Waking Up in Costa Rica (and a Few Days Later)

 

Just to say… it is a marvelous thing to get on a plane and get off a few hours later in a totally different world.

My daughter and I flew into San Jose, Costa Rica Sunday morning. She leaves for UCLA later this month. It’s been years since I’ve been out of the country. She has never traveled further than Washington, D.C. I wanted her to have that experience before going off to school. I wanted to share that with her.

Here’s the first thing about travel: you have the chance to be completely out of your comfort zone, especially if you make all your arrangements yourself. This can be uncomfortable, but it also opens the door for so much grace.

Everything is new to us here: the money, which is beautiful and different colors. It’s so smart that it’s different colors, the 1000 and 2000 and 10,000 notes (about $2, $4 and $20 respectively). Makes me think that our US money is pretty dull. All those dead presidents? Who decided that anyway?

Once off the airplane at 6:30 am, we had to get money out of the airport ATM, which was easier said than done. Then we had to find the buses that were outside the airport, politely saying no to the taxi drivers who would’ve charged us 10 times more than we needed to pay for the bus.

After a bus to the main bus terminal in the center of town, we had to find a different bus station where the buses to the Eastern part of the country were.

Enter our first angel: a young man with a phone who called us an Uber, waited with us until it came, and sent us on our way.

From there? Two more bus rides (and many more angels who made sure we got on the right buses) and a boat ride to get us to where I woke up this morning: the town of Tortuguero, where the green sea turtles come to lay their eggs every year.

Our room is private, but next to our host’s room. They are a kind couple who have shepherded us through our stay here. Jasmina, our host, made us breakfast each morning: eggs with tomatoes, and handmade tortillas with avocado and cheese.

Rafa, her husband, was our guide for the turtle tour, where we dressed in black to minimize stress on the turtles, and rode bikes to the end of town, to the protected area where the giant turtles lay their eggs.

We were lucky. We saw one turtle slowly make her way down the beach and heave her giant body into the water. A ranger then told Rafa that another turtle was nearby, digging a hole for her eggs.

So we waited. And waited. It takes time to dig a hole that deep, maybe three feet deep and three feet wide.

After the ranger gave the OK, we quietly crouched and watched as she laid dozens of eggs. Once she finished, sand sprayed our faces as she started the hours long task of burying them again.

This was breathtaking. Miraculous. Marvelous. Even holy. The dark sky. The quiet beach. The beautiful turtle, eggs dropping into the sand, her mighty legs covering them up again. And to realize they can live for a hundred years, and always return to this place, this beach, to lay their eggs.

Well. That was one night.

The next day? Rafa our host took us on a boat tour through the canals here. Monkeys. Lizards. Iguanas. Butterflies. The grand caiman lizard, who looks much like a crocodile. We even saw a sloth, high up in a tree.

Along with all this? There was the young man carrying a machete who helped us see iguanas on our walk one day and who cut coconuts off the tree for us and showed us how to drink their water.

There was the boat driver from the all inclusive resort who dropped off his guests and then ferried us back to the proper boat stop, when we somehow were waiting at the wrong one. (There are no roads or cars in Tortuguero; everything comes and goes by boat here.) Who knows how long we would’ve sat there without his help?

There was the driver of the fruit boat who gave us a ride back to town. One of the fruit sellers in the boat gave us a new kind of fruit to try, something like a mango but not. I gave him a big handful of my California almonds.

There was the young man who greeted us warmly when we wandered onto his front porch, thinking that it was the national park office. Turns out that he is a coordinator for a program that does volunteer work throughout the country. We talked about their environmental and service projects and learned so much. He was a little surprised to see us, he said, as he wasn’t expecting anyone that day, but didn’t seem to mind that we let ourselves into his house and woke him up from his nap. Their website is here:www.asvocr.org

All this kindness and beauty since we arrived just three days ago.

Now, as I write this on my phone from the little room where we’ve stayed these last days, we are preparing to head out again, back to the land of cars and buses. We will spend the next few days in Manzanillo, a small town not far from the Panama border. We are a little sunburned but so happy. Onward to the next part of the adventure and all the grace that lies ahead.