I didn’t stay at this Beach Resort but the map shows our route in blue to Montezuma.
We thought we were staying in Montezuma but the taxi driver kept driving after Montezuma and Los Cedros was the real destination. Which is just a beach and a little road. And our quaint bungalows.
I only found myself walking down a dirt road to Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula because I have an awesome friend whose studies have led her to a specific teacher in this specific area of Costa Rica. I selfishly volunteered to deliver her safely there and back and that’s how we ended up meeting in the Charlotte Airport (in the bathroom of all meet-cutes), flying over the Keys, over Cuba to Central America. How we ended up having our names called to board a 12 seater plane and how the plane landed in Tambor in a fenced-off airfield with a folding table for check-in and a taxi waiting to drive us a bumpy 40 minutes to a grocery store in Cobano and eventually, to our lodge which was a tree-covered oasis with the scariest sounding monkeys I have ever heard.
The plan was that while my friend took her aerial yoga training courses, I would explore, relax and read and write. We really were pretty isolated from the two “cities” on either side of us so I would walk in the morning until it got hot and then read until she got back. Somehow, we managed to squeeze in a few adventures like walking down a seriously steep hill from a treehouse brewery, avoiding the sliding cars who couldn’t quite make it to the top and visiting the falls and the towns of Montezuma and Cabuya.
But I wrote a little too, musing about my beach walks and generally being amazed that I was there.
Walk One/Day One
My first walk on the beach was, hot. 45 and out of shape and no longer embracing the heat, I had to work very hard to embrace the heat. Just embrace the fucking heat, I thought to myself as I took in the beautiful view.
Don’t get lost, don’t die. Don’t trip on the rocks and be stuck here alone with a bleeding leg. Don’t ruin this trip for your friend by breaking an ankle. Don’t dive in the water alone or someone will start shouting in inexplicable Spanish while you wave your arms in a dumbshow of “What? I can’t hear you?” Until you are swallowed whole by a shark.
Oh the mountains we have to climb in our psyche! Oh the trips and traps of the brain!
Perhaps, I thought, I could make it all the way to Montezuma on the beach.
At high tide, I would have had to take my chances walking along the dusty road to each sandy beach, avoiding the trucks and motorbikes vying for the same lane. But at low tide, I found I was able to walk over patches of rocks and shells for a mile or so until I found myself, finally, in an impassable backyard containing a tent and a lean-to and a barking dog.
I stood there wondering how brave to be. (Is this not one of life’s constant questions?) A barking dog is usually my signal to stop. Anyway, I reasoned, after that was a field of rocks too long to climb past, unless this happened to be some sort of pharmaceutical commercial.
I love the way those pharma-actors embrace their imagined disease and the way they sigh and put their hands on their hips in the sunshine, doing amazing outdoor things like I’m doing right now. Damn, they’re enjoying life! And here I am, sans pharmaceuticals, climbing rocks and feeling fine. Blessing abound!
Another bark jolts me back to reality and I go back the way I came.
This time though, I tried to tune in and absorb what I was seeing. I stopped and watched the deep waves. I thought about the color turquoise for awhile and its evolution from nature to sports jerseys representing tropical cities and I felt sorry for turquoise. I enjoyed the laughter and various languages of the vacationers playing soccer on the low tide of the beach.
I thought I should try to narrate my journey in the third person. Practice seeing the world that way.
But here I quickly met a little rivulet connecting the river to the ocean. And my mind seized up - is this a rivulet? What else would you call it? And I realized - I don’t have shit for vocabulary when it comes to the natural world. Sure, I like going out in it, but I can’t name it. Aren’t I supposed to like words?
I tried again. She climbed carefully but with strong steps, over the black … lava/volcanic rocks?? I’m pretty sure they’re volcanic but I’m no geologist. (a quick google brings me the non-poetic answer of calc-alkaline basalts and andesitic flows with subordinate pyroclastic rocks. So what am I supposed to do with that?)
She walked with purposeful strides to the beach’s end in a path of palm trees and the _____ trees and the _____ plants, surrounding her. The flutter of a… a … big … bluejay looking creature? With a Quail thingy on its head.. She had never seen before. Calling its mates … and of course she knows a hummingbird when she sees one!
No, that was just a bit of palm with a speck of light on it. Damnit, my eyesight is getting worse. The night before, I swore I saw a man taking underwater pictures and was embarrassed to be told it was just a pelican.
