Pura Vida
Okay, so I’m mostly saving our vacation stories until I can share the photos that go along with them, but for now here are just three historias Costarricenses for your reading pleasure:
Uno: There’s no such thing as an address in Costa Rica—at least, no such thing as a specific, absolute address. When we arrived at the airport we were picked up and driven to Alajuela, the second-largest city after San Jose and the place where we spent our first night, by John—a genial African American who moved to the country over a decade ago and now runs a driving service there. John apparently knows and is known by every single person in the Central Valley area. He greets them all with “Buenas!” even if they have just cut him off on the road, and is inevitably rewarded with a smile because he is, after all, “the only good looking black guy in Alajuela.” In the van, we asked John for a map of the city so we could find our way around that evening, and he sort of hemmed and hawwed. Eventually he handed us a map of the entire country, instead, and when we arrived at our hotel it soon became clear why. The way you describe locations in Costa Rica is by picking a major landmark and then using distances and cardinal directions, like “Our four-room hotel is 100 meters east of the post office.” Or “The restaurant where we had our first dinner and accidentally ordered a rendition of Guantanamera from two traveling troubadours because we were way too polite to say no is 300 meters north of the Quaker church.” Or even “The supermarket that was recently bought over by Walmart, though you wouldn’t know it to look at it, is 50 meters south of the park where, if you are not careful, ripe mangoes will fall from the trees and bean you on the head.”
In San Jose there are at least signed avenues and calles (streets), but no one really uses them to navigate. When we stayed there on our final night in the country we were told that the fantastic Mediterranean restaurant the guy on duty at our delightful hotel was recommending was “three blocks to the left and two blocks to the right.” He handed us a colorful brochure for the restaurant (which was, in fact, marvelous) and while it contained the avenue and calle numbers for the correct intersection, it also informed you that the restaurant was “75 meters east of the Hotel Clarion.”
In Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, where we spent the bulk of our two weeks, there aren’t even such niceties as road signs. You just have to know where the best coffee and chocolate place is, or be shown the bank, or walk around until you find the pharmacy (it’s an incredibly tiny place to begin with, so that’s not very hard). The whole thing is kind of wonderful, although it can be frustrating when you’re trying to get to someplace you’ve never been and the person driving you doesn’t know where it is. The lack of addresses actually made me feel much less anxious about navigating, because I figured out where everything was using visual memory instead of being forced to impose a mental map upon my surroundings. And then, of course, there was really no need to feel anxious about anything. I didn’t wear a watch the whole time I was there, and my only responsibilities were to clean iguana poop, keep the turtles watered, and learn a semester’s worth of Spanish in one week. Easy-peasy.
Dos: Think you’re nervous when your uncle’s had a drop too much to drink and is speeding the family home after dinner? Ever find yourself gripping the door handle with white knuckles when your little sister, who’s just gotten her license, is proudly turning left to take you to the mall despite the fact that there is no left turn? Baby, you ain’t seen nothing till you’re being taken to Cahuita to go snorkeling, and you’re sitting in the back of a truck with no functional seat belts. The truck is driven by a Costa Rican who is both surprisingly concerned about being late (almost every Costa Rican is late almost all the time, but concern over this situation is rare) and deep in very eye-contact-y conversation with the pretty blond tourist sitting next to him. There are loping dogs on the road every 20 meters chasing motorcycles, there are pedestrians and bicyclists avoiding the same gaping potholes and huge rocks on the road your driver is avoiding, and there is no such thing as a lane, so you swerve onto the other side of the road in order to pass other vehicles with abandon, and cars coming in the other direction do the same. It’s almost as bad as when you’re coming back to San Jose through the mountains after dark, in the rain, on a highway with no street lights but an inordinate number of Mack trucks, and your traveling companion, who is gazing out the window, suddenly informs you that a large portion of the road right next to where you were just driving seems to have collapsed down the side of the hill.
But hey, you know: Pura vida. It’s all good.
Tres: When you return to Boston after spending two weeks in Costa Rica and you happen to hear a single cicada singing in the trees as you’re falling asleep or a single sparrow whistling like a fiend as you wake up, it sounds indescribably lonely. The experience is akin to listening to a tiny flute playing an aria all by itself after having a symphony orchestra perform complex movements by Bach 24 hours a day outside your window. You have to reach down to your left shin, where a mosquito bite still itches like mad from when you were bitten on Wednesday, and scratch for a few minutes before you can start to ease the loss of living in the midst of every flying, fluttering, digging, rasping, trilling, chirping thing in the world.