Day 1 in Costa Rica – País Hermoso
I am staying at a place called Monteverde Inn at the Valle Escondido Nature Preserve, a private few acres of land seated on the edge of a creek that looks out over a lush green valley akin to something I’d imagine from The Land Before Time. Aside from being a small hotel, restaurant, and nature preserve, the place is also a small farm devoted to teaching folks the fundamentals of permaculture and sustainable farming. The owners of the preserve lead guided tours of the farm, along with night tours to observe native wildlife, and sunrise aerial yoga classes on a deck overlooking the impressive view of the valley.
It has been a grinding 24+ hours to get here, but now being here I can’t imagine a place more serene. Just hearing the birds and bugs and intermittent rain and wind in the trees makes me feel so safe and calm and content. The whole place radiates pure peace.
Being here is paradise – it feels so authentically untouched by humankind. Such a gift to be able to experience. And in solitude it is even more special.
I took a walk throughout the property earlier and am stunned by how green everything is. Truly a chlorophyll kingdom. I stop to notice the little things that go under the radar, like so many strings of worker ants carrying their payload in unison march across the hiking trails. Everything is a marvel here and the closer I look, the more I see. With each moment of observation, the more sure I am that this life and consciousness itself is such a gift. I am trying to train my eyes and ears to look more closely still.
There is a mural with a quote painted on one of the walls near the restaurant at the preserve, and I can’t imagine words more suitable to the feeling I am trying to express having experienced here:
La naturaleza va primero.
Todo viene de ella, todo va hacia ella, todo es parte de ella.
Lo alimenta todo y nadie
puede tomar un respino si no es por ella.
Agradecer por la naturaleza es agradever por la vida – la hermosa obra maestra de cual somos testigos y formamos parte.
La tella de esta obra maestra, es el amor.
Tajhen Chogyaf
After walking through the preserve, I sit at dusk watching the clouds surf over this lookout point, rainbows gently rolling out across the sky and then back again as they retreat with the showers. It’s all so surreal and calming and powerful at once. I wonder how I can bring this presence into my life beyond traveling here to experience it.
I also wonder still about my place (and our place) in it all. We are still just a small piece in the web of this fabric that is nature and life. Why does it feel that it’s become our role to decide what environment is best, and to enforce it through what we build and grow? Where are our limits to growth? What can I do in my field to redirect our focus to nature and connectedness, rather than growth and profit? How can I live my life this way more consciously than I currently am?
The older I get, the more I learn about myself, the more I see and acknowledge my inner child, the more I recognize the people I value and want to be like, the more easily I can let go of other images, paths, and models that are not authentic to me. I will always be on that path to conscious self acceptance and love. Being here gives me a new energy to share myself in the most open, authentic, confident, and loving way that I can. I want to open my heart and share my world and my voice. I’m excited at the prospect of growing further with sensitive, wise old souls, artists, and the endlessly curious who seek and find the beauty in everything.
The sidewalks here in Monteverde are embedded with tiles printing out the reminders:
abrirse
ariesgar
disfrutar
amar
How much can I do each of these things in the next 10 days?
Day 2 in Costa Rica – Mucha Lluvia
Today has been a lot more of what I expected from a cloud forest: lots of heavy rains. Soaked all the way through my rain jacket, through my socks, my skin, my hair; I don’t think I have ever been so drenched. It has seemed to hydrate my soul from the outside in. I spent a lot of my time today exploring in the rain, slipping and sliding and playing in the mud. It was interesting to observe the initial shock of slipping down a slope when I lost my footing coming down a hill, but my reaction was just to stand myself up again keep going, and hold my hands out to let the raindrops wash away the red clayey dirt. Everything is okay, everything is temporary.
I have seen a lot of ficus trees during my time here so far. These trees, the “strangler fig”, have a habit of wrapping their winding roots around stones, off of cliffs, and generally around their “host” trees. I was in awe of the ficus trees for their vein-like root systems, so clear and capable of holding back entire cliffsides. This was before I knew that these trees are parasitic. They literally begin their life at another tree’s root system, gradually smothering them and depriving them own their own sunlight, water, and nutrient resources. The tune changed again when I learned even more, that (as far as parasites go) this ficus is one of the better ones. The birds and animals here enjoy the ficus fruit, explaining why the ficus has been so successful and can be found thriving so many places here, owing their residence to the animals doing the seed-distributing. Additionally, the ficus also forms a special kind of shelter for the wildlife, as the twisting, winding root system left behind as a shell after the host tree dies is full of nooks and crevasses that serve as the perfect playground and home to birds, rodents, bugs, and even other plants.
