Pura Vida

In Spanish "pura vida" literally means "pure life" but in Costa Rica it seems to have many meanings, from "pure/good life" to "cool." We saw the words in many places, used many ways, but the only time we heard it was when we were short by a few colones to pay for some pottery and since the vendor let us take the pottery, we assumed that her saying "pura vida" meant something along the lines of "no problem." Except for the roads, everything about Costa Rica is definitely pura vida!

It is a breathtakingly beautiful country.

Lake Arenal and Arenal Volcano

and the beautiful sunset, seen from our porch:

There are beautiful birds everywhere.
(These two are from a postcard, but we actually DID see two toucans together in a tree along a road out in the country. They were too far away to get a good photo of.)

During the week were were in Costa Rica, we saw over one-hundred species of birds!

The cattle are as often in the roads as in the endless pastures. No one seems to mind and traffic, when there is any, just slowly moves ahead, giving the cattle time to get off the road.




The iguana are, well, not beautiful, but plentiful. They are everywhere!

Even on tops of buildings:

During the first part of our visit, every sighting of an iguana was cause for a stop to take photographs. By the end of the week, every sighting was ...yawn...oh, another iguana.

At Palo Verde, a national park where we saw howler monkeys and white-faced capucin monkeys, we came across herds? flocks? families of coatamundi.

I loved all of the animals. Costa Ricans still use horses for transportation, so we saw lots of horses on the roads and grazing along the roads. Oxen are still work animals. As we left Tamarindo for a day's exploring, we saw these two, ready for work.

And hours later on our way back into town, we saw them at work:

There are interesting contrasts in Costa Rica. The roads are beyond horrible. Most of them are not paved, just covered with rocks - not crushed gravel - rocks! The highest posted speed limit that we saw was 60 kph, which is equivalent to about 36 mph. It was really, really rare that we could even approach going that fast and as a result, going anywhere took much longer than we anticipated, and that limited our tourism.

The country doesn't appear to place a high value on road-building, but it does, unlike Mexico, have drinkable water. It also seems to highly value its natural assets and beauty. There are many national parks and preserves that bring lots of eco-tourists back to visit. At Lake Arenal, a man made lake that provides hydro-electric power, there are vast wind farms along mountain peaks to produce electricity. It's startling to see people travelling by horseback and on old, single-speed bicycles, and then to suddenly see miles of modern windmills.

One of my fellow travellers had been to Tamarindo, where we stayed, years ago, when the town was just a tiny fishing village. It has now been discovered by north Americans and is being developed; formerly empty beaches are being filled with condos, resorts and hotels. Costa Rica will have a fine line to trace to keep over-development from destroying the beauty everyone comes there to enjoy. I hope they can do this because........

I think it would be a shame to go there and not be able to stumble across this view:

and find a restaurant on the beach:



where the seafood is great, and the pina colada is the best EVER!!!

Friends ask me if I would like to go back, and YES! I would. I would love to have the time to go up higher into the cloud forests where there are even more birds and the chance to see the tops of volcanoes. I was told that the Arenal Volcano, which we partly ascended, still blows off steam and smoke regularly. It was obscured by the clouds the day we were there, but I would love to go back and explore the area.

So I will!

Anyone interested???