On Repeat

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Costa Rica, family, family travel, Jaco, Manuel Antonio National Park, repeat travel

I’ve written before about my penchant for repeat travel. I don’t really understand people who check places off a list, who believe that going anywhere more than once is a waste of time, money, or a chance to bolster a count of some kind. Some travelers – I am clearly one! – happily return to places they have enjoyed (and even places they have not), perhaps to deepen an understanding or maybe to change their minds about a subpar initial experience. (Believe me, there is no value judgment intended here; I want to keep seeing new places as much as anyone else.)

Much of the last two-plus years has been a more painful exercise in repetition, not just in the travel realm, and when I looked back at where I had gone since my last post in July of 2021, I couldn’t help but see many of the same places over and over again. There were good reasons for that – family most of all – but the main one was that we hadn’t been able to really spread our wings in all that time.

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Now, I’ve recently returned from my first journey out of the country since February of 2020 and it was, you guessed it, a repeat: my third trip to Costa Rica. It was the least ambitious of my forays there but still a great way to triangulate what I know about this small Central American country. Like many, we have cancelled our fair share of travel plans in the last few years, so when my son and his wife asked if I wanted to join them on a trip in late April, I jumped at the chance. They had their own travel goal: getting one final country stamp in their daughter’s passport before she turned two and had to start paying for a ticket!

Our family’s initial trip to Costa Rica was twenty years ago, a spring break trip with our three kids to the west coast of the country and our first experience with eco-tourism. The hotel had no A/C or TV, was strategically built into a jungly hillside to catch ocean breezes and optimally manage water and waste, and served food from sustainable and organic sources.

At our kids’ ages at the time, it helped that it was also a veritable wildlife refuge, with howler monkeys in the trees outside our room and giant iguanas that roamed the pool deck. A short jaunt down the road was Manuel Antonio National Park, a tiny gem that we spent several days exploring with knowledgeable nature guides.

We returned in 2005 to spend nine days of our Christmas break volunteering in a small village in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. This was not the same cushy vacation we’d had a few years earlier! We stayed in a rustic motel that cost $10/night, where my daughter and I found a spider the size of my fist in the ice-cold shower on day one. We dug trenches for pipes, mixed concrete by hand, moved endless piles of cement blocks, painted, hammered, and cleaned.

Overseas volunteer trips were in their infancy at the time, and we have always been happy we took such a trip before many of these ventures became little more than vanity projects. We felt truly connected with the villagers who worked alongside us for a week and a half, and we were required to take our work cues from them, whether or not we might do it that way at home. It was a valuable lesson in servant leadership. As simplistic and hyperbolic as it may sound, I still believe this trip was the initial driver for our children’s later careers and other life choices.

Last month’s excursion had no such lofty ambitions, unless bonding with my granddaughter and her parents counts (I think it does, actually!). This time, as we did on the first visit, we spent a day near San Jose to recharge after the long trip with a toddler. We were especially happy with that plan after our flight was delayed, our car rental became a series of mishaps, and we reached our hotel after midnight.

The rest of our days – again, on the west coast, this time in Jacó – were pure vacation as we walked the beach, played in the pool, and ambled into and around the small town for groceries, dining, and of course, ice cream. In a full-circle kind of outing on our last day, we took little E to revisit the eco-resort as well as Manuel Antonio National Park, and both were just as delightful as they were when her daddy was 14 years old!

It felt great to break the seal on staying put in the U.S. Now I’m itching for more, so I’ll need to twist J’s arm to get back out there in the near future. Until then, I’m savoring one more repeat stamp, even if I’ve got a couple of new ones in mind for this year!

In the Costa Rican Cloud Forest

Tags

Costa Rica, culture, monteverde, pura vida, servant learning, volunteering, work tours

In a post on family travel a few months ago, I briefly introduced the other eight feet that wander the globe with me from time to time. While we’ve had many good vacation times overseas, the five of us have also spent some time volunteering abroad, a vastly different way to really learn about other lands and cultures.

