About a month ago I found myself with a wonderful opportunity. A great friend of our family told us that if we were going to revisit his family in Costa Rica the time had come, all the stars had lined up. It didn’t take us long to gather our things, check our passports and our flip flops and get on that quick flight to Liberia, Costa Rica. We fly to that airport because it’s way closer to where we would be on the Pacific coast. In the 70s our buddies’ family purchased some property in a remote part of the country on the sands of the western coast. I have never seen such stunning views from a beach side compound.
I can imagine his father and his brothers standing there together making this decision that would forever change the course of their families. They had to talk about how to get the place built, how to get jeep loads of kids, grandmothers, provisions and generators with fuel all without electricity and nearly non-existing roads. I can only imagine the road trips they must have experienced. The first few trips there were not without incident, multiple flat tires, a gas tank with a hole in it from bottoming out in a river crossing, leading to a memory of theirs about a makeshift tube running from the gas tank through the Land Cruiser, over the windshield and into the carburetor.
The family had to be so resourceful and patient to make these long trips, I can only think of them as pioneers staking their claim 53 years ago on what would become this place that we were privileged to visit. Since then a lot of the area around their place has become a national park which makes any further commercial growth very difficult and close to non-existent. That led to a nearly perfect situation for this area to not have too much overfishing, tourism and a very quiet place to chill. I love to see when someone nails a real estate deal that just gets better with every day. His father and his uncles had nailed it.
Javier went down a week before I got there so he could be with his mother while she got moved back into her place in the capitol. He also had a few things for some of the fishermen in the area along with our fishing gear. We didn’t make a lot of plans but one thing we did know is that we planned to fish every day and work the remainder of each day around fishing such as a nap, some lunch, some visiting and hopefully an afternoon fishing excursion.
Our plan came together beautifully. We were at the boat by 5:30 every morning even after my family arrived a week later. Whoever wanted to join us could and did to watch the sun awaken the sea. The fishing was good. We caught yellowfin tuna, rooster fish, red snapper, wahoo and mahi. We saw a mother humpback whale with her baby, another smaller whale and lots of sea turtles coming up for a quick breath of air. There were so many turtles swimming around. We realized that the arrival of thousands of sea turtles needing to lay their eggs on the same beach they themselves were hatched had begun.
The turtles are protected by the government. Various groups from Australia have helped with this quest. We met a guy near the beach, where the turtles were going through this arduous process, who was qualified to be a guide. The only way to get on the beach to watch the eggs being laid is with a guide and at nighttime with a red flashlight. Apparently the turtles are in a trance and can’t see the red light. The turtles weren’t hard to find, they were nearly on top of each other seeking the best place to lay her eggs as close to the exact spot they were hatched.
It was raining pretty hard with lots of lightning strikes nearby so there weren’t many of us on the beach that night. We stopped at a group of mother turtles when the guide told us we could look where the turtles had dug their holes and had begun to lay their eggs. Each turtle leaves 80 to 100 eggs in their hole in the sand so they drop five to eight eggs every few minutes. The eggs are encased with a clear liquid that hardens and protects them from the sea water. If those eggs don’t get crushed by another mother or eaten by a predator or killed from too much water, their hatchlings have a very small chance they will make it from the beach to the ocean where everybody is eagerly awaiting their chance for some tender turtle breakfast. Only about three percent of the babies survive the gambit. It looks like there were 10s of thousands of turtles there so I guess that’s enough for them to survive.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the rain that night but I had a change of shirt so we could find a great restaurant afterwards, not hard to do in Costa Rica.
The next day we headed a little farther north towards the Nicaraguan border not to cross over but because there was a small fishing village we wanted to check out. A day or two later we took the mostly paved road over to Javier’s place. There was a place in the road we weren’t sure would be passable so we wanted to hit that as early in the day as possible in case we had to take the long road around the missing bridge. We were there in the winter, better known as the rainy season, when it usually rains every day around 3. The other season is summer, known as the dry season.
It had been raining fairly regularly before I got there and had not rained much since I arrived so we weren’t sure how much water had accumulated upstream from this river crossing. When we got to the spot in question we watched two other vehicles cross with their land cruisers equipped with snorkels in case the hood of the vehicle went under water. It didn’t look too bad except for the buzzards drying their wings ominously on the banks of the river. We had a rental car that was all wheel drive with pretty aggressive tires on it so we blew right through the deep part, whew.
With two more hours to go weaving and bobbing around people, animals and mopeds we enjoyed the ride while Javier reminisced about past trips down this road when they didn’t get so lucky. The road we were on abruptly ended at a beach with the Pacific Ocean only about 20 yards out. The tide was in so that meant we would be driving on the beach with the water lapping the side of our tires.
We had arrived in paradise, we made it to their family compound. He showed me the ropes and we got the place opened up while we figured out where everyone would sleep. My gang would be arriving in two more days and we wanted everything to be perfect. That place can sleep 21 people so we had plenty of space for everyone but he had some of his family members coming in for the weekend so we wanted everyone to be able to sleep in their favorite rooms. Mimi, Max and Madeline would arrive first, then Mia and Cody would arrive a couple of days later so we had a couple of trips back to the airport. Those trips were opportunities for us to hit the grocery stores as our need for food increased.
We ate that day’s catch from the sea every night but for our breakfasts and lunches we went with more traditional fare. Usually we would have rice with either black or red beans, fried plantains (my new favorite) and a salad. Eating healthy on that trip was easy for the main meals although there were plenty of tempting things to try if a guy didn’t want to eat healthy.
I was very pleasantly surprised at the health conscientious lifestyle that people in Costa Rica displayed. There were lots of organic farms serving produce, lots of Yoga studios and a big awareness of the environment going on around them.
We fished and napped and cooked and ate the next few days away. We spent some time at the grocery store getting everything we thought our gang would enjoy. I love to go to other people’s grocery stores. It’s a good place to get a feel for the place. It was fun figuring out what things written in Spanish were. The picture on the packaging did a terrible job of depicting what was inside. My Spanish is pretty bad but I tried with all I had to communicate without Javier’s help. I did make sure he was close by in case I ran into a snag.
I found out I can understand most of the conversations that I listened to but unless the speaker went really slow and was willing to put my Spanish words together I had a hard time beyond the typical surface questions, I was successful asking for and finding food coloring. Try that sometime. We had to have a tie dye flag to fly on the beach in front of our spot just in case. I could tell that people appreciated my trying and we often had some pretty good laughs about my crummy language skills.
Finally the day came that Mimi and Max and Madeline would arrive. We got rid of the speedy car and rented a van that would hold everyone and their stuff. We were excited to have these guests joining us in this crazy adventure. We made up their beds, cooled down some drinks and had dinner barely prepared so after their journey from home and from the airport they could watch the sunset with no worries.
Next week I will share about that leg of the trip. Until then I hope you can avoid being outside at all costs. I have to keep reminding myself that this too shall pass.
