PURA VIDA (costa rica update #3)

Simplicity.  I don't think anybody can doubt the utility of complexity - from sociology to technology, the more complex, the more sophisticated, the better.  Yet wouldn't you agree that there is an intrinsic beauty to simplicity?  Perhaps it awakens the part of ourselves that delights in rolling hills and babbling streams and peaceful quiet.  Usher himself says "it's the simple things in life we forget."  But take simplicity to an extreme and suddenly "simple" comes to mean "stupid" or "backwards".  So then perhaps the perfect balance is to find complexity in utility and simplicity in beauty.

My Costa Rican updates have all been titled Pura Vida, and to anyone who's been to CR, it's a no-brainer.  If ever a country has had a national motto (E pluribus unum?), this is it.  I first heard Pura Vida in the conversations of two ticos waiting to board at Miami International.  Pura vida!  haha one exclaimed as they strutted into line.  I don't know exactly what Pura Vida I was meant to experience in Costa Rica, and certainly I can only stab at it after a week there, but here's a go.

To me, Pura Vida is complexity in utility and simplicity in beauty.  Arrive in CR and you'll find all the trappings of American extravagance: flat screen TV's, mp3 players, kids with cell phones.  Escape the major city though, and nature takes over.  Even the major highways in CR are one-lane as though to minimize Man's adulteration of the nature around them.  Traffic?  No traffic, not at least as long the weather cooperates.  People travel in buses, buses that love to stop along nearly indiscriminate points along the highway.  Jam-packed with people, the bus driver is in no vicious hurry - he waits for the pregnant woman to find her seat; he waves off the fare of an emaciated man fumbling for enough change.  In one instance, the bus jolted violently as the driver swerved to avoid a motorcycle that had sped onto our lane and avoided death by inches - the jolt threw a sleeping woman from her seat in the back down the exit stairs.  The entire time, my eyes were fixed upon the driver's through the rear-view mirror - not once did his expression contort in outrage.  In the aftermath, every single person in the back half of the bus turned around to offer expressions or words of comfort for the injured woman.  Her indignation evaporated almost as quickly as it had appeared.  Pura vida.

Playas del Coco is exactly what you'd expect it to be (in retrospect).  A city whose design was to be a city has names such as London, Seoul, Chicago; a city or town designed for one singular attraction is named for that attraction.  My town was called Playas del Coco because the one and only attraction it boasted was the shoreline.  There was one road from the highway that led to the beach and the entire town was constructed like the endothelial cells along this capillary, a near single line of buildings on either side of the road beginning about 1.5 miles from the beach.  Welcome to Playas del Coco.

We woke each day without the need of an alarm clock at 8am.  I realize that if you concentrate on the time you want to awake as you drift off to sleep, it's almost like setting your biological clock - 80% of the time, you'll wake up on the dot at the time you wanted.  Try it!  We'd return from diving at noon meaning we'd have a glorious 11 hours to figure out something to do.

Pura Vida Lesson: in the States, 11 hours = death by boredom.  in Costa Rica, 11 hours is amazing.

The beach at Playas is a black-sand beach created by volcanic activity and coupled with an omnipresent stench of garbage, is not conducive to a good time.  So after a simple meal of casados for lunch and Cocomangos Fruit shakes for dessert, the rest of our day would be spent with a 6 pack of delicious Costa Rican beer.  Neither Steven nor I had a watch and our phones failed to receive their satellite time, so we'd go through the day painlessly oblivious of the time of day.  More often than not, I'd find myself tracking time's progress by the sun's position in the sky - anyone read the Hatchet?  


So if the Pura Vida way is the best way to live, why do we in the US seek complexity in everything?  Bigger, better, newer.  Your nose not the way you'd like?  Plastics baby.  Can't afford those shoes?  Use plastic.  I dread the day that I'll be so attached to the internet that I'll want it on my phone.  Emails and chats can wait until I'm bored enough at home for me to check them.

Pura Vida Lesson: My theory is that everything in life, and I mean everything, will either augment your relationships or replace your relationships.  It is why we tend to overpack when we go on vacations.  On vacation, our primary focus is our relationship with those we vacation with - suddenly all the junk we fill our lives with back home lose meaning on vacation.  Our mp3 players tune us away from the world around; our Facebooks define our sense of popularity and sociability by the activity of our walls - have you ever seen someone somewhere who is waiting for a friend?  99% of the time, that person is eating up the wait time by playing with their phone.  Nowadays it's come to the point where all of us know those certain people in our lives who live on their phones even when out with friends.

Complexity for utility; simplicity for beauty.  Pura Vida.  Thanks Costa Rica

this is what my menu said.

PURA VIDA (costa rica update #2)

What is it really like to scuba dive?  I can only begin to describe the sensation.  Actually, my first thought as I began my certification class was that it seemed pretty primitive all the gear we had to equip simply to breathe underwater.  Since the beginning of mankind, I imagine three of the greatest aspirations of Man were to fly through the air, soar among the stars and roam freely underwater.  We've long since achieved the first, grasped at the roots of the second, but the water remains a largely elusive world.