Thinking about the ficus this way has me applying the relationship within the context of our species and how humankind is in the process of terraforming our world. Much of the time, I feel hopeless when I see how much of our environment has changed, some of it irreparably, at such a dangerous rate that does not appear to be slowing or stopping at any point in the near future, unless my some grand force majeure (apparently COVID-19 was not enough to get us all aligned and thinking critically and realistically about how we need to drastically re-define what progress, success, and growth mean on a planet with finite resources). Can we be the parasite that comes to benefit the greater ecosystem? Maybe the host tree dies, but can we keep the forest alive and thriving? Or perhaps we are the host tree, and the growing force that is AI is the strangler fig that will take us down, but allow the forest to survive.
When I spend time alone in the forest, or even just here in my hostel bed alone at night, listening to the rain fall and the crickets and birds and frogs singing their songs, I feel that so gently, the world is asking us to just listen, to slow down, to trust, to open up, and to see the beauty of what life really is: our connection to everything and to each other. The reality that we know is just a pixel in the bigger, moving image, only a fragment of this continuous, looping cycle. This is only temporary. Let us use our time here when we have the consciousness and voice and power to protect the quieter things that don’t speak in human languages.
Day 3 in Costa Rica – mas lluvia y camine en la noche
Torrential downpours here in Monteverde, but I am soaking up every second of it. I have spent most of the day exploring the Cloud Forest Reserve and again feel that I am walking in near complete solitude. From talking with some of the locals, it sounds like the wa
After spending most of the day in the clouds, I returned after dusk to Monteverde for a guided night walk tour, where we saw more wildlife than I could have anticipated. It was just a small group of four of us: our sharp, young guide, a couple from the Pacific Northwest, and myself, which again really added to the experience and made it feel private and special.
We started off seeing a green side-striped pit viper, lounging high up in a tree with a belly full of whatever creature had fallen victim to her that day. Her yellow eyes gleamed at us in the light of our flashlights, but she as perfectly relaxed. Afterwards, our guide spotted an owl nearby, followed by so many bugs including crickets, stick bugs, a caterpillar, spiders, a tarantula, and dozens of frogs. The tree frogs were paddling around in a tiny pond, croaking and kicking and mating, really enjoying themselves and sharing their songs with the rest of the nightscape. The true highlight of the night was finding a red-eyed tree frog – truly beautiful little frogs, a pure image of Costa Rica, with a sweet song, almost like someone gently tapping their finger on a glass or playing a single repetitive note on a xylophone. This song is what led our guide to finding it. In fact, I know I would note have seen any of these things had it not been for our guide or other folks on the walk. I am so amazed by people’s keen skill and practice of listening to and seeing the forest for all its parts, beyond the glorious overwhelming mass of green and chords of every living thing that it is.
Day 4 in Costa Rica – Antes de morir, vivimos
Currently I’m sitting outside my hostel as dusk sets in, slightly buzzed from happy hour drinks with Avery and a stunning view of the Bay of Nicoya, gentle clouds rising and falling over the horizon, reminiscent of the all-too-familiar Bay Area fog I have come to know and love so well. This evening is the first clear one I have had since staying here in Monteverde, and as much as I have come to appreciate la lluvia, I am happy to be in dry clothes and with a heart oversaturated in appreciation and adoration of everything around me. Even the crickets and night life bugs I hear around me now appear to be in unison chorus, mimicking breath. The forest seems to be teeming with life always. Are these another set of lungs I am hearing, apart from the wind in the trees?
Today was filled with ziplining, flying through the rainforest, getting a new vantage point again of all the countless shades of greenery surrounding us. During the zipline, I find myself wondering consistently that this must be what the birds feel when they go about each day. This is their reality. What freedom! But how much are the boundaries we observe in our own lives constructed in only our minds? Where, if anywhere, do they exist in reality? We always have a choice, if only at least in how we react to things. I am trying to make the most of my choices each day.
