Chapter 4

Pura Vida

San José, Costa Rica

August 10

When we last left our intrepid travelers, they had narrowly escaped the hippie lepidopterists of the Monteverde Butterfly Garden, fiends who would have inadvertently—but fiendishly nonetheless—revealed to their innocent children the mysterious facts of life. Having deftly dodged that bullet, it was time for lunch.

Apparently the proprietors of the restaurant we went to had the same prudish attitude toward sex as I did, because there was a large hand-printed sign inside the front door that read, “En este restaurante no se permiten escenas amorosa.”⁶ That message was somewhat undercut by the fact that it hung right next to a 2×3-foot beer calendar adorned with a life-sized picture of a woman’s rear end in a thong bikini. Still, the meal was delicious, or as Kara loudly announced to the assembled tourists and locals alike, “That sure was good Mexican food.”

Our next stop was Arenal Lodge, which was located near the very active Arenal Volcano. The lodge was only about twenty-five miles from Monteverde as the crested caracara flies, but we denizens of the tour bus had to rattle four hours and a hundred miles across a mountain pass to get there. Aside from not wasting money on armed forces, the Costa Ricans have apparently been skimping on road repair, and my kidneys barely survived the ride.

Our room at Arenal Lodge featured a magnificent view of the famous volcano that blew its top in 1968, killing somewhere between sixty and eighty people and around twenty thousand head of cattle. The day we arrived, the mile-high cone loomed ominously above the jungle canopy, wearing a mantle of white clouds and an iron-grey crown of volcanic smoke. It rumbled ominously every half hour or so, and after dark, we could see streaks of glowing orange lava flowing viscously down its side. It was like the old King Kong movie, and I expected to see Faye Wray fleeing from the jungle at any moment.

Since traipsing our children through the venomous cloud forest had gone so well, we decided to push our luck and bring everyone—including two-year-old Lucas—on the volcano hike the following morning. This trek took us across old lava flows and part way up the cone. As we picked our way through the steaming basalt boulders, it occurred to me that a large-scale eruption at this point would be inconvenient to the point of cremation. Strangely, nobody else seemed the least bit concerned.

Sitting comfortably at home, you probably think that a three-mile hike on a narrow path through vast fields of jagged lava rock would be a rather bad place to bring a two-year-old … and boy, would you be right. I mean, really, what were we thinking? The only thing that could have made matters worse—aside from an actual eruption—was a driving rainstorm. And sure enough, an hour into the hike, the heavens opened, drenching our clothes and making the rocks as slippery as … well, wet rocks. I’d still be picking my way back down through the lava fields with Lucas on my shoulders if it weren’t for Oscar, the bus driver. Add “agility of a mountain goat” to “eye of an eagle” on Oscar’s list of James Fenimore Cooperesque attributes, because he carried Lucas at least halfway down the mountain.

Later that afternoon, we found a mellower way to enjoy the volcanic ambience. At the base of the mountain, there was a funky old hot springs resort called Tabacón. It had five steaming pools heated by Arenal’s magma core. The largest and warmest pool had a long waterslide for the kids and a swim-up bar for parents. Devi and I stood in the hot green water with our backs to the mossy old bar languidly sipping margaritas and watching the volcano above us spew steam and ash. Every thirty minutes or so, it tossed up a few pretty good-sized boulders, and as dusk approached, red lava flowed torpidly down its side. This was simultaneously pleasant and disturbing. Actually, I think the word would be decadent. Even for Californians used to life on the fault line, it seemed awfully hubristic to be standing around in a swimming pool sipping cocktails immediately underneath an erupting volcano.

I’d always wondered how the citizens of Pompeii had been caught so unawares. Now I know. Someone probably said, “Gee, Mount Vesuvius seems awfully active today.” And everyone else said, “Don’t worry, Marcus. Have another margarita.”

Our last stop in Costa Rica was Tortuguero National Park, located on a long, nearly uninhabited stretch of Caribbean coastline. Its name derives from the fact that Tortuguero is one of only two spots in the Western Caribbean where giant green sea turtles waddle ashore to lay their eggs.