To be perfectly honest, I've always found fish fairly dull.  Beyond the fish I eat, my only encounters with the animals are through the glass of their tanks in the aquarium and let's set something straight - there's very little difference between staring at a fish through glass and staring at a fish projected on your TV.  But it's one thing to see a fish swimming aimlessly around in a tank and another entirely to swim among fish in their natural habitats.  It's another to see a Moray Eel lurking in its cave with its mouth wide open, eyes unblinking, waiting patiently for its next meal to swim a little too close.  It's another to see tiny creatures half the size of the tip of your finger poking out of a reef, ducking away from your inquiring fingers like the many heads of a whack-a-mole game. As a lazy pufferfish floats on by seemingly oblivious to your obtrusive presence, you give its tail a quick pinch to cause it to swim indignantly away.  It won't bother puffing up for you.

Three of the most amazing sights I witnessed under water:

1. A literal tornado of silvery fish from as high as I could see down to the bottom where I hovered, a frenzied cyclone of fish seemingly determined to bore a hole straight through the ground only to at the last minute turn perpendicular to the floor in a cool, sleek stream extending beyond your vision.  What are they doing?  Where are they going?

2. A hawksbill turtle.  In direct defiance to the timid nature of most of the sea life you'll encounter, this turtle swam its long graceful spirals around us before the murky waters swallowed it up forever.  How old was this turtle?  What is it thinking?

3. An eagle ray.  We swam and actually stumbled upon it directly below us, a couple feet away.  It was sucking the floor below it vigorously, apparently too ravenous to bother to be bothered, an animal after my own heart.  To be sure, a ray is one of the most graceful and awe-inspiring creatures you can ever hope to witness underwater.  Rays are the swans of the ocean, the geese among the many ugly-ducklings of the sea.

PURA VIDA (costa rica update)

Friday, June 4
I sit anxiously in Miami International, the drum-drums of the rain upon the sloping windows doing nothing to ease my anxiety as I stare at the clock tick inexorably on past my departure time.  American Airlines, I sigh with more than a hint of annoyance.  My plane is delayed three times and I wonder each time what was going to happen if it were to be cancelled and if I were to have to miss my domestic connection.  Ironically, from the very beginning of my vacation trip, my mind is in Type-A overtime.

My landing in Costa Rica is welcomed on the bridge by a blast of humid air that puts that of Miami's to shame.  I am finally here.  I meet with Steven, pack half of all the tourist brochures I find in the airport into my bag and we're off into the great unknown.  We step out of tiny Juan Santamaria Airport to find the bus station we had read about on the internet, but..there is no bus station!  We barely have enough time to decide there's nothing to panic about when we are approached by the first of millions of cab riders that week that would see us as walking USD.  Following his advice (in retrospect, we were better to have stayed in Alajuela), we decide to go to a hostel in San Jose for it's "closer" (by a few minutes) to the domestic airport we need to get to early the next morning.  He drops us off at a dirty looking hostel and while we check-in, he enjoys a smoke with the youngsters who run the hostel.  Apparently they enjoy a good business attracting tourists to each other.  Oops.
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Saturday, June 5
Saturday morning!  Finally now the real vacation can begin!  Well, almost, first we must get from San Jose to our destination on the north Pacific coast - Playas del Coco.  We had, in the States, decided against taking the 4.5 hour bus-ride from the notoriously shady Coca-Cola bus station in San Jose, so we had splurged on domestic tickets to the nearest airport - Liberia.  Naive, and still thinking Costa Rica would be fairly cheap, I flex my rusty Spanish muscles to ask the hostel to call us up a cab to the airport.  It is a slight relief that the cab driver is not the same over-eager man from the night before.

Once at the airport, our trip becomes largely uneventful.  We board a craft that seats 7 people including the captain and take off into the Costa Rican air cutting through thick layers of rainclouds and soaring over miles of GREEN.  And really, Costa Rica is GREEN.  Sadly, if much of the Africa foreigners like me imagine is brown, then what color would I say the US is?  I guess I'd say America is grey.  You can only conceive of how electrifying it is then, to come upon a country that seems alive and connected with the earth sporting magnificent cholorophyllic greens as far as the eye can see (or as far as the conspicuous mountains in the horizon would allow).

We land in Liberia's Tobias Bolano airport expecting it to be a fairly vibrant terminal with bus stations and restaurants a la 서울역 or Union Station.  Instead, 25 strides take us through the entire airport from the tarmac to the exit and there is nothing in site.  I look at Steven and our expressions belie the same realization - So, this is what "the middle of nothing" really means.  Uh-oh.

Eventually, we find our bus into the heart of Liberia and arrive at the bus terminal.  (I really really wish I had taken a picture of this bus terminal for it's pretty memorable but I suppose I was too drained each time I arrived there)  We wander around the bus terminal in fairly significant confusion as to which bus was ours fully conscious of the hundreds of eyes upon us, visually marking us as foreigners and thus to many, as obvious targets for exploitation.  Cab drivers jingle their keys in front of us rattling off a stream of fast Spanish to which we shake our heads no and move on.  We are the sick calves of a herd being picked out by lions and it is only a matter of time before...before..but then!  A man approaches us saying in broken English, I work here, where do you need to go?  Salvation.  Destination - Playas del Coco.