The last experience of our zipline tour was a “Tarzan swing” that drops you from a platform while you are fastened to a rope that then swings you like a pendulum above the canopy of the forest. I think this may be the closest I ever get to bungee jumping or skydiving, and I am perfectly okay with that for now! The feeling of the ground disappearing underneath me is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced – I lost my breath and then instinctively let out a scream. When was the last time you really screamed? Out of fear? Before this moment, I don’t recall. The second I felt the tension in the rope begin to work against gravity and keep me suspended, this fear receded and my sanity returned. I started laughing almost maniacally. I felt crazed, being almost so close to death that making this choice did feel like a bit of a gamble with fate. It’s funny and crazy how our brains control and manipulate us like this. We can be so sure – and I thought I was so sure – that I am relatively removed from my ego and exist on a higher plane of awareness and being with others (I find I am constantly reminding myself that fundamentally we are all the same), but clearly that is my own ironic and naive ego thinking.
I continue to learn more and more about myself with each day here, and plan on continuing to do so for the rest of my life, in addition to cultivating a deeper sense of self appreciation and love that requires consistent practice and meditation. This trip has been a good exercise in that so far.
Day 5 in Costa Rica – Monteverde to Santa Teresa
It is amazing what can classify as a personal paradise for one individual, yet can be absolutely harrowing to the next. This is how I find myself in the first few hours of Santa Teresa, what I was expecting to be a small, mellow beach town (this may have been the case 15-20 years ago), but what I am finding has been overrun by tourists and expats, many of which have opened their own cafes and boutiques lining the streets, giving the place a vibe (and a price tag) that feels all to similar to southern California. The place is truly an Instagram influencer’s paradise. I feel so incredibly out of place here, almost like a fraud? I am sitting on the beach and reflecting, dwelling on the feeling and letting it come and sit naturally, accepting the discomfort and trying to understand it. The best way I can explain it is as feeling threatened. As I reflect on it, I feel like it’s my inner child being fearful and just trying to protect me, using words and negative self talk with the intent to hurt me before anyone else has the chance to. I let these feelings come, acknowledge them, recognize that the words are not true, and let them pass.
I want to add something here for anyone else who has ever struggled with this kind of self criticism, and anyone in general that may need to hear these words: you do not need to be anything but yourself to be worthy and deserving of love. You are inherently worthy and deserving of love. You are beautiful and wise and grateful inside and out. When people look at you, they do not see these things you are picking apart about yourself. People are good. Know them, let them in, open up, love them.
Enjoy yourself, bask in the light in this world, relax, do not retract. Remember to love, remember that people are good. Let your guard down a bit and you will see and be grateful for it.
Day 6 in Costa Rica – loud but beautiful beach town
Today I swam in the beautiful ocean, read on the beach (How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan), did a lot of walking around the town, drank 3 coconuts’ worth of coconut water, and had some great fresh food, tea, and coffee at some local spots. Santa Teresa is a beautiful town, but I can’t help but want to leave and isolate myself. I miss walking in the forest alone. I’m planning on doing some more yoga this afternoon and a surf or SUP lesson tomorrow to hopefully get out of my head a bit. Action cures anxiety.
Santa Teresa has certainly shown me a bit about myself: at least my vulnerabilities and what I appreciate. I miss the quiet and solitude of the jungle, but spending time in the ocean is healing too. Here, I am really challenged to slow down and truly relax. I am observing this feeling of wanting to get up and leave or move and reminding myself that this part of the trip is about being still, resting on the beach, relaxing. Still, the town itself is not what I expected, with people bustling around on ATV’s and dirt bikes, everyone seems eager to chase the waves, keep the drinks flowing. I continue to just observe and soak everything in as I do. I am just learning more about myself this time.
Day 7 in Costa Rica – yoga, tide pools, & more rain
My surf lesson this morning was rescheduled due to the rain, so I did a yoga class instead. Practicing yoga always makes me feel so grounded and I want to revitalize my practice and meditation when I get back home and start school.