Up until this point, the Cost Rican roads had been pretty wretched, but that was no longer an issue because there was no road whatsoever between Arenal and Tortuguero—or between anywhere and Tortuguero for that matter. There were only two ways to get there: drive to the Caribbean port of Limón, and hire a boat, or take a light plane over the mountains to a small airstrip near the lodge.

There were several good reasons not to take the airplane. First of all, before we left home, my sainted mother called specifically to say, “Son, I realize you are travelling around the world for God knows how long, that you’re going to India and Africa and God knows where. And I understand that you feel compelled to take our grandchildren away from us for a year or more. But promise me this one insignificant thing: that you won’t fly around Third World countries in small airplanes.” Then she told me a story about another young couple, just like us, who went to Africa, and when the guy’s mother came to visit she was killed in a small plane crash and her body was nearly eaten by lions. (“They’ll have to live with that guilt.”)

Anyway, we didn’t have much choice. The tour operators, in their wisdom, had decided to fly us to Tortuguero from a small rural airstrip, and it would have taken an extravagant display of cowardice to weasel out of it. That being said, I was still taken aback when Miguel asked us to pare down our baggage to ten kilos. I mean, honestly, do you really want to fly in a plane where a few kilos either way will make a difference? I also couldn’t help noticing that the airstrip in Rio Frío Sarapiquí wasn’t exactly what you’d call a real airport. There was a sixteen-seat propeller-driven plane and a strip of blacktop that might pass for a runway. But otherwise, there were none of the usual accoutrements one associates with modern air travel. I mean I didn’t miss the X-ray machines and the long lines at the check-in counters, but there is something reassuring about a tower and radar and whatever else they use to keep one airplane from colliding with another.

We took off over a patchwork of lush jungle and cultivated fields. Despite my misgivings, the flight was remarkably smooth, and within twenty minutes, we sighted the azure Caribbean hemmed by tall palms and a gleaming strip of white beach. We descended alongside the Rio Tortuguero and landed on an airstrip hacked from the coastal jungle. Brakes squealed, the plane shuddered, and we rolled to a halt. We all got out and humped our luggage across the runway, through a palm grove to an old-fashioned flat-bottomed boat powered by a sputtering outboard motor. Then we crossed the wide, crocodile-infested river.

On the far bank, we found simple accommodations reminiscent of summer camp. The lodge looked as if it might blow over in a stiff wind, and its builders weren’t particularly attached to the concept of right angles, but in my present ascetic state of mind, I was delighted to find someplace without air conditioning, telephones, televisions, radios, or mini-bars. The most anomalous and pleasant aspect of the lodge was the fact that there was no parking lot or any sort of road leading in or out. Automobiles, trucks, and the wheel in general were completely useless here, and this gave Tortuga Lodge an old-fashioned Graham Greene sort of appeal. We’d clearly left civilization behind, and that was good for one cleansing sigh of relief.

Our first scheduled trek was a boat trip into the coastal rain forest. After a hearty lunch, our entire party piled back into the little blue scow that brought us over from the airstrip. As we headed upstream, the river gradually narrowed. The mud-brown water turned black, and the trees closed in around us obscuring the heavy grey sky. Webs tended by monstrous black spiders hung from bank to bank only a few feet above our heads, and from time to time, the screech of an eagle or the subwoofer grunt of a howler monkey pierced the hot, heavy air.

As we chugged up the river, movie scenes kept popping into my mind—first The African Queen, then Apocalypse Now. At first, I thought that was sort of romantic, connecting our little adventure with these grand cinematic images. But then it struck me that popular culture—even good popular culture—has so thoroughly pervaded our lives that it’s now practically impossible to experience new places and adventures without immediately comparing them to something we’ve seen in a movie or on television. Fortunately, Kara and Willie don’t have this problem—at least not yet.

When they were four and five years old, respectively, Devi enrolled them in a Waldorf preschool.⁷ The school asked parents to insulate their children from television and movies and not to buy them clothes festooned with cutesy media characters. Initially, I thought these rules were elitist nonsense—a sort of cultural superiority—but in the end I realized that they kept the delicate garden of a child’s imagination from being weed-whacked by violent action figures or the latest Disney confection.

