Costa Rica
We left on Christmas Day. Travel was as travel always is: boring, uncomfortable, but the pains are staved off by the promise of arrival. Five and a half hours in the air and one connection in Miami later, my siblings, father and I stepped out of Juan SantaMaria Airport and were met by a rush of warm air, the smell of humidity and cigarette smoke, and the shouts and bustle of taxi drivers and fellow passengers, each with their own destinations and goals.
We stayed one night in the Marriot before, at 5:45 the next morning, a bus full of passengers came to pick us up. And so the journey began.
The bus trundled along endless roads, looking over lovely green hillsides pock-marked with houses. We reached the river, which flowed smoothly, if with undeniable power, past, before dissolving into enraged rapids. Our guide took us white-water swimming for a time, while we awaited the second bus of people. We wore life jackets and were told to assume a position with our feet pointing downriver and our heads up. The water was chilly and it quickly soaked my clothes. Then, the river took me in a firm grip, dragging me downriver, while the curtain of greenery made an unbelievably lovely backdrop. I was so joyful. Illinois can drink the life from you, absorb it in impenetrable gray and cold until you don’t remember anything but the icy shell that’s formed around you. But Costa Rica! A waterfall of life, so full of energy that it seems perfect, untainted by even the slightest hint of cold.
We then rafted downriver, following instructions from our guide with silent assent. We didn’t need to speak to fill the silence. We just listened to the natural orchestra of animals, the rustling of the trees and the never-ending percussion of the river slapping the rocks in a rhythm as old as the earth. We reached the lodge: a collection of cabins with Zip lines strung like human-bearing spiderwebs above, and a dining and lounge area that over-looked the river. The smell of moist earth, the faint, delicate scent of tropical flowers…it was the perfect spot. Lunch and dinner came and went, delicious meals of tropical fruit, rice and beans, salad, fish…everything that we ate had to be rafted down the river, there was no other way to take it. And when night fell, casting the brilliant bird-of-paradise plants into ghostly, vague shadows, it was so dark that it seemed almost brighter when your eyes were closed. There was no electric lighting. We had to read by the golden flames of the candles in our room. Even the darkness seemed vibrant. Nothing was done halfway. Instead of the sickly eternal sunset of Illinois, a property born of light pollution, the Costa Rican night sky held none of the sallow reddish cast, but rather a thick, rich darkness, broken only by the pinpricks of stars. Looking up felt like drowning in the softest, warmest vat of the darkest chocolate. And stars! I hadn’t seen stars in so long…I felt like I had come home. I guess that it was as close to the natural home as EVERYBODY as one could get. Untarnished by the scars of civilization, uncontaminated by technology, uninhibited by the growth of population.
The trip continued and everything was lovely. The endless forests, the dainty, colorful birds, the zip lining, the rafting, the gorgeous geothermal springs. But nothing could compare to looking into that perfect sky and being irrevocably and unarguably home.
Topic: Life, Ramblings Tags: Life
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