My Favorite Thing to do in Costa Rica will Surprise You

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My Favorite Thing to Do in Costa Rica

Photo by Dennis Michel on Unsplash

I used to love driving in my car.

When I lived in the US I used to love driving my car. I’d arrange road trips to visit friends in the Bay Area so I could hop in my little red Hyundai and drive up the 5 freeway, just listening to music and looking out the window at the passing scenery. The landscape changing from grape vines to redwoods to ocean to pastures full of cows. If I didn’t have time for a road trip I’d sometimes just drive up the 101 along the coast to Pacific Palisades, just to enjoy the fresh air, rolling down my window, watching pelicans glide over the water as I listened to NPR and felt like I was getting an education while swerving around the bougainvillea strewn curves between the hills and the sea. Anything to get out of the house, and just be alone in my car.

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Which is why it feels so strange to me now to suddenly be so home bound. Part of what’s keeping me in Coco is the pandemic, the fear of catching covid, but part of it is just that there really isn’t anywhere else to be. Costa Rica is basically divided into two segments, the Ocean and the Mountains. The husband and I have traveled around a bit to explore the country, and what we find is that it takes a lot of time to get from one place to another, sometimes all day in fact, and once you get there, each town looks remarkably similar to the next.

Usually there is a central park square, and next to that a church. Surrounding the park, coffee shops, restaurants, houses covered in banana leaves. Sometimes the landscape is more mountainous or less. The sand at the beach is blacker or whiter. There are more monkeys or fewer. If you ever travel to Costa Rica with a lot of time on your hands, it’s worth renting a car so you can travel around, but if you’re in the middle of a pandemic, and don’t have your own private transportation, the extra effort of getting from one place to another just isn’t worth the time.

Now I’m suddenly a home body.

This realization has suddenly made me a serious homebody. In fact, I’m starting to worry that rather than be the social butterfly I naturally am, I might be turning slightly agoraphobic. I haven’t been out of Coco it seems in months and months. And that is a shame because one of the true pleasures I have discovered about being in Costa Rica is, surprisingly, enough, riding the local bus.

Back when we lived in Jaco, I loved riding the bus. You could get on for a short ride from home to town and see so much, almost like being on Safari at the zoo. Out the window you’d see tin roofed houses shaded by huge banana leaves. Unnamable vines running up the trunks of trees. Large leaves swiss cheese. In the distance mountains. If it was raining you could watch mist move over the peaks. If it was hot you could fall asleep with your head against the window, or you could pop the window and feel the breeze cooling the sweat on your brow.

If you were lucky you could see the silhouette of Macaw Parrots flying in the distance, like two or three brush strokes against the fabric of the sky, or hear them cawing at one another as they flew between trees. Sometimes you’d get off the bus and they would be there, bright red and feathery waiting to greet you from up in the top of the trees.

My favorite thing to do in Costa Rica is ride the bus

But what is really eye-opening is watching the people interact with each other. I think if I were born in Costa Rica, I would like to be a bus driver. They seem to know everyone. Greet passengers as they step up onto the bus. They’d stop on their rout and women would come out of their houses to hand them sandwiches and tamales wrapped in banana leaves and bottles of soda or juice. And the bus drivers would do this crazy thing sometimes. If they were about to move on from a stop and they saw somebody in the distance running to catch the bus, they would do this crazy thing I’ve never seen a bus driver in L.A. do. They would actually stop the bus and wait for the person to catch up.

It's not just the bus driver being kind. It’s everyone. Everyone takes the bus and the bus is where the community meets. Old people, kids on the way to or from school, teenagers, nursing mothers, boys listening to music on their earbuds.

You see the girls climb onto the bus and wave to their friends across the way and sit next to one another in their green and blue plaid uniforms. Nursing mothers cram themselves and a baby and a toddler all in one seat. And when older men or women ascend the steps, anyone sitting at the front of the bus immediately jumps up to offer them their seat. Taking the bus, you get to see the microcosm of community. The little dance people do to welcome one another, to adjust themselves to the needs of strangers, or the surprise arrival of friends. They way that people interact so that they can share a resource that they all need.

In the whole time we were there, I don’t think I ever offered anyone a seat. Usually because I was sitting in the middle and someone else always offered a seat before I could get up and it made me feel somehow left out.

The bus is a microcosm of the whole community

Now that I’m in Coco, I only take the bus when I need to go to Liberia. It’s a little bit of a difference. These aren’t people who live in the same town running their daily errands. They’re strangers riding to “the big city of Liberia.” It’s also quarantine now. Everyone is wearing masks and eying those whose masks slip below the nose. (I am anyway.)

I worry it won’t be the same. And, it isn’t the same.

