Day 6 (In Which After the Consumption of Rum, Nancy and I Debate Which of our Friends should get the Bottle Opener with a Wooden Penis Shaped Handle)

Day 6 (In Which After the Consumption of Rum, Nancy and I Debate Which of our Friends should get the Bottle Opener with the Wooden Penis Shaped Handle)

After two days of road trips, we planned a day of rest, although sleeping in was never really a choice. We rode into Coco again and found a different Soda to eat breakfast at. We sat on the porch with several other dining couples. We could tell something was wrong since there seemed to be only two people and a 2 year old behind the counter. After a long wait, the owner, an American expat came out and confessed that neither the cook nor the babysitter showed up for work, but he was working on making us some breakfast.

When the food arrived it was fantastic, but the guava jelly that came with it made the sun shine brighter and the iguanas in the tree wink and smile. When the morning rush died down the owner told us stories of moving to this beach 40 years ago when it was a hippie commune. He also took us back into his office to look at pictures of his gnome.

A Swedish advertising company had brought two garden gnomes to Costa Rica to shoot a magazine advertisement. He hosted the company and helped the secure locations for their photo shoot. As a reward, he got to keep one of the gnomes.

After breakfast we wandered down to the souvenir shops where we learned that Costa Rica is not exempt from the first Universal Law of Tourist Areas. “If an item is popular in one souvenir store, you will find the exact same thing in every souvenir store in the city.” We saw every color and size of strokable wooden frog imaginable. Duplicates of wooden bowls, masks, puzzle boxes, and coasters were in every store.

The second Universal of Law of Tourist Areas states that “Every T-shirt shop should have at least one shirt showing a local animal, one with a joke about drinking beer, one with a Christian message, and one with Marijuana leaves.” The exact ratio can vary by site, but all of the groups have to be represented and intermixed. Again, in this respect, we were not disappointed.

We saw many of the same items we had seen at the roadside stands marked up 30-40%. We also noticed that the prices in town were in dollars, not colones, a sure sign that you are getting gouged even further since change is always in colones and can vary from 520-1 to 480-1.

We bought a few knick knacks for friends and were heading back to the car, when I found, placed among the wooden crocodiles and brightly painted yo-yos, a bottle opener with a wooden handle lovingly carved to resemble a giant penis. It was $10 which seemed a bit steep for an item that, while being fully functional and hysterical is not something you are going to leave in the drawer next to the can opener and the little sharpened handles that you stick into corn on the cob so you don’t get your hand messy.

As discreetly as I could, I tried to get Nancy’s attention by yelling her name and waving it over my head. She asked me who I intended to by that for, and under that sort of pressure I was stumped. (I already have a “Sea World” bottle opener that works just fine, so I did not need it.)

It was only later after Nancy and I were drinking rum mixed with tropical fruit juice that Nancy came up with the ideal recipient for such a prize. (I won’t tell who since Christmas is right around the corner.)

Most of the day was spent climbing on the volcanic rock formations at the beach, lazing by the pool, and eating chocolate and orange ice cream while watching the afternoon thunderstorms.

After dinner at the Asian-fusion-tapas restaurant down the street, Nancy and Isaac went to bed, and I wandered up to the pool area because Wednesday was movie and karaoke night in the open air dance hall. By the time I showed up, the movie was almost over which was okay because it was “An Inconvenient Truth” dubbed in Spanish. Somehow they found a voice actor to recreate the excitement in Al Gore’s voice in Spanish.

Our neighbors were there with their kids. The younger had fallen asleep, the older was playing his DS. When the time came for karaoke, I was excited. I knew that the crowd would be dazzled, by my mastery of the Johnny Cash canon, but when I looked through the list, 99% of the songs were in Spanish. The English ones were an odd collection including songs by Metallica and “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a difficult one to pull off by oneself. I finally settled on “Don’t Be Cruel” and did “Kokomo” as an encore. In between I sat through half a dozen cheesy love ballads in Spanish which actually sounded pretty good after a round of 2 for 1 Imperials with my neighbor David.

The crowd seemed appreciative of my effort and after taking my bow went back to room 411 to get some rest for the next day’s adventure.

Strength and Honor.
Big Matt

Day 5 (In Which We Learn That Water That Comes Out of Volcanoes is “Scientifically Speaking” Incredibly Freaking Hot)

Day 5 (In Which We Learn That Water That Comes Out of Volcanoes is “Scientifically Speaking” Incredibly Freaking Hot)

On Tuesday morning, Carlos once again picked up at 7:30 in the morning for a day trip to Arenal Volcano. Even though it was over two hours by car away I wanted to see it because up until a few months ago it was one of the world’s most active volcanoes, with lava visible from the base almost ever night. It was this constant erupting that actually made it slightly safer to visit than the volcanoes that keep it all bottled up until having a little too much wine at Thanksgiving dinner and exploding and wrecking havoc on anything in the immediate vicinity.

