Pura Vida

I have always been a bit nervous about traveling, I suppose it's the fear of the unknown. Although, at age 18, I moved across the country to a place I had seen only twice in my life, alone, so I'm not always a scaredy cat.
Having gone to Italy in February, and now Costa Rica this week, I believe the wanderlust within me has awoken.
The two trips were as vastly different as they could be. In Italy, we spent a week viewing man-made treasures, art in opulent and majestic galleries. We feasted on cheese and wine and pasta, and then feasted again on the rich sights of the Vatican. We took trains to the beautiful cities of Pisa, Florence, Milan, Rome and Montecatini. The days were filled from morning till night, sometimes blending into each other like watercolors, where we had forgotten what we had seen until we could process it days later. It was a week of history, and art, and beauty and family.
This week, in Guanacaste, has also been about beauty and family, but entirely different in its sameness.
We spent the first day and a half here overwhelmed and a little confused. It wasn't what we had expected. We rented a palatial house on a hill, overlooking the bluest ocean I had ever seen. It was luxurious and sinful, and we loved it. Until we stepped out to the town, and found ourselves in streets that seemed impoverished and so entirely laid back that we felt like the stereotypical New Yorkers, with our big SUV, and our big cameras and our big family with big voices. We were startled by the solicitors on the beach, and the prices of the foods that we hold familiar.
But on the third morning, we woke up to the sounds of the howler monkeys, whose voices are deep like gorillas, and are carried throughout the valley like a song. The three older children spent the morning snorkeling, and came home, excitedly sharing stories about blowfish and baby sharks. I drank a fresh orange juice (which is unlike any Orange juice I've had in the states) cocktail by the pool, while the family swam and watched lizards skitter and chat in the eaves of the porch. In the evening, we saw a brush fire that had made a path down the mountainside, and feeling like brave warriors less than curious tourists, we barreled through town and up the mountain to watch the fire burn.
This morning, our tour guide picked us up early, before the heat began its heavy coating over the day, and drove us an hour through sugar cane fields and rice farms, near the base of the volcano, to what would become a day that would iron the wrinkles in my soul.
We spent the better part of the morning on zip lines- ten lines, to be exact. We each rode our own beautiful horse up a very steep and precarious mountain- with Nolan's being as stubborn as he is. So much so, that my own very cooperative horse was forced into a large dry bush, ripping my legs up and causing our guide to be horrified by the blood. At the top of the mountain, we began to do the zip lines. Some were as long as a football field, and even higher than they were long. Each one of the kids flew before me, and though I knew they were nervous, they were brave and happy. I have no fear of heights, so it wasn't daunting to be above the trees of the rainforest, but I had hesitance because of my weight, which is always my biggest hurdle to tackle within myself. By the fourth line, I was jumping like an expert for my attachments, and even speaking my rudimentary Spanish with the guides.
After Ziplining, we each got on our bathing suits and went down the side of the mountain on a quarter mile long water slide, wearing rubber diapers to protect our bottoms from the cement of the slide. At the bottom, we were whisked away to the restaurant, where they served us a five course typical Costa Rican lunch. Our first course was fried plantain chips with black bean dip, and then a squash soup, followed by a salad, a main course of grilled pesca (fish) or pollo (chicken), with jicama and carrots and sweet plantains, and then a dessert of a coconut and pineapple sorbet.
With full bellies, we hiked down to the volcano mud baths, where we slathered each other in hot ashy mud, until our bodies and faces were gray and we resembled aborigines, lined up along the riverbed. Once we had dried to a stiff cement, we bathed in the river, which was cold and clean and happy to rush our ashy remnants away in the current.
We ended in the hot springs, warmed by the pipes from under the ground, much like Saratoga springs, both in smell and in theory.
We lazed in the springs for what seemed like ages, with the canopy of the rainforest overhead, and the sounds of the river and birds as our background music.
The drive back was quiet, while everyone dozed and pondered the day. We passed by the houses that an American would think of as shacks, with people happily sitting on rockers, watching us pass by, and I felt at that moment the meaning of pura vida. In Spanish, the phrase means pure life, and that's what it is here. The days are longer, and lazy and warm and the people here do not believe in work over family, or possessions over happiness. It's a slower way of life, and certainly not for everyone, but I feel more peaceful in the last two days than I have in a long time. We are all sleeping better, and being healthier. The kids have all asked to stay here indefinitely (besides Rhiannon, of course), and we would be lying if we said that temptation weren't as real as can be.
As real as pura vida.