My knowledge of nature, I realized, is perhaps a serious kink in my literary abilities. Even reading, I have always liked the sound of the passages that focus on the hyacinth or the smell of pinks still in the air, but honestly, they conjure no actual images. Inscrutable as music.. but still meaningful.
Following the .. rivulet, we’ll call it, I found the mouth of the river right there, clear water, sitting still and waiting, I suppose, for the tide. I found here a shady place to observe and wonder, wonder and observe. At the bottom of the pond was either a large sand-dollar, a small sting ray or leaf. Again, what does it matter, no words, no eyesight.
I touched the water with a palm leaf and watched the ripples extend all the way across, and I began instead to make a list of my favorite but most overused images/metaphors, ripples in the water being, currently, at the forefront of that list. All things beaches really. They are magical and time really does stand still on a beach. And there are sunsets and tides and waves and footprints.
Footprints in the sand - there’s another metaphorical gem. Also a classic story of Jesus either abandoning you or carrying you depending on your point of view. The poem doesn’t say anything about having the strength to perservere because you are awesome, but I think that’s the point, right? God is supposed to be the strength that keeps you going. Or If your friends help you out, then they’re Jesus, carrying you. Of course, this can be true, this idea of being carried sometimes, but like all things that can fit on the back of a prayer card or a bumper sticker, it’s just generally not enough for me.
Footprints, though. Toes in the sand. Getting past the obvious metaphors… it takes work!
I had an English professor once who stopped in the middle of his lecture and said, “Shwew. Don’t get me started on shoes.” And I totally knew what he meant.
These metaphors are easy because they work - they can go on and on. They can be like, well, shoes, that carry you from one life to the next. But they can make you lazy.
The question is, I pondered, watching the ripples grow, am I progressing in my ability to maneuver these metaphors and expand them into something worth writing about? Does everyone feel poetic at the ocean? Becky? Do you? Everyone does, right? That’s the siren’s call. But that’s the thing about the siren’s call, it makes you lazy.
What I really noticed about my footprints on this walk was that, on this empty beach, I had walked a good distance and crossed those lovely volcanic rocks, only to turn around and be met by my own feet going in the opposite direction. And, I suppose, after a few days, my footprints would cross each other a lot. (Herein popped the image of those Goofy cartoons where he would learn to dance by putting footprints on the ground going in every direction. It’s all a dance, right?)
And though it’s an overused metaphor, it was a decent representation of my leaving home and returning, eventually following the same footsteps home that had brought me here and making the same journey from the airport, with the same cab driver, only the sun was in a different place - rising to meet me in colors rich and pink.
And of course the footsteps all fade, that’s inherent in the sand metaphor, but it’s nice to recognize sometimes that you’ve even been on a journey at all. That these jungle roads and slippery pebbles, jagged rocks and gravel drives, runways, freeways and driveways are the qualities of not just eras of our lives but of the hours and minutes of every day.
Seeing my own footprints just reminded me that I was there. And that’s no small thing.
Walk 2 /Day 2
Perhaps, I thought, today, I could make it all the way to Cabuya on the beach.
I sort of had a plan. I had filled my super hip fanny pack with my wallet and phone and this seemed to spur my confidence. I’d walked this far. Maybe I could make it the 3km (the bungalow owner had said) down the beach to the next town without having to walk the dirt roads. No water? Oops. No problem. No turning back now.
One possible goal of this trip would be to live, instead, like Hemingway for 6 days - but that’s hardly enough time, or worth the hangover. He would have been able to nurse that for weeks and avoid his wife for a month if he felt like fishing for that long.
The goal here was to simply expand, wasn’t it? A trip like this is here for you to think and make space (for god only knows what’s coming right? and for yourself in the freight train of daily life) and to go a little further.
But toward what? It doesn’t have to be a glass ceiling or a salary or a certain level of beauty or amount of “followers” (Jesus that’s a creepy word). It’s really all about expanding your experiences and growing as a person. Am I growing as a person just by walking on the beach for a few days, I wondered? Should I get a tattoo?
I was about 2km in, dreaming of the great feminist literary heroines and moving forward in that mesmerized phase of walking, half looking at my feet, half the foamy incursions of the ocean, when my eyes glanced the horizon and saw the surprising vision of a roadblock - 5 or 6 cows who created a wall between rocky sea and inland property.