The Arenal area also was at a higher elevation and was in a rain forest which would give us the opportunity to see other animals. The trip described on the website involved some strenuous hiking, and Nancy and I were a little concerned about Isaac, but Carlos had already altered the day’s schedule to make sure we got to see plenty of animals without pushing Isaac to exhaustion.

We drove towards Liberia and turned right on the Pan American Highway, a road that theoretically could be driven from Alaska to Southern Argentina. A few miles behind us was Nicaragua, and a couple hours ahead, Panama. (Costa Rica is about the same size as West Virginia.) We drove south for about an hour and then turned left towards the middle of the country. After another hour, we arrived at Lake Arenal. The top of the volcano was shrouded in clouds. We stopped at a roadside stand in the middle of nowhere to stretch our legs, admire the view, and haggle over the price of wooden frogs with wooden ridges on their back that you stroke with a stick and they make a noise similar to what a frog would sound like if he was rubbing a stick against a jagged wooden statue of a frog.

Shortly after we got back in the car, Nancy felt a sharp pain in her back. I had time to either, kill the wasp on her back or take a picture. Carlos, ever the “nature loving bad ass” that he is, caught the wasp and let it go out the car window.

The car trip was probably almost three hours, but there was so much to see, and we were having so much fun talking and looking for animals, it didn’t seem long at all. When we arrived at the tourist area of Arenal, the jungle gave way to hotels, internet cafes, and a shop boasting “Hand made Costa Rican crafts and German bakery”. We could tell that this tourist area was a little higher end than Playa Hermosa. Carlos took us to a fancy hotel for lunch where we had steak and then got back into his truck and headed even closer to the Volcano.

Instead of taking us into a National Park, we went to a wildlife preserve where the land had been allowed to return from farmland to its natural state. Carlos immediately pointed out sloths up in the canopy. Isaac found a red arrow frog under some leaves. Carlos showed us cacao and banana trees and identified local birds for us. We interrupted an Agouti in the middle of his lunch. Isaac did his best to herd a Jesus Christ lizard toward the little pond in the area to see if he would really walk on water.

We packed up just as the sky opened up and Carlos took us to another hotel/spa that had a series of gardens and pools fed by the naturally occurring hot springs. Carlos got us checked in and told us that we could go up to the buffet and have dinner under the volcano at 5:30. I asked if we should wait for him, and he told us that he had to run some errands, but would meet us after dinner.

The hotel was pretty much how I picture the garden of Eden. Stone paths meandered through thick, well manicured, tropical vegetation. Humming and other birds sampled fruit and nectar in open areas. Dozens of pools were spaced up the side of the mountain. Also in this “Matt specific” version of the garden of Eden there were three particularly dangerous looking waterslides, college co-eds on summer vacation, and half a dozen swim up bars.

The first pool we came to had partially submerged, tile recliners. It looked perfect. I stepped into the pool, completely ignoring the sign which warned that the water was 113 degrees Celsius (235.4 Fahrenheit). Every bug bite around my ankles lit up. I eventually made it over the lounge chair and sat for about 20 seconds before getting out. Isaac preferred the adjacent cold pool.

We tried different pools and hot tubs and found a few that we all enjoyed. I decided to try one of the water slides. Normally water slides are cool, splashy, twisty fun. The water in this one was a relatively cool 100 degrees Celsius (to remind you, this is the boiling point of water.) The slide was pitch black, and just for fun that had random blasts of 100 degree water interspersed throughout the darkness in case you were breathing too easily or moving to slowly. The slide dumped you a very deep pool of 100 degree C water.

It was a lot like what I remember about being born.

As the thunder clouds closed in for a second time, we changed and walked up to the buffet. The food was fancy versions of typical Tico fare and spaghetti. Isaac was most impressed with the chocolate fountain. Like most restaurants that we had been to, it was open air offering a great view of the volcano. The thunder in the distance was not too hard to mistake for rumbling in the mountain next to us, but that didn’t make me nervous. What made me nervous was the realization that I was three hours from my hotel and rental car. I had no cell phone, and at that point did not know Carlos’s number anyway, much less his last name.

I felt a huge wave of relief (and a more than a little guilt) when we ultimately found Carlos down at the lobby drinking coffee waiting for us, just like he said he would.

I was sure that the ride home would be uneventful; perhaps we would all fall asleep. It turns out that riding through the rainforest during a thunderstorm is exhilarating. Carlos had wanted us to see a red eyed tree frog all day, but never found one. In his last ditch effort, he would stop any time he saw a frog in the road, pull over, back up and run out with a flashlight, and umbrella to see what it was.

