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???

Ah, Mexico...

First of all, there's the beach. Sigh....... I really, really miss the beach.


A week ago today I left the warmth of the Yucatan in Mexico. This is the third year that I have gone with friends to various places in Mexico: the first trip was to Sayulita, a small fishing village north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific; the second was to San Miguel de Allende, a centuries-old city in the high desert in the center of the country; and this year we went to Puerto Morelos, a tiny fishing village between Cancun and Playa del Carmen on the Caribbean.

SO, first things first. The top picture is the beach in front of our house; the second picture is the view from my BED!!! I fell asleep every night watching the white foam from the waves breaking on the beach. I awoke every morning to the soft sounds of the waves washing up onto the beach. It was a wonderfully relaxing vacation.

But Cancun and Playa del Carmen are so Americanized, Canadianized, and Europeanized that they are cities I have no interest in visiting. The beachfronts are lined with wall-to-wall, enormous, gaudy resorts, condos, and hotels. Instead of staying there, we rented a house on the beach just north of the town of Puerto Morelos. It was quiet and sort of remote, but I suspect, based on the construction already begun, that in under five years it too will be overbuilt and overrun by tourists from all over the world. That's just fine; I understand. I am, after all, a tourist too. I know that resorts are perfectly nice places and they provide jobs for the locals, but I prefer being where I can see old Mexico, or at the very least, Mexican Mexico. San Miguel de Allende, by contrast, was wonderful, and I could go back there again and again. It's centuries old, very colonial, and we were able to rent a 400-year old house in the center of town. Amazing!

There was little to do in terms of sight-seeing in this part of the Yucatan. We did drive inland one day to a place called Coba, where there is a large site full of ruins from the Mayans. It was in what the locals call a jungle, but I guess it's technically a "dry" jungle. Our pedi-cab driver was a descendant of the Mayans and could speak Mayan as well as Spanish and some English. He took two of us on an hour tour of the many ruins. The third of us had been there thirty years ago and took the time to go bird-watching.

I considered climbing this, and then, after watching a youngish man struggle to get down the ruin, re-considered and just took pictures. It really was amazing to see these old, old structures, and picture the Mayans building and using them, and living in the jungle many centuries ago. Below is a typical Mayan residence built of sticks side by side for walls, and thatch for the roof. Usually, two or more of these were joined by walkways for a family's home. I suppose this is not original, but there were enough of them scattered around everywhere we drove once we were inland that I suspect that some people still build and use them. The poverty in Mexico is stunning, and so it's no surprise that people would still live in these.

The Yucatan and the jungle are supposed to be filled with wild and potentially dangerous animals: jaguars, ocelots, monkeys, crocodiles, boa constrictors, and coatamundis. The coatamundi and crocodile are the only wild animals we saw, much to my dismay! I really wanted to see monkeys in the wild, and a jaguar would have been a treat (as long as I was in a car or a building).

Meet Mr. or Mrs. Coatamundi. He is wild, but he was near a hut where the staff sells snacks and water. I saw tourists tossing food to this guy, so that's why he was so accommodating about having his photo taken.

Anyhow, the trip to Mexico was wonderful. It is the first of the trips where it occurred to me that I was someplace WARM when it was COLD at home. During the past two trips I was so entertained by sight-seeing and doing other tourist things that I hadn't even considered what a really GREAT idea Mexico is in January!