Dank Dawn — Costa Rica

Aeroplan botched my connecting flight out of Montreal on Sunday morning. “I’m sorry, I’m going to Fort Lauderdale?”

After a pinch of terror-panic, ended up in San José Sunday evening. Flying into the city, swaddled by ancient volcanic hills and lush forests, the street lights had a distinctly redder hue than our North American sodium lights, like a freeze-frame of embers climbing up from a campfire.

In a tussled and dusty post-colonial mansion, some sweet punks, a failed microbrewery entrepreneur, and an Austrian amateur diver made me feel right at home. Running on fumes, I begged them to speak to me in Spanish, and they gave me the run down on their rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of San Pedro, and their glowing memories and reviews of my next destination of Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

San José reminded me of a lot of mid-size cities in Germany: Freiburg, Stuttgart. Some pedestrian-only parades, and a sprinkling of modern architecture. The brightly coloured bus station went to the coast and to nearby Nicaragua, which immediately made me feel like I was touching my mom’s past.

The 4 hour bus ride was a vast gradient of modest living, garbage heaps, to inexplicably ancient forest highways, endless coconut groves, and small towns where shipping containers outnumbered the human population. Stuff, and their people.

We crept into Puerto Viejo at 2:30pm bathed in the hot glow of the late-afternoon sun.

I barely muttered “No, gracías..” to a herd of taxi drivers as I stumbled directly to the beach with my duffle bag to stand in this equatorial sun I’ve been dreaming of my entire adult life.

I humbly accepted a taxi ride to my jungle hut, about 7 km south down the road, by the coast’s most mystical beach of Playa Punta Uva.

My hosts have been renting here for 9 years. The hardwood floors feel like satin, and there’s a constant hum of natural activity in the air. Tropical birds sound off, a dog, roosters, some monkey chatter on occasion, and endless crickets. Then the roar of the Atlantic emerges below it all.

I wandered, zombie-like to Punta Uva. Even in the late-afternoon cloud cover, the beach was absolutely surreal. Warm waves washed over my feet as the suggestion of riptide flirted with my ankles.

I slumped on the sand and took it in until I realized I was passing out.

I got back to my hut at dusk. The equatorial sun rises and sets in restorative 12 hour intervals:  6am and 6pm. I took a cold shower, and made sure my friends knew I was alive. I took the porch hammock for a spin and communed with my aural surroundings.

I tried out my bed, and laid there contemplating the 5 minute bike ride up the road for dinner. After an hour, I turned off the lights and just lay there, swaddled by the dank air, windows wide open to the jungle, secure in my mosquito net, contemplating the syntax of the night life, and drifted off at 8:30pm.