At one point we passed a snake in the road. Carlos stopped for us and explained that it was a Fer-de-lance viper. He explained that herpetologists don’t like to use the word “aggressive”, but the Fer-de-lance would not deviate from its course if it was coming towards you. Naturally he wanted to get out in the rain so we could get a better look.

When you are in a thunderstorm in a rainforest and a guy wants you to get out and look at a really misunderstood viper in the road, you do it because when the hell is that ever going to happen again?

He found a second snake in the road and he wanted my help to make sure that got safely off into the bushes. He grabbed a branch and started pushing the snake off into the brush when the snake jumped. Normally you would not associate an activity such as jumping with a legless animal, but there we were.

Carlos looked genuinely surprised that I was back the S.U.V. instead of helping him shepherd a jumping viper to safety. Carlos drove us safely home and we said our good byes. I really hope that someday I will get a chance to show him around North Carolina or Florida..

Strength and Honor
Big Matt

If you are ever in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, contact Carlos at http://www.ecoexplorercr.com/ or look up Carlos Jiminez in my friends on Facebook.

Day 4 (In which we meet the man who should be in charge of all tourism in Costa Rica)

Day 4 (In which we meet the man who should be in charge of all tourism in Costa Rica)

Before we left for Costa Rica, I found a website called Eco Adventures. There were quite a few day trips available. I made reservations for a river boat cruise through a national park and a day trip to Arenal volcano. The guide named Carlos told me in an e-mail to meet him at the gate of our resort at 7:30 a.m.

The Costa Rican 5:45 a.m. sunrise made this much easier than it sounds.

I had no idea what to expect, but suspected that we would be crammed into a hot, crowded school bus with a handful of obnoxious American families for a miserable drive. I could not have been more wrong. Carlos pulls up in a new, immaculately clean 4x4 and introduces himself. We all take a seat and we assume that he is taking us to a meeting point for a large group and again we are wrong. We are his only family for the day.

He starts the drive to Palo Verde national park, but stops at a supermarket to buy some snacks and drinks for us. (He would not let me pay for anything.) He bought Isaac a little bag of chocolate covered raisins and a can if Imperial lager for me (it was like he knew us both for years!) in addition to fruit juice and other snacks.

We started the long drive toward Palo Verde. Carlos spoke impeccable English and was a funny and amicable host. He answered even the most odd ball questions about Costa Rica that we lobbed at him. (The woman on the 10,000 colones bill was a children’s author. The Motmot’s tail feathers don’t grow that way, they actually groom them into that shape. He also taught us how to tell the difference between the green and black iguanas and the two toe and three toe sloths.)

The car ride to Palo Verde was much longer than I expected. Much of the rode was along long straight dirt roads through sugarcane fields. Whenever we came to the edge of one of Costa Rica’s world famous potholes, Carlos would slow down and strategically pick the route which would do the least damage to his vehicle’s suspension.

We talked for a long time and I learned that although he had never been to America, he did have two things on his itinerary when he does visit. 1) He wants to grow a long beard and get into a bar fight in Texas and 2) He wants to go for a ride in a cab in New York City with a daredevil driver of Middle Eastern descent.

Carlos would stop frequently to point out local birds. I don’t mean slow down the car and point them out, but stop the car, get out a telescope that we could use to take pictures, and tell us about whatever it was we were looking at. He was never in a hurry, and seemed to really savor being outside and sharing the beauty of his home country with us.

When we arrived at the river, a small boy greeted us and pointed out some howler monkeys and iguanas to Isaac. There actually were about a dozen other people on the boat with three or four other guides, but Carlos took the lead in pointing out the local animals. We saw numerous birds, a larger gathering of iguanas, howlers, and a tree covered with bats. The other guides shared fresh pineapple with us.

We stopped near a gathering of Capuchins and the other guides gave out pieces of banana for us to feed the monkeys. Nancy later asked Carlos about feeding wild animals in a National Park. He told us that it is not something he would ever do, but as long as the other guides bring the animals food that they would find in the wild naturally, he doesn’t make a big deal out of it.

Near the end of our river tour, our boat drifted up to a crocodile on the banks. I could have reached out and touched it. Isaac immediately moved from his waterside seat to a more comfortable aisle seat. I will admit I was pretty excited, but when one of the other guides attached a piece of chicken to a stick and started feeding him, my heart rate definitely picked up. The feeding attracted a second and then a third croc, each one bigger than the last.

As the crocs jostled for the chicken inches away from me and the guide’s stick got progressively shorter with each chomp, I did a quick mental tally of the subtle differences between this crocodile feeding and the still interesting but 100% less terrifying alligator feedings I had seen from behind Plexiglas in Florida.