Stopping only momentarily, I began to slowly approach the cows, assuming I could go around the rocks and outsmart the dopey things. But as I closed in I made the fateful mistake of locking eyes with one of the beasts. He cocked his head, yes he did, and it was as if he double-dog dared me to go around that way. I don’t know about you, but I have never been one to take an animal up on a double-dog dare. And so it was that I was given another path, pushed inwards through a camping ground to the main dusty road.
These off-ramps in life, are all part of the journey aren’t they, I thought, with decided optimism, heat be damned. And despite the lengths of road where there was nothing to see, and the moments of minor terror where two trucks were vying to pass each other and I was forced to bolt across the street to an off-road to avoid being killed, I did happen upon the largest tree in Cabuya, easily 10-12 feet wide - AND I’d seen it on the internet as a place of interest! So, you know, that made it legit. So far, so good.
Off-roads and detours forever!
ATV parade! Back to the beach!
One amazing thing about these beaches is just the amount of evening shade they get from the trees. But it was nearing noon and at the next beach outlet, I realized it was probably time to hydrate so I headed back to the main road once more.
After a smoothie at a restaurant where I met a man who moved there from D.C., I realized that there were no taxis in this area and despite my texting our previous drivers on WhatsApp, it didn’t look like it was going to happen. I maybe could have panicked, but since I didn’t have any children with me, I just walked, unperturbed, a long hot 20+ minutes in the still-further-away-from-my-place direction until I find an unbelievable open-jungle-chocolate-cafe - you heard me. Here a lovely, English-speaking Italian gave me a spoonful of 75% dark chocolate and informed me with great love that there was a bus and that if it would arrive, it would be arriving in 15 minutes in the other direction, at the Super Chico. There’s nothing you can’t do when children aren’t whining at you while you’re doing it.
And that’s no shade to the kids. I’m just saying, Have you been to Disney World? Have you stood in the relentless humidity and sun in Animal Kingdom where there’s no shade and it’s 100 degrees with a baby who kicks off his shoes constantly and is sitting in a dirty diaper while an 11-year-old rolls her eyes and whines that she has a headache and no one is doing the thing she wants to do and an 8-year-old is so red in the face from the heat that someone yells at you to put sunscreen on her, which of course you have done because you’re not a fucking idiot? Which leads you to wonder why there are so many fucking idiots that don’t put sunscreen on their kids that you have to get yelled at and mistaken for a bad parent when all you’ve done is not be on top of every goddamn thing every second for everyone! And then you pull a cool rag and a bottle of water and a mint and a diaper and an Advil and a snack bar out of your Mary Poppins bag that miraculously holds everything everyone needs and here’s the thing - no one questions it or marvels at the wish that just appeared in front of them and instead you all continue on as if you aren’t a miracle and run instead further into the craziest jungle of fiction and humanity ever amassed by man? Has that happened to you?
The point is, I’m a miracle, I thought. And if I can do that, I can walk these 15 minutes back to this bus, and if there’s no bus, I’ll drink water and walk home. I’ll just be late. And my friend who will be at our room that I have the key to will be fine. Because she too is a grown-ass woman with no kids to care for right now.
And then how do you explain the miracle that is this: I am melting at the “bus stop”/ store when the owners of our lodge drive up and recognize me! I tell them I am waiting for the bus and they tell me of course, they will drive me back to the lodge. I even get to stop (as I wrote in the last installment about errand-dates) at the fishmonger with them and arrive just in time to greet my friend, back from our respective adventures, each with a story to tell. And I didn’t have to take the bus.
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Costa Rica Travel Bites: (Naming rights for this section still available)
Howler monkeys sound like you’re about to be eaten by lions.
People still stick out their thumbs for rides here
Dogs are all loose but very well behaved
The stars were bright - and the number of crabs that scattered when you turned on your flashlight was disturbing.
WhatsApp and Google translate worked for everything
Glad we didn’t take the 5-hour bus ride from the airport on those roads!
What a trip! A few events (very few actual, but several similar) remind me of Guatemala! I felt like I was right there with you!
Oh my; I have no words but thank you for sharing your journey! You had me howling (but not as loud as the monkeys)! If you were my daughter, I would never want you to leave home again for fear of “where-in-hell are you traveling to?”
After reading your adventures I can only say that I’m glad you are home safely and alive to experience another Disney adventure with the cute family of six who live across the street from you!
Keep your words flowing!