But it doesn’t matter. The road to Liberia is beautiful. Guanacasta is a different kind of beauty. More like Mexico I imagine. Or the Savvanah of Southern California. During the dry period the fields are yellow and the hills in the horizon are blue. All dotted with big green Guanacaste trees. Usually there are Brahmin cows. No Macaws, but plenty of green paracotos. Palm trees. Banana leaves. Coconut bearing palm trees. Fruit stands full of dragonfruit.

Half way to Liberia a blind man and his companion get on the bus and sit down. The woman carries a small tambourine and as the bus begins moving again the blind man begins to sing. It’s an old voice, maybe it was beautiful once, but now it is mainly reedy. He sings something in Spanish as his companion bangs the tambourine absentmindedly on her knee.

I’ve seen this happen a million times in L.A. on the subway or in Chicago or in New York. Once a whole troup of young guys got on and did a whole acrobatics routine to a boom box, while the train was in motion. Always it ends the same, someone ends their act and then passes a hat. In New York and L.A. I’m used to people staring straight forward in the distance, pretending not to even notice. But here a strange thing happens.

Every person reaches into their pocket. Do they know the man? Is this part of their regular commute? Do they like his singing?

I see this kind of thing so often in Coco.

The homeless are less invisible here.

I’m trying here not to romanticize the homeless. I’m not trying to say this is a Utopic situation. Maybe a utopic situation would be one where nobody was unhoused, nobody was so unstable financially they would depend on strangers for change.

In this community, everyone cares about each other.

Now that things are slow I often see her walking into restaurants empty handed and coming out with cups full of ice water, or to go boxes of food.

There’s a man who is always offering to wash your windows.

There is one man who is frequently drunk, unshaven, frequently seen sleeping on the side of the road.

Nevertheless, people without flinching give them their spare change without thinking, as though they are paying a toll.

Somehow watching this exchange of money, this outpouring of generosity makes me realize how much of an outsider I am. The woman passes by me, but for some reason I do not give her any of the change in my pocket. I feel like my hands are made of Los Angeles. Hands made of America. I do not know these people. I do not know about this automatic sharing of my money with strangers.

I feel like my hands are still stuck in America

At the next stop the woman leads the blind man off of the bus. They are still shaking the hat, which jingles with the music of a kind of community generosity I don’t fully understand. When they get off the bus I feel relieved, able to go back into my own isolation. I feel more quiet and also alone.

Check Out The Poetry Salon’s Featured Poets for September and Register for Events with Them Below

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Jessica Purdy

Sestina in the Voice of Frances Glessner Lee

When I was a child and heard the word murder

It hit me in my center and entered my sleep.

What was this fear I’d never felt? This worry.

In my imagination, my body was carved with an adorable knife.

Each entry meant another miniature. Crime scenes in a nutshell.

Imitations of little deaths in my head.

My dollhouses made them real. To study the bludgeoned head,

the intention. My marriage had been murder

motherhood stifling, in a nutshell.

My husband could only sleep

around. When I was young and in love I said I loved knives.

Guns and their chambers made me worry.

I wasn’t prepared for worry,

but I could make a doll’s head,

a cloth curtain, miniature furniture, a protruding knife.

Was it suicide or murder?

Did it happen while the family was asleep?

Each room seen from above like the walnut shells

my mother would crack, create baby bassinets out of half a shell

with glue and old sheets torn by worried

fingers, feet. Ripped and tucked over a toy mouse asleep.

So now I make dioramas, dolls with bashed-in heads,

cigarettes that glow red, bullets lodged in ceilings. Murder

into art. Maybe the police will think of me like a knife:

cunning and sharp. I’ve always loved knives,

shield myself from those that don’t take my Nutshells

seriously. These detectives need to learn observation, and murders

cunning and sharp. I’ve always loved knives,

shield myself from those that don’t take my Nutshells

seriously. These detectives need to learn observation, and murders

need to be solved by looking. Don’t worry,

make time for the details in your pretty little head.

Did this one die in his sleep

or did his wife poison his wine and make him sleep?

Did the perpetrator knife

the girl in the chest and then head

home? Crack nuts and leave their shells

like trails of bread crumbs? Did her mother worry

she’d never grow older than sixteen, the victim of murder?

I’ve started sleeping with a knife

under the head of my bed. My obsession became the Nutshells.

Still, my ultimate worry: the precision of murder.

Kim Malinowski

Blatant Blister (from Buffy’s House of Mirrors)

I want to peel layers

of anxiety like sunburned skin.

Want to burn haunted itch.

Bring me fire.

I’ll dowse myself in kerosine.

No need for demon to teach

me bad dance moves.

My nails dig into my flesh,

no stake to save my heart.

Where do I go from here?

Prescriptions twist me into pretzel, antidote vampire bite.

I dare to grip Buffy’s flame.

Let it freeze me into solid ache.

Unresolved tension when

love

doesn’t matter and want

makes us flame

Register here for Our September Reading with Kim Malinowski and Jessica Purdy.