February 2012
7 posts
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples...”
– Maya Angelou
We woke up 10 minutes before our 5am alarm, silently dressing in the dark and hoisting heavy, tightly packed bags onto our shoulders. After 90 days in Costa Rica it was time to leave the country in order to renew our travel visas, so we were heading north to Nicaragua for at least 72 hours. The animals were staying at the Beach House, guarded over by Granjero, and we pouted as we gave them each...
“Searching for the truth among the lying
And answered when you’ve learned the...”
– George Harrison
According to our tide calendar, this morning around 11:30 was to be the lowest tide of the month. We have been waiting for a low, low tide so that we can walk across the exposed ocean floor to Cemetery Island: the beautiful tuft of trees floating on the horizon where the local Ticos are laid to rest (pictured below at high tide).
Both of us felt like we had stepped into an apocalyptic movie. The...
“I need to laugh, and when the sun is out I’ve got something I can laugh...”
– The Beatles
We have been waking up at sunrise. Every morning at 6:00 sharp, a reflected sunbeam bounces off of the ocean and directly into our bedroom. Sometimes we awake to a red sun gently bathing the whole atmosphere in a warm, orange glow, but usually it is a jarring streak of blinding, white light that pierces through our sleepy eyelids and sets our days into motion.
This early morning photo was...
January 2012
14 posts
“It is by chance that we met, by choice that we became friends.”
– Unknown
Meet Luna, the full-figured, sweet-faced canine who lives at the Beach House regardless of who is paying the rent. She has no master, but manages to stay well fed by locals and tourists alike by batting her honey eyes and swinging her flirtatious tail. To the locals, she is known as Luna Llena (Full Moon), a funny pun explaining her orb like mid-section, but to us she is known as Marley’s...
“This mess is a place!”
– Unknown
We looked at each other and smiled, this was it. No more packing and no more moving until we went back to Chicago. The Beach House was our home for the remainder of our Costa Rica adventure, and a chorus of birds was intent on welcoming us, accompanied by the percussive waves in their spectacular and victorious symphony.
We took a deep breath and prepared to separate our stuff into its...
“Beware the bareness of a busy life.”
– Socrates
The days pass lazily at The Farmhouse (the blaring sun may invigorate the banaño trees but it wilts the mammalian inhabitants). I will admit, however, that Jon and I have adapted pretty well to the leisurely pace of life here. When I am not curled up in the hammock with Tom Sawyer, I am feeding papaya skins to the horses, watering the zucchinis, or sweeping the floors to revel in the shine of the...
“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that...”
– Unknown
The car came to get us and we piled everything in-Clover on my lap, Marley on Jon’s, Dylan somehow with a seat all to himself-and headed down the dusty Road to Montezuma. The Farmhouse is invisible from the road, but we remembered where to turn, and then pointed to a small sign, hand-painted with the word perros, nailed to a gate. We started up the path, two lines of grass worn by the occasional...
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that...”
– Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Everything we have done so far has required us to turn right out of our cabina: Café el Coyote, the grocery store, the river, the ocean, Montezuma, even Granjero’s farm, all are a la derecha. We are leaving the cabina soon, and agreed that we should see what lies to the left before we go, so we awoke early on a Monday morning excited to make a ton of terrible Zoolander jokes about spending our...
“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is...”
– Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
We sat in Café el Coyote with two Ticos from Cabuya, two Gringos from San Francisco and two bottles of red wine. Our liquid courage soon turned the conversation towards politics, and luckily, in Latin culture, the passionate presentation of my line of reasoning is not as easily confused for anger as it often is back home. I am definitely an idealist, and I don’t believe that the meaning of life...
“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new...”
– Benjamin Franklin
It was New Year’s Eve and our plan was to go to Montezuma (pictured above) with Granjero and his daughters. Jon put on his blue, button-down “date shirt” and I shimmied in to the tiniest dress I had packed, artfully embellishing my eyebrows and unwinding my hair from its perpetual braid before adding a coat of pink gloss to my lips (which were twitching with effort as I mentally practiced...
