OneWayTicket

Day 48: The joys of nothing, Puerto Viejo

Take a look at the gentlemen in the photo below. They reminded us of the joy of doing, well, nothing.

If it sounds to you like that´s what we´re doing through this 90-day journey, you couldn´t be more wrong. We´ve been on the move: travel, packing, transport, getting visas, finding food, and that great holiday trap -- activities. Ah yes, not easy.

Make no mistake, we´ve enjoyed every bit of it. It truly has been the experience of a lifetime. 

But it was these Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves, at the little seafront in Puerto Viejo (literally, the old port) -- a little town on Costa Rica´s Caribbean coast that we´ve chosen as our base for 10 days -- who reminded us of the great joy in hanging around, watching the people go by and enjoying the sun and the rain.

I assume it was around 11 am, the day before, when we saw them gather around a friend´s boat on the little stretch of beach that´s called el parquecito (the little park). When we saw them more than two hours later they had moved exactly 5 metres, reluctantly driven under cover by the rain.

We know this because we were there, first having a drink and then a wonderful paella, rice cooked with saffron, fish, squid, prawns (Photo below), served to me by the cute daughter of the woman who cooked it and apparently runs the place.

Yesterday, the men about town had simply moved across the road, playing with some kids. Every girl who cycles by waves to them, drivers in construction trucks do the same. They speak to everyone, long-staying foreigners and locals, switching from Spanish to English when needed.

A word of explanation about the language: Many of the locals speak Caribbean English around here because they are Afro-Caribbean, hired from a group of islands called the Antilles to build a railway line sometime in the late 19th century. They haven´t given up their language or traditions.

Reggae rules around the handful of little towns and villages strung out on this coast, Bob Marley is everywhere (see photo above), and it´s easy to get Caribbean jerk chicken and coconut fish curry and rice everywhere. So, it isn´t hard to see why that Caribbean tradition of "liming" -- the art of hanging around -- is so strong here.

The people are gentle and friendly -- add this to their languid attitude to life, the spectacular rain forests sloping into endless beaches, and it´s easy to see why you will find people from across the world living as permanent residents here. The pace is e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y slow, and there are dramatically fewer people than Goa. And yes, it is dramatically cleaner: The sewage system works excellently, there is no trash on the beaches (save the occassional bottle or straw), and no one tries to cheat you. Taxi drivers or street performers -- they will smile if you tip them, smile if you don´t.  

The walk from our guest house of Banana Azul (translated, Banana Blue) to town is just over 2 km, along the beach. It takes us 35 minutes at least. Yesterday was a busy day -- we ran into five people, three horses -- and three dogs trying to chase the horses (see photo below).

Just before town, we slow down at a rusty, old wreck that now has trees growing inside it. It is the local fishing spot (see photo above) and invariably a place of some entertainment. Christopher Columbus anchored in the lee of an island somewhere just north of where we are, on his fourth trip to the new world.

We never take the road. It´s in very bad shape. Actually, potholes have taken over the road and the asphalt is distant memory. Once you get off the main roads in Costa Rica, the roads are just like India´s back roads -- in terrible shape, if at all they exist. Only last night we took a taxi back home because walking home after dark isn´t recommended. Today, we´ll cycle. Bad roads apart, the other thing you need to take in your stride are the insects. Our legs are covered with itchy bites, the result of not using Odomos -- which works absolutely fine, thank you -- one evening.

It really hasn´t take me long to get in the slowdown mode. I sleep at least nine hours every night, don´t know what day, date or time it is (I confess I am now randomly pasting days in the header of this blog; the wife´s keeping track, I hope). I make decisions based on how hungry I am, how high the sun is or how much light there is. Even the wife -- a soul normally given to hyperactivity -- has slowed down, as you can see in the photo below, taken without her knowledge because she doesn´t like the world to know she´s paddling in rock pools and gazing into nothingness.

I now take an average of 45 minutes to finish a meal, as opposed to 15 minutes back home. This is how I lived life growing up in an equally slow corner of India, the Deccan. I spent years gazing at insects in the grass, the clouds in the sky. So, here in Puerto Viejo, I watch the turtles at the guest house, the crabs on the beach and on the lawn (yup, giant ones on the lawn, one got into our room and caused the wife some panic). The joys of nothing are returning fast to my soul.

The Costa Rican motto is Pura Vida, the full life. A bit like the Goan susegad. A wonderful, if slothful life. Appropriately, the sloth is a creature you will see in the rain forests around here.

Hey, hang on. As I´m typing this, a guy from the kitchen has just brought in a live sloth! .... Okay, I´m back. That was quite wild! The sloth was hanging around in a nearby tree, to which he´s now being returned. Someone tried to pet him, and just missed getting a handful of claws sunk into her hand: A sloth normally moves in slow motion but clearly can move fast, if needed.

It´s not like there is only nothing to do in Costa Rica (literally, the rich coast). If you want, there are very exciting activities every day. We´ve already done an intense 18-km white-water rafting trip in a gorge through a rain forest on the day we got here, and tomorrow we intend to zipline over the rain forest, an adrenalin-pumping activity where they sling you in a harness and zip you on a steel line over the top of the rain-forest canopy, upto 100 metres (that´s a tenth of a kilometer!) above the ground. There´s also kayaking, visits to cottage-choclate factories (made by families), snorkeling, forest hikes, dolphin-watching tours -- its endles.

Actually, Costa Rica makes great sense for any of you who intend to come to the US on vacation. It´s a Rs 20,000, or cheaper, round trip from the US (Delta flies direct from Delhi to New York, then direct to San Jose), and things are incredibly cheap. We are staying in an atmospheric guest house, made entirely of wood. The bathroom is open to the sky, impecably maintained, has hot water, white sheets, and our room overlooks the beach and the Caribbean sea. All for about Rs 16,000 for the entire week, including breakfast. Our meals in town cost an average of $ 8, you can have a drink for $2.

If you don´t know Spanish, hey everyone will help. And here on the Caribbean coast, someone will speak English. By the way, my wife has been exaggerating my Spanish-speaking skills. I can manage the basics though, and I find a great conversation starter is asking about the food. ¿Qual es la comida tipicos de la zona? What´s the typical local food? I find that always get a great response, and keeping the conversation going from there on is great fun, if substantially challenging. (Photo: the view, below, from a restaurant on the beach from where we had our diner last evening; inside the restaurant, a young couple was playing Bossa Nova, a Brazilian genre of music)

This blog post has got to be the most energetic thing I´ve done in three days. Got to stop before I slip out my state of mind.