Carlos took us to very cool restaurant/ boat tour staging area for lunch. The food was fantastic. I recall beans, rice, beets, beef, cassava, spicy vegetables, and finished up with mango ice cream. By this time in the day, Carlos was like an old family friend. Isaac had certainly taken a shine to him (in fact Carlos was the first person that Isaac used a little bit of Spanish for.)

We went back to the hotel to watch the parakeets roost and the sun set over the ocean. Out at the beach we ran into the couple that we had ziplined with the day before. They had actually been staying at a different hotel in a different city, but missed their plane back to America that morning and went from hotel to hotel trying to find a room until that wound up at ours.

We walked down the beach to find dinner. The next hotel down had a restaurant on the beach that was completely empty except for a bored waiter, chef, and bartender. This should have been our first clue. The second should have been that they were out of shrimp…..100 yards from the ocean…..with no other visible diners. I still decided to be daring and ordered the catch of the day, “Red Snapper” not realizing that I would get it in pretty much the same shape (minus a few organs) it was in when it was pulled from the ocean. Isaac ordered ice cream for dessert and although I’m pretty sure the day and month on the expiration date was safe; one mouthful suggested that it was perhaps the year which may have been a bit off.

Although I had the communication advantage over Nancy with my limited command of Spanish, she could speak fluently with two of our neighbors. To our right was a family from Colorado (She was Tico, their two sons became Isaac’s friends during the week and he taught school). He and Nancy spoke the special “Teacher’s Language”, casually dropping a dizzying number of acronym titled standardized test and teaching methods that each seemed to disapprove of. Two doors down was Joe who was taking his son on a trip as a graduation present. He and Nancy both spoke New York/ Jersey (which is a lot like English, only much louder.)

Isaac and I watched the first 20 minutes of Rocky Horror Picture Show (in English) before falling asleep. The last thought before I blacked out was, “This vacation is going by too damned fast.”

Strength and Honor,
Big Matt

Day 3 (In which I have the best Father’s Day that I will ever have in my life.)

Day 3 (In which I have the best Father’s Day that I will ever have in my life.)

The sun is at full attention at 5:49 in the morning. The hastily re-scheduled zip-line adventure outfitter is called “Extreme Adventures” and is very close to our hotel according to the standard issue caricature map featuring local hotels and restaurants which you can find in any city which fancies itself a tourist destination. We simply turn left out of the resort’s parking lot, pass the boat catching a swordfish and the two bikini clad women playing volleyball, and when we get to the family of howler monkeys wearing T-shirts make a right and we are there.

The caricature map did not convey the poverty in the area around “Extreme Adventures” headquarters. On the map, it was located right next to “Papagayo tours”. Both companies were in fact in the same front room of someone’s house. It dawned on me that all of tour companies in the area were not completely independent businesses, but more like a network. A company would splice together whatever you wanted to do out of what they had available to them. 6 different companies might advertise canopy tours, but they might all take you to the same ziplines.

Papagayo tours and Extreme Adventures shared a fleet of ATVs. Our contact at Extreme Advenutres took us to one of the neighbor’s houses where a couple of Ticos were saddling up three horses. The guy who seemed to be in charge of the horses told me that he was going to be riding bulls in a rodeo later that day (I think.) The horses did not look like the robust steeds that we had seen at farms or circuses in America, but by this point a) we had paid to ride horses b) the only person who spoke English was back at the office c) Isaac was already mounted and d) the remaining caballeros assured me that the white horse was very strong and could carry me. (I told them in advance how much I weighed and how tall I was in case they were worried about the horse. Their response? “No problem”)

Our guide, who spoke no English at all, led us down the narrow two lane road that we had previously gotten lost on looking for “Extreme Adventures”. We passed where the pavement ended and a group of locals hung out at a dusty turn around waiting for the bus. Our guide led Isaac’s horse and Nancy and I did our best to negotiate with our steeds to follow as closely as they were cool with….if they want to stop and eat some leaves, that is cool too….you know….whatever. We learned some important facts about native flora that none of us could understand since they were in Spanish. We smiled and nodded politely while we tried to get our horses to get back on the path.

We wandered through some back country and plodded through some streams. I would love to tell you about the magical bond I developed with the animal, but it was more of a magical tolerance. For the short period of time that we rode, I definitely understood how riding horses could become someone’s obsession in life.

The ATV training consisted of pointing to the key, the gear shift, the accelerator, and a reminder to brake with front brakes when going uphill, back brakes when going down (or was that the other way around? And which is the front brake? Left or Right? We will figure it out on the way I guess.)

Isaac rode on the lap of our guide while Nancy and I each rode our own 4 wheel All Terrain Vehicle. It took much less than an hour for me to grasp the mystical bond between a rider and his ATV. We basically lived in a truck commercial for an hour. We climbed hills, rode through streams, crossed farm land, and explored the dirt roads in small villages. We drove past an open air church that was holding Sunday morning worship. Nancy and I felt bad that we were making so much noise while someone else was having church.. I am pretty sure that the guide told us not to worry, they weren’t Catholic; they were Evangelical.

Another interesting thing about riding ATVs in Costa Rica is that howler monkeys seem to really hate the sound of their engines. The only thing louder then the ATV engine is a group of howler monkeys yelling at you when you drive past. If you have never heard a howler monkey before it is a sustained loud deep grunt and whoop that will definitely get your attention.

After an hour ride, we made it to the Congo ziplines (Congo is a local name for the howlers). We rode with a couple from Dallas and two Tico boys who were on vacation. The zip lines were impressive but the views were spectacular. I have to say Congo had the business of throwing Gringos out of trees down to a science complete with bathrooms and water coolers out in the woods.

It took another hour to ride back. When we were almost back to the car the guide said, “We can go the short way, or over the mountain.” We were all tired, but to my surprise, Nancy opted for the “over the mountain” method and we back riding through creeks and up and down muddy, rock strewn ravines. It was wildly fun and terrifying at the same time.

We arrived back at the hotel and while Nancy read her nook, Isaac and I fell asleep watching Lucha Libre wrestling and 80’s comedies dubbed into Spanish.

Strength and Honor
Big Matt

Day 2 (In which I wake up in a foreign country)

Day 2 (In which I wake up in a foreign country)

There were no clocks in our room and the only time keeping device which I had with me was my cell phone which would turn out to be insanely expensive to answer or get texts on, so I mainly kept it off.

The good and bad thing about this is that I went to bed and woke up when my body felt like it which in the case of day 1 was about 8:00 p.m. local time. Funny thing about western Costa Rica….it is bright and sunny just before 6:00 a.m. and the Ticos are early risers…quite content to weed whack just after getting out of bed.

Saturday was going to be a decompression day…a time to just relax after a stressful day of travel. I had heard from the guide books and our friends the Olsons that to get an authentic Tico breakfast, you had to look for a sign that said “Soda” and stop there. We made the ten minute drive to Playa Coco and stopped at the first Soda we saw, “Soda Los Pelones”.

We had an incredible breakfast of beans and rice, eggs, sausage, juice, and coffee. We ran across the street to the bakery to get a loaf of bread. We drove down the dusty, unpaved street to the shoreline and doubled back stopping at a supermarket. There are two obvious differences in American and Tico supermarkets. The first is that the Tico supermarkets are basically open air warehouses. The second striking thing is that every grocery store had at least one aisle with hard liquor.

We bought a few essentials (rum is essential by the way) and a few costa Rican beers. We bought some cheese, ham, and some lime flavored mayonnaise in a giant toothpaste tube. I also bought what I suspected was skim milk, but later turned out to be due to a mistranslation two quarts of buttermilk.

We went to the beach again, and took a dip in the pools. After relaxing a few hours, we decided to check out a trail we found behind one of the buildings at the resort. We hiked through a valley (where there were a surprising number of tall cactus plants), and through the wooded section of the property where we saw howler monkeys and crabs. We meandered back to the room where we saw several hundred orange throated parakeets roost in the tree in front of our room.

While Nancy read, and Isaac watched movies, I used my limited Spanish and the international language of beer to make friends with the neighbors. One was in real estate and came from a family of 15 brothers and sisters. The other was an engineer for the Bimbo bread company. (Bimbo bread is huge in CR. I didn’t have the heart or the Spanish vocabulary to explain what “Bimbo” meant in English.). Thankfully my friend “Little Matt” had told me a few funny stories about visits to Costa Rica that I could share. At one point, one of my new friends offered the toast “Poura Beera” (a twist on the Tico saying of “Pura Vida” which I thought was clever until I saw it on about a hundred shirts over the next 6 days.)

As we were settling down for the night, I got a call from the company that we were ziplining with the next day, “Pura Aventura”. For some reason or another, they were going to have to be closed for the next few days. Thankfully, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting a zipline company in Costa Rica and so a quick phone call later we had a reservation to ride horses, ATVs and ziplines the next day at a place that was 10 minutes down the road instead of a two hour drive.

We all fell asleep shortly after 8:00 that night.
Strength and Honor
Big Matt

Costa Rica Day 1(In which I have the frightening realization that I know nothing)

Day 1 (In which I have the frightening realization that I know nothing)

I woke up to Nancy asking me, “What time did you set your alarm for?”
My response “4:00 a.m.”
Her response, “It’s 4:45” opened the floodgates of adrenaline with the realization that I was running 45 minutes later than I wanted to in order to be at the airport on time to leave for Costa Rica. I dressed quickly and woke the boy up. We had the foresight to stop by Donut World the night before and so the Apple Fritter I had for breakfast mellowed me out and helped me think clearly.

If you are the first person to arrive at Piedmont Triad “International” airport in the morning, it is generally expected that you find the key under the planter outside, turn on all the lights and warm up the X-ray machines.

The flight to Miami was un-eventful. I really wanted a Cuban sandwich while we waited for our second plane, but Nancy had carefully budgeted for the week and did not want to have to skip two meals in the future to pay for one “airport” sandwich.

The second plane ride featured the first magic moment when I realized how very far we were going. After about 45 minutes heading south over the ocean, I looked down at the coastline and realized that I was looking at Cuba. It was a great moment to see something which I had heard about all of my life…something mysterious and foreign..right underneath me. It looked just like any other country side, but still it was the first real moment where my brain started thinking about my surroundings in a different way.

I would like to make a disclaimer here. These writings are only my perception of a small part of Costa Rica. I don’t claim to know everything about the whole country, I only report my experience, and my experience involves a lot of the “Gee-Whiz-We-aren’t-in-Kansas-anymore” moments that I expect a lot of people travelling abroad for the first time have.

We touched down in Costa Rica and my senses were overloaded. Everything I looked at, heard, touched, and smelled, even the most mundane things like the landscaping at the airport was drawn in deeply. We disembarked and walked into a large warehouse to get our passports stamped and claim our luggage….not at all the giant hassle I expected (That would come one week later in Miami.)

The mini-bus took us to “Avis” car rental where a friendly man who spoke English very well showed us the sparkling Kia we had rented. There was an ominous warning on the Avis desk about the “Flat Tire” scam I mentioned in the last blog. I was prepared. I had the rental agent show me where the jack was, and I carefully inspected all four tires.

We were on our way.

We took a right towards the relatively large city of Liberia. We passed large areas of farmland, schools with uniformed children playing soccer in the yards, and small industrial businesses. It wasn’t just the barbed wire around the fence of every building we saw that made me the most nervous. It was the realization that I can only read about 2/3 of the street signs For example, the frequently seen “Interseccion Adelante” had me worried. I knew that “interseccion” meant “intersection” but it took me a while to realize that “adelante” did not mean “dangerous”, “busy”, or “flammable” but simply “ahead”.

The other surprisingly disorienting thing about driving was that all speed limits are in kilometers per hour, which is fine on paper, but in reality, if I see a sign that says “40 kph”, my brain automatically goes into a panic because it knows what “40 mph” should feel like, and we are no where near that fast. Throw in the occasional “25 kph cuando scholars presente” and I am panicking even more because there are almost always kids out on bikes around schools and I know how going even a few miles over the speed limit in a US school zone results in a hefty fine.

While I am going slowly and carefully, Tico drivers are whizzing past.

We finally arrive at a shopping center with a bank and a grocery store. We go into the bank to change money and are stopped and asked for our passports. I think “This is a little odd since really all we are doing is getting change.” I am also searched with a metal detector. At this point, the exhaustion and culture shock take over and I start to panic.

Right or wrong, if I am in a part of town where everything is surrounded by barbed wire, nobody speaks English, and I am searched with a metal detector when I walk into a bank, I know it is time to move on, and I had to be very deliberate about not losing my cool. We changed $200 into 100,000 colones in bills of 10,000 each.

I was now walking around with money that I could not quickly tell you what it was worth. It was at this point that I found a new level of respect for anyone that does not speak English coming to US for the first time.

We walked to the grocery store which had a small ice cream shop in the back. I bought an ice cream for Isaac, a small ham biscuit for myself, and a custard pastry. I tried to pay with a 10,000 colones note and the woman looked at me like I was crazy and asked if I had anything smaller. Just then a very thin woman walked over, patted Isaac on the head and asked me for money. I smiled politely and sat down. The cashier managed to get change for me and we ate, the beggar staring at us the entire time. I really felt bad about not giving her anything, but at the same time, I could not quickly process how much anything was, and more importantly I could not open my wallet with out showing a lot more money. We ate quickly and went back to the car.

We were all tired and tense. I checked the tires again before we left and drove to the coast. Getting out into the country side helped calm everyone down a lot. We even saw a huge iguana basking on the road when we came around a corner. We found the hotel and tried to check in. We were early. We wandered around the facility. The view was incredible. They had about six pools set into different levels connected by waterfalls overlooking the bay including an “infinity pool” where it looks like the water touches the horizon and a bar you could swim up to.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat at the restaurant (It is a universal truth that all hotel restaurants are overpriced with mediocre food. I found it oddly reassuring to find that this was the case at Condovac as well.)

Another cultural/technological difference in Costa Rica is that toilet paper is not flushed, but placed in a garbage can next to the toilet. The less said about that, the better.

We wandered down to the beach and we looked at the boats in the bay. We walked along the black, volcanic sand beach until we saw a guy in a ladder poking at coconuts with a stick. A young man about 18 years old grabbed one, cut the top off, put a straw in it and offered it to Isaac. The young man introduced himself and told us that if there was anything we needed, Jet Skis, tours of town, snorkeling, that we should come talk to him and he would take care of us. It was clear that he did not work for the hotel and was just trying to make a buck, but he was very friendly and when I politely declined, he stayed and talked for a while and reminded me that he would be down on the beach if we thought of anything.

After several hours, our room was ready. We checked into a very nice, air conditioned, two room suite with a kitchen, and fell asleep around nine o’clock local time.

Strength and Honor
Big Matt

Prologue (in which I thank people who have no idea that they are responsible for me wandering into a jungle)

The van’s exhaust was thick, black, and menacing but it smelled pleasantly like doughnuts and French fries. Gabe’s “Veggie Van” ran on used cooking oil and was careening down I-95 carrying it’s owner, our friend Tim, my son Isaac (henceforth to be referred to as “The Boy”) and myself.

We were on our way to Gainesville to see a football game the week before Thanksgiving. During the 8 hour drive, Gabe told us a story about a trip he had recently made. It was a good story. He told about a place where he drove from the Atlantic to the Pacific in four hours crossing through rainforests and passing volcanoes. He stayed in small hostels on the beach which cost less than $20 a night. The water was safe to drink. The locals liked Americans. The surfing was world class. There were monkeys, sea turtles, and prostitutes everywhere. Costa Rica sounded like it had a little something for everyone.

I love the show “The Amazing Race” and am enamored with the idea of going on it with my friend and pastor Michael. When I watch the show I often imagine how I would react in certain situations. The exotic scenery and people would certainly be thrilling, but I don’t know if I would ever make it out of the airport. My brain could not handle something that was both so immediately familiar and foreign at the same time.

This is not to say that I don’t have experience in international travel. As a child, my parents once took us in to deepest darkest heart of Canada. Shortly after arriving, to the village that the locals called “Niagara Falls” we hired a local guide to take us on a tour. We loaded onto a powder blue school bus with several other frightened American families and drove to see what the site that the city was famous for. That’s right, we went to the “Niagara Falls School of Horticulture” home of the world’s largest floral clock (I would just like to point out that my mother and sister will verify that this story is entirely true. My father does not want to talk about it.)

In the middle of the night some Canadian hoodlum tried to break into our empty luggage trailer. We fled the country the next day and barely made it out alive.

I tell that story just so you don’t think I am some naïve yokel. Oh yes, I have international travel under my belt. In college I also went on a mission trip to Jamaica because most Jamaicans have never seen a mostly white group of college kids sing along to pre-recorded to tapes about Jesus. I like to think we made a difference.

I have also been on several day visits to exotic countries while on cruise ships. I spent almost six hours each in Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Nassau, Pirate Island (a subsidiary of Disney), Key West and New Orleans. This would explain the “world weary” look in my eye that those who know me well often comment on.

I have a friend Jeremy O who has hiked the Appalachian Trail, and backpacked solo around New Zealand. He thinks nothing of wandering by himself to a desolate part of the world just to see what is there, no matter what hardship he has to overcome to get there.

Last year, we spent a week at Dollywood.

My friend Roland who is in his sixties has recently spent months teaching English in Mongolia and Mauritania. He fell in love with one country, and was pleasantly surprised that he wasn’t abducted and sold as meat in another.

I’ve been to Germany in Epcot and Busch Gardens.

I love the idea of travelling to a place where I don’t speak the language and instead of squirrels they have monkeys, but I need to get back on to the cruise ship by 6:00 so I don’t miss the early dinner.

Back to the veggie van.

During our Thanksgiving week in Florida, I took the boy to Disney and Universal Studios. We had a great time on the rides, but the families who were there were incredibly mean to each other. On top of that, the theme parks found every way possible to get as much money from each tourist, even selling tickets that let you skip the lines. The tourist parents pushed as hard as they could to get every last ounce of fun out of their overtired, heat exhausted families, and if they missed anything, the exact same “adventure” could be had the next day, at 11:00, 3:00 and 5:30.

It was a little depressing. Nancy and I were in the planning stages of a California vacation for this summer, but I didn’t want to have the same experience that I saw the miserable families in Orlando having.

Christmas came and went quickly like it does every year. Nancy and I had no firm plans yet for summer vacation. The previous year’s trip to Key West had been abruptly cancelled when several family emergencies made it impractical to go.

The sensible vacation would have been to rent a place at St. Augustine Beach for a week in the summer so we could see family and see the same sites we saw since we were kids, but then my mother in law went swimming with sting rays.

After going through a really rough year of family turmoil, my mother in law went on a cruise with her sister to get away from it all. During her cruise she took an excursion to swim with the stingrays (something I would never in a million years have expected her to do voluntarily), and she loved it. Since then she has seized life and I am grateful that she has found her footing once again.

If my mother in law can jump in with the sting rays, we can do something bold as well.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.- Helen Keller

We declared our intention to go to Costa Rica. We had no idea where we were going or how we would get there, but we were going. Shortly after we made our decision, our friends Kevin and Lisa (who actually are regular world travelers) offered to transfer a week at a timeshare in Cost Rica to us.

It is one thing to say that you want to go to a foreign country, it is quite another to have paid for a real honest to goodness resort with real hard and fast dates (no address though…Ticos don’t “do” addresses.)

After paying for the resort and the airfare we had that exciting and panicked thought “What have we done?”. The day the passports came in the mail, I texted Nancy a picture of them at work. This was real

At work, conversations would drift to the “What are you doing this summer?” variety. Most were going to the beach: Myrtle or the Outer Banks.

“How about you Matt?”

“I think we are going to Costa Rica.” I was surprised at how often the next question immediately followed.

“Are you going on a mission trip?”

“No. I am going with my family.”

“You are taking Isaac?”

“Technically yes he is part of the family, and please…call him “The Boy”.

A good number of people that I told about out plan had never left the country. Some had never been outside of the Carolinas. One had never even been on a plane. It wasn’t because they didn’t want to. On the contrary, most of them wanted to go somewhere exotic, they were just afraid. I will be honest. I am nervous as well, but I do not want to be old and think about all the things I was afraid to do. I do not want to set an example to the boy of living a life controlled by fear. Our grandparents travelled all over the world before they were in their 20s either serving in armed forces or searching for a better home for their families. I’m sure that they were afraid as well.

I almost didn’t go to one of my dearest friend’s wedding in New York City because I was certain that I would be mugged and quite possibly raped the minute I stepped off the plane.

We bought a guide book and tackled the overwhelming amount of information available about Costa Rica. We narrowed down our excursions to a volcano/hot springs day trip, a river boat cruise where we get to deliver school supplies to a rural school (a moderate Baptist’s wet dream vacation trip “Not only is it a fun adventure but I get to feel righteous since I even help people on vacation!”), and a combination Horseback/zip line trip.

Quick story on the zip lines…after deciding we were going to Costa Rica, I had a vision of climbing through the jungle to the top of a zip line platform and Isaac flaking out and screaming that he was not going to do it. We went to a local zip line place in Asheboro for a test run and after the first few, we all had such a good time, we came back with about 60 of our closest friends from church to do it again.

We continued to research and study and read until we found the site “Visit Costa Rica Now.com” last night. It was different from the other sites in that it was hosted by an American who lived there and didn’t always paint the rosy picture from the guide books. Specifically we watched a video about a scam where villains (possibly Canadian) puncture the tire of your rental car and then offer to help you change it shortly before robbing you.

I told my friend “Little Matt” who is a veteran of numerous trips to Costa Rica that we were renting a car and he immediately laughed and said, “Good luck with that.”

There were also charming videos about Dengue fever and Costa Rican jails.

I was feeling extremely anxious this morning on the way to work, when I had a moment of clarity. I realized that if we always stay where we are comfortable and safe and know exactly what to expect, we never grow or evolve. It is precisely that element of danger or the unknown that make you rely on your own wits and common sense. At the end of your journey you learn that you could survive, or you learn how to do it differently in the future: two lessons you simply can not learn by sitting at home. This is the difference between going abroad, and exiting the log flume through the gift shop.

We leave at 4:00 in the morning. I know my mind is going to be racing as I try to drift off to sleep. I wrote this to try and clear my head so I can get some rest.

The Ticos have a saying “Pura Vida”. It is the equivalent of “Aloha” and can mean hello, good bye, cool, or let me help you change that tire. The literal translation is “Pure Life”. I like that. (At least now I do….ask me again in a week.) I hope we get an idea of what that means this week. I hope the boy gets a real sense that there is more to this world than America, and comes back with an appreciation for what he has and a desire to see what else is out there.

Until next time, “Pura Vida!”

Strength and Honor,
Big Matt