We all agree that our first and longest work tour was the best – a nine-day building trip in the Monteverde area of Costa Rica. We had been to the country before and remembered technicolor sunsets over the Pacific, ziplining through the jungle canopy, and nature walks in the rainforest, but nothing prepared us for the level of poverty we would experience for a week and a half the second time. This trip was the polar opposite of our previous one and, as we soon found out, it was quite different from our life here at home, too.

We arrived in Santa Elena, deep in the Monteverde cloud forest, to heavy rains. The road into the town was unpaved, and even when wet, its firm ridges rattled our van and our brains for what seemed like an eternity. We dropped our bags in the spartan rooms we were assigned, let out tiny screams when we spied a gigantic spider in the shower and tiny sighs when we felt the thin, rock-hard beds, and then bolted out to walk into town to find food and an internet café.

Water rushed down the hill, swirling around our ankles and backing up into the kiosks set up along the well-traveled route. This was hint number one of the dirt to come. Staying positive, we loaded up on beverages and snacks and returned to our simple accommodations to start a routine that we would follow for the next nine evenings: taking turns showering off the day’s grit and then assembling for beers in a courtyard of plastic chairs.

Each morning we would ride for over an hour on rutted dirt roads into a tiny village in the hills. Here, our overall goals were to dig a hole and two trenches for a new septic system, finish the interior of a school lunch building, dig a culvert, and paint a community center. There were no power tools to use; we mixed concrete by hand and transported it by wheelbarrow, both backbreaking jobs.

We framed walls, tiled floors and countertops, built bookcases, cleared a landslide (and felt a powerful temblor one afternoon) and laid pipe in our new trenches. Yes, we were exhausted. And filthy.

We worked under a volunteer philosophy called servant learning in which we were asked to follow local instructions and leadership; we were there to provide manpower and friendship, not control. Oftentimes, the work did not progress in a way we ever-so-efficient Americans were accustomed to. We moved concrete blocks into a pile to make room to dig trenches, then had to move them again to build walls. We built walls that had to be deconstructed when room measurements were inaccurate.

We cemented a floor before someone mentioned we needed to run pipes under a counter. We had to chisel out spaces for electric sockets, hacking into 2x4s and drywall. With no levels available, we eyeballed our shelves for squareness; once propped on the uneven floors, that notion proved moot anyway.

And we found all sorts of interesting things in our new trenches!

Beyond the work, we forged a deep affection for the villagers. At first, they were shy, speaking in quiet voices with eyes lowered. They cooked us tiny tasty tortillas for lunch each day and worked alongside us before and after the meals. They were masters of their own domain, and even though we thought we knew better, most of the time their ways were the best ways to get things done. As the days passed and we worked together for hours on end, the formality began to crack and we laughed with our new friends, the adults sharing a smile over a wheelbarrow gone rogue and the kids rustling up impromptu soccer games when they got bored digging holes.

At the end of our work tour, the villagers arranged a dance party for our final night. With a boom box and tables laden with food, we celebrated our building accomplishments and cemented the brief but deep friendships we had formed. We wore our finest outfits; for all of us, Ticos and Americans alike, this meant a clean shirt and pair of jeans, a simple dress or skirt. Our final night together, we were partners of a different sort, dancing the night away in the simple community room that we and many former volunteers had helped build and raising our glasses together to the national slogan: Pura Vida!

“Pure Life” is not just a saying in Costa Rica; it’s a way of life, a lifestyle quite opposite to the one many of us live at home. It is a life of simplicity – and contentedness with that simplicity. Costa Ricans don’t stress out about things, they are grateful for what they have, they don’t worry or dwell on negatives, and they have a humble and relaxed way of looking at life. Pura Vida expresses a feeling of eternal optimism and, as opposed to what we might feel in their circumstances, they would say and really mean what Pura Vida expresses: “Life is good!”