Because of this early training, I believe that Kara and Willie can still encounter new places and experiences with imaginations that are largely unsullied by seductive processed Hollywood imagery. That’s one of the many nice things about bringing our children on this trip. They give Devi and me a rare opportunity to step outside the hive-mind and see new places through their fresh eyes.

On our last day in Tortuguero we had the rare opportunity to observe giant green sea turtles as they shuffled ashore to lay their eggs. At ten o’clock on a moonless night, the whole family hiked and stumbled along a pitch-black Caribbean beach strewn with rocks and logs. We were led by a whispering guide carrying a half-watt penlight. His number one rule was “do not annoy the sea turtles.” Brighter lights and talking of any sort—even whispering—were strictly forbidden.

Even though they weigh four hundred pounds and are the size of large ottomans, green sea turtles are actually fairly difficult to spot in the middle of the night. First of all, they are dark green; and secondly, they use their big flippers to bury themselves halfway into the sand. This process takes several hours, after which the turtles go into an hour-long trance and lay dozens of gleaming white eggs that look like small ping-pong balls.

Half an hour into the hike, we finally stumbled across a sea turtle. We all circled behind her. (Rule number two: Never stand between a laying sea turtle and the sea.) Our guide gently lifted the turtle’s rear end, and we all took turns glancing at her big pile of white eggs. Devi and I were rewarded with big silent “Wows!” from the kids.

Afterward, as we hiked back up the beach, the guide held up his hand. We held perfectly still while another giant sea turtle shambled across the sand and slid silently into the mild Caribbean. She would never see her children. After a few months in the warm sand, the hatchlings would make their way into the shallow water, where 95 percent would be eaten by predators. The few survivors would roam as far as Florida and Venezuela, then two or three years later they would return to Tortuguero to repeat the cycle. When we got back to the lodge, in the middle of the night, the children shook the sand from their shoes and fell asleep, enchanted by the evening’s revelations.

So was the first leg of our journey a success? On one level, yes. Less so on another. Certain moments, like observing the laying sea turtles and watching Kara come alive with joy and knowledge in the Costa Rican cloud forest, were worth all the coffee in Central America. But there were also philosophical problems with this segment of our trip. First of all, we travelled in a hermetic group that somehow managed to avoid any substantive contact with real live Costa Ricans. Granted, this was billed as a nature expedition, not a cultural experience. But there’s something wrong about rambling around a country for eleven days and never meeting anyone outside the tourist trade.

And while one of the primary goals of our journey was to search for adventure, we found the whole concept of an “adventure tour” to be oxymoronic by nature. An adventure is supposed to involve challenges, surprises, and an element of risk. When you begin an adventure, you’re not supposed to know how it ends. But tour operators—even adventure tour operators—have to do everything possible to eliminate risk and surprises. Their job is to deliver an experience that matches the advertised itinerary as closely as possible.

The organizers of our tour did a fine job, and with Oscar and Miguel at the helm, we undoubtedly saw more sights and learned more facts than we ever would have done on our own. Furthermore, adventure tours, such as they are, tend to attract easygoing travel companions—not the sort who whine if the soup isn’t hot or there’s a cockroach in the sink. But anyway you cut it, this was still a preplanned, prepackaged, predestined experience—and on that level, it was ultimately unsatisfying. Devi and I are both glad that this was the only part of our trip that was professionally planned and organized. Within the bounds of safety and reason, the journey we want to take will be full of screw-ups, wrong turns, blind alleys, and missed opportunities—the very things that tour operators avoid.

If you ask a Costa Rican “Que pasa?” and things are going reasonably well, he or she will invariably answer “Pura vida”—“Pure life.” It’s the first phrase they teach you when you stumble off the plane in San José. Pura vida is what we’re searching for on this trip, and unfortunately, it can’t be packaged.

⁶ “No amorous scenes are permitted in this restaurant.”

⁷ Based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Waldorf schools encourage children to develop their natural spirituality without imposing structures on their learning.