Our mantra for last night’s practice was self love and acceptance. It was a very slow and relaxing, peaceful session. Often when I practice on my own, I tend to move through many of the postures quickly, rarely ever taking the time to just sit and meditate. During last night’s session, I started thinking about my practice differently: holding a pose or meditation for an extended amount of time is not “inefficiency”. I am not wasting time by doing this, I am making space for myself to breathe consciously and check in with myself, and I will be all the better for myself and others for it. I am going to remind myself of this so I can gradually re-train my brain, which has a tendency to think that the faster I move and the more I can accomplish, the more valuable I will be.
This seems to me to be part of the American/Western culture and something that is ingrained in many of us. To see beyond this “matrix”, and live one’s life according to one’s own true rhythm is the greatest act of service we can perform for ourselves and for others in order to shift our culture away from efficiency and exponential growth, which have proven harmful to ourselves and the planet’s limited resources and biodiversity.
Following a beautiful yoga session last night, I had dinner with a hostel friend from Montreal and since I finished my book, a local cafe was nice enough to lend me Eat Pray Love, which is ironic and almost too perfect. I try to channel my own Julia Roberts.
I biked over to Playa Hermosa, which is up the coast and out of the wildness of Santa Teresa, to escape from the tourism and explore some tide pools. I found so many tiny hermit crabs, each with their own style and comical personality. Also spotted a beautiful blue pufferfish, which seemed to be trapped in the pool and was trying to make his way back out to the Big Blue. I hoped I could tell him that the tide would be back in shortly and he’d be able to find his way. Sometimes we find ourselves in spots that we feel we need to get out of, but if we practice patience and mindfulness, and live consciously with gratitude for the current moment, it is the greatest thing we can do for ourselves.
Day 8 in Costa Riva – every emotion under the sun
I woke up and walked to Playa Hermosa for my surf lesson. It was a beautiful morning this time, full of sunshine and the perfect day for surfing. My instructor was a cool, sun-kissed, Costa Rican man named Esteban who was incredibly intimidating since he had been surfing for at least 12 years and I was the only student in his class. I feel like my inner child was present out there on the board and in the water with me, feeling so vulnerable and scared and naked and whispering that I’m not good enough. I shut that down and convinced myself that being the object of a Costa Rican surfer’s attention in the whitewater with salt in my eyes was fun and that I had nothing to worry about.
The highlight of the day was going up to this gorgeous vista bar that overlooked the Santa Teresa Beach and watching the sunset with Avery and Steph.
Day 9 in Costa Rica – a week awake
Today was the best day I have had since being in Santa Teresa, and ironically most of it was spent in Montezuma, a neighboring beach town about a 45-minute drive away from Santa Teresa Beach. Avery, Steph, and I took a day trip late in the morning, after I had gone to an Ashtanga yoga session.
A side note: I had forgotten how challenging Ashtanga yoga is, and (similar to yesterday’s surf lesson) I was again the only student in this class. I got a lot of helpful adjustments from the instructor, but man did that extra attention to my postures show as my arms were super sore the next day.
Avery and Steph had had a nice beach picnic for breakfast that morning and we all met up in a taxi to head to Montezuma. Once we arrived, we stopped at a cafe and were joined by a Costa Rican man and his three sweet dogs, Mami, Chiquita, and Nino, who insisted and took it upon himself to show us the way to the Cascadas. We didn’t ask for this tour, but figured the guy (and his dogs) were nice enough.
The rest of the day consisted of barefoot walking through the rainforest, tip-toeing over stones to cross the streams, and squishing our way through mud (my favorite), feeling the earth and roots and life-sustaining ground force directly beneath our feet. There were points where we climbed on all-fours, jumped from cliffs, and swam in the oasis of the Cascadas landing, truly basking in the beauty of the place and taking it all in. We drank the day fully and freely. It was a coincidence once we reached the Cascadas that we happened to run into our friend Evelin, whom Avery and I had met at the bus stop in Monteverde, and who had also spent a couple days in Santa Teresa before moving on to Montezuma for her trip. She somehow ended up on this same trail at the same time as we did, what felt like another experience of Divine Intervention on this lovely day.
