordable restaurant).  

After dinner, we went to the hostel our new friend Danny works at, and spent time at the poolside bar. The bartender kept giving us free alcohol, and glasses of each of the Costa Rican specialties. Guaro is liquor made from sugar cane and tastes like vodka. The next was chili guaro, which is a mixture of hot sauce, chili, and spices with and tastes like the devil. We had Imperial and Pilsen, which are the typical Costa Rican beers.

Before long, she and I were pouring alcohol and playing the dance music for the bar. There was a rainy-season-downpour going on around us. We rode in their friend’s car to the local bar, Magic Mountain, and walked in to see a magnificent scene of about 40 locals dancing the most perfect Cumbia and Salsa. It was amazing to watch all those people dancing so well, and in sync.