December 2011
18 posts
“Whatever you are doing at any time you are physically modifying your brain to...”
– Athene’s Theory of Everything
We are only a few weeks in and we have officially established a routine. The day begins with our iguana, Roofie (as we have accurately named him), waking up to run circles in the ceiling above our bed. This flurry of activity is quickly followed by loud, wailing cries from both of the cats, who have been up since dawn, pacing in front of the door, waiting to get outside. Marley is the first one...
“Feliz Navidad de los Caminantes las Selva!”
– Merry Christmas from the Jungle Walkers!
Here in Costa Rica Christmas is celebrated today, December 24th, and the atmosphere is filled with a tingle of excitement and the wafting fumes of authentic culinary wonders. The Tico families all gather to feast and toast, but since we have no family here to feast or toast with, we planned our own little celebration. Jon is currently cooking up some delicious smelling Italian food that we plan...
“Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad...”
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
We awoke early and abruptly to Marley barking like a maniac. Shaking off his sleepy fog, Jon momentarily wrestled with the bolts on the porch door before throwing it open and following our rowdy dog onto the balcony to identify the cause of the ruckus. There, standing in our front yard, was our soon-to-be-landlord (I will call him Granjero) accompanied by his three dogs....
“He was a wise man who invented beer.”
– Plato
We approached the bar, our steps becoming subconsciously slower as we recognized the droning beat of techno music. Turning the corner, we saw the bar exploding with neon lights and the kind of dance beats we had grown to know and hate back in the States. A motorcycle zoomed past, uprooting a cloud of dust that shadowed the tight circles of people laughing and drinking in the street. We peeked...
“The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.”
– Isak Dinesen
Upon arrival, the water was still past the rocks, but close enough that we were determined to get into it. We climbed over the slippery stones that our feet were starting to acclimate too, and sunk into the warm ocean water. We found some flat rocks to sit on and talked as the tide gently nudged at our lower backs. We continued this way, splashing our faces with the salty water, until the tide...
“And he puzzled and puzzled ‘till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch...”
– Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It is blowing my mind that it is December. December in my mind is a stressful time full of shopping, scraping windshields and packing on layers of clothes to attend multitudes of holiday parties where I pack on layers of fat. ‘Tis the season.
Here in Cabuya there are no commercialized shopping deals or parties, and it’s too hot even when my only layer of clothing is a bikini....
“our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.”
– Albert Einstein
It was the low tide, rocky time of day and the clouds were heavy, so instead of swimming I curled up on the sand with my book while Jon and Marley took to exploring the driftwood. By now we were used to the fish and lobster carcasses washed ashore the night before and picked clean by the vultures, but today we had the pleasure of finding a giant sea turtle carcass. I know it sounds strange to say...
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely...”
– Lord Byron, The Dark, Blue Sea
We dedicated our Wednesday to not leaving the house. We were here to write after all, and holing oneself up in a creepy cabina is, evidently, the best way to do that. While I stare unblinking at the computer screen and Jon strums his guitar, the other 3/5ths of our family takes the day to enjoy the outdoors. Marley has really taken to his role as a Tico (Costa Rican) guard dog, frequently...
A “casado” is a Spanish term that means “married”, and that is exactly what the plate is; a marriage of basic features for a complete meal.
As beautiful as the days are in Costa Rica, the nights are equally as terrifying. We had grown accustomed to the incessant racket of the iguanas as they ran around in our roof, and we told ourselves that the baby scorpion Clover found a few nights back was...
“The palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”
– Thomas Paine, Common Sense
November 2011
2 posts
We were scared, no doubt about it. We were at least an hour away from Montezuma, which seemed like the Big Apple compared to this isolated little cabin that even the locals couldn’t seem to find. But we sucked it up-we were here, it was paid for, and this was going to be our life for the next month. We opened the windows, illuminating the place a little better and did some exploring. We...
“I had an inheritance from my father
It was the moon and the sun
And though I...”
– Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls