Costa Rica

Costa Rica: A Teaser

/ Pam Goode / 14 Comments

When I first made this trip 20+ years ago, we traveled across the Pan Am Highway, her roads broken into car-sized holes that slowed the journey considerably. It didn’t bother me an ounce, because travel teaches us truth. And during every visit since, I’ve watched Costa Rica blossom in so very many beautiful directions. I pray it will always be so.

And now, once again, we’re here! First, we’ll enjoy a beautiful three-hour journey through the countryside. Along the way, we’ll pass small houses with colorful laundry hanging, stalls selling creches and life-size deer figures, and vast fields of sugar cane. The backlit fronds of the cane will compete for our attention with their feathery tufts.

The roads are hilly and winding, with lushly planted homegrown guardrails of Dracena protecting against the steepest drops. Fortunately, traffic is mild. A small white dog trots up the road; a hilltop palm missing most of its fronds arcs leeward in the mist. I spy a rounded tree literally covered with white birds — at least 50 of them — and again, I wonder.

Halfway through the drive, we stop for coffee and the skies open wide for the twenty minute afternoon rain. When we pile back into the van, mist has settled onto the hairpin turns taking us down the mountain, but not enough to obscure the drive of banana, coffee, bougainvillea, citrus trees, dracena, palms, unfamiliar tropical fauna with giant leaves in every shape, blooming brush, and one surprising stand of three-needled pines.

Bridges become more frequent as we cross rocky streams and rivers, each path only one-laned, making a gentle dance of transport vans and the occasional bus or truck. Most of the locals walk, wisely against the traffic but still along the road with neither sidewalk nor shoulder for safety. Small signs advertise local businesses: “Many Meaty Dishes. All Meatless. All Tasty.” The rafters of a porch along the roadside support 20 bunches of bananas hanging by ropes. We pass through several small towns, and as the 5:00 sunset moves in, the people double in number — there is so much walking through the nightfall, and I hope hard that each arrives home safely.

We reach Finca Luna Nueva at what seems like 10 or 11 PM, though it is actually closer to 6:00, and we ascend the gravel just as moonstain moves in, spreading her welcome across the sky.

The lovely ladies of the lodge feed us well — offering chicken with saffron rice, soup, organic spinach, juices and salad from the farm, and I’m fast asleep before 9:00, tucked away in my little cabin with Costa Rican breezes blowing through.

I pray it will always be so.

P.S. Twenty years of visiting Costa Rica regularly, and I’ve never, ever tired of it. Bring it on in January 2024!

In the Jungle

/ Pam Goode / 8 Comments

The weather here is capricious, dancing from warm to cool to humid to breezy on a whim. Showers are so light they almost pass detection — they simply whisper by and are gone in a breath, and it’s something like watching a play while seated onstage — you feel everything from the joy to the spit.

The changing weather reminds me I’m on top of a mountain both physically and emotionally — not Everest, to be sure, but high enough to be face to face with changing currents not only of air and nature, but also the currents of thought and emotion within me. Nothing is static here.

Up at 5:45, I’ve already missed the sunrise. I walk to breakfast early to do some writing, and all nine of us are already there, ready to take on the day. We scarf down eggs cooked with tomato, beans and rice, half-dollar-sized cornmeal cakes, rustic bread, buffalo cheese (fabulous), buffalo yogurt, and carambola (starfruit) jam.

As soon as I finish, I miss the tastes.

By 9:00 we’re gathered for our tour of the organic farm, and before we hit the path, our guide Ishmael has already shown us a tree full of toucans (yesterday a flock of parakeets flew overhead); jackfruit, which can weight up to 75 pounds and often hangs bulbously and pimpled in an unseemly flop between forks in the tree; and the fruit of the Lipstick Tree, a beautifully freakish hairy and crimson pod used to color lips, cheddar cheese, fingers (oops) and cheetos.

Just beyond, Ishmael moves beneath a large bush, reaches both hands overhead to grasp an oblong yellow fruit, and begins twisting it on the stem until it snaps. About a foot long, this is cacao — the mother of chocolate. Smashed once against a trunk, the pod opens to reveal a white slime which we’re encouraged to taste, and it is deliciously sweet/tart with the faintest hint of bitter chocolate.

Later, Ishmael hands us the halves of several nerf-ball-sized green orbs with fleshy spikes, with a thicker white goo-ish interior. This is anonas, or custard apple, also known as ice cream fruit, and the most sublime mouthful I’ve ever tasted. I eat more than my share — scooping out the custard with my fingers and licking it up eagerly.

We pass drying racks for the cacao beans, used for chocolate smoothies onsite, hives for sting-less bees, an organic kitchen garden for the open air dining hall, papaya trees, the seed-starting greenhouse, the compost house where waste is buried in horns to add calcium to the soil, and a tasting table for ginger and turmeric, the two primary crops. The turmeric root is more orange than the spice — a WAKE-UP orange — and those who nibble it for a sample spend the rest of the day with orange teeth. Turmeric, which fights inflammation, is also as an antiseptic, and has antioxidant, antiviral, and anti-tumor properties, as well as being used as a dye for the saffron-colored robes of Buddhist monks. It would be a lovely landscape plant in any garden.

After a perfectly-cooked lunch of coconut-crusted white fish, we’re off on the rainforest path through a secondary-growth stand. The path is mossy and moist, with miniature fairy plants cascading across the forest floor and skinny sun-seekers so tall I can’t see their tops. In between, greens tangle across and upon and below each other, taking root in the most inane of places. Philodendrons and ferns and mosses and every type of epiphyte line the trunks from here to there, and when I look up, I can watch a single drop of moisture fall from the canopy high above me right down to my toes.

It’s like walking through a wonderland, except that nothing here exists for show. Every plant or insect has a purpose, and it’s a big one, symbiotic and natural. Wish it were so easy for humans.