Following our afternoon hike, we stopped for a late lunch at a local soda near the beach. I again had an amazing vegetarian casado, complete with fried sweet plantains, beans, rice, and avocado. Afterwards, we walked through the small town and on to the beach, all of us eventually deciding to take a dip and play in the waves, smiling, jumping, and just feeling fully present there with each other. I felt so inspired and happy to be there with such wonderful and independent people, all of us on our different trajectories but somehow meeting at this intersecting and fleeting moment of bliss.
After our swim, we walked back to the town for our ride back to Santa Teresa and said goodbye to Evelin. Once Avery, Steph, and I got back to our respective hostels, we each showered and met up again at Banana Beach for some drinks, smiles, and stories before walking further in to town to dance the night away at a discoteca. It was so hot and muggy in this bar, I don’t think I have ever been so sweaty in my life, and I was completely sober. In Avery’s words, the place felt “like a middle school dance” – spot on – but we all danced our asses off. I shook every care and fear away, and reminded myself that every single person in this room – including myself – are the same in the sense that we all harbor our own insecurities. We may feel like the world is watching, judging, but it is not – it’s just us. So just dance how you feel. That is healing.
Day 10 in Costa Rica (Day 1 in Dallas) – the Universe reminds me of how little I control / Nancy from Denver, a Guardian Angel in human form
The morning of my final day in Costa Rica, I woke up early to catch my shuttle at 8am. By 8:30, the shuttle had not arrived, and I was trying urgently to make calls to see if they had missed my stop, were looking for me and couldn’t find me, or if there was some kind of mistake. When by 9am they still hadn’t come, I began to get frantic. It was a 6-hour drive, plus ferry, to get from Santa Teresa to the San Jose airport, and my flight was scheduled for around 3 in the afternoon. I was already cutting it close and didn’t have any wiggle room to be late or miss the ferry or next shuttle on the other side of the bay. I was kicking myself for not having planned it better – I definitely should have scheduled a quick flight from Santa Teresa to San Jose, or taken a shuttle out the night before to ensure I was at the airport in time, but I did not.
The shuttle finally arrived, over an hour late, and once I was onboard I just told myself over and over that I have done everything that I could up to this point, and now I just had to wait. Stressing isn’t going to make the bus go any faster and it sure isn’t going to do anything helpful for me. I read some more on the bus, listened to music, tried to sleep. We made it to the ferry and again had to wait to board the next one. I tried to resist the panic that wanted to set in. I got some gallo pinto for breakfast and sat down to relax. Once finally onboard the ferry, it was a pleasant view across the bay and a cool experience overall. I tried to just focus on that instead of the fact that “oh-shit-I-might-miss-my-flight-and-be-stuck-in-Costa-Rica-and-have-to-pay-the-difference-for-a-new-flight-and-I-don’t-have-any-income-right-now-and-why-am-I-even-here-at-all-ohgodthisissoirresponsible”.
Long story short I made it to the airport in time and hopped on my flight. Crisis averted.
The hilarious part of all this is that mid-flight, the captain comes on the intercom to announce that we will need to make an emergency landing in Cancun because a passenger had become violent and needed to be escorted off the plane.
Thankfully everyone was okay. My understanding from the whole intervention was that this passenger was heavily intoxicated and harassing the flight attendant that was attempting to get this person to sit back down and comply.
Due to the emergency landing in Cancun, we arrived a bit late to Dallas and I missed my connecting flight to the Bay. It was 11pm and I received a notification that I would be on a flight out tomorrow instead. The airline sent me a hotel and meal voucher by email. I selected a hotel from the list and called an Uber to the place. Once I arrived, the receptionist told me they were “completely booked” – it seemed like most all the people that were on my last flight got redirected here. Fortunately, this hotel was in a plaza with other hotels, so I walked next door to try the next spot. Unfortunately still no luck, another one completely booked. I walked a bit of a distance across the street to another hotel to find a woman waiting in the lobby for the receptionist. When I walked in, she greeted me and asked warmly “how are you doing this evening?”
I picked a corner booth in the back that had a full view of the restaurant. After ordering, I looked up at the wall next to me to find an old 90’s poster of the Bay Bridge connecting Oakland to San Francisco. The irony made me smile – what I would have given to have been there instead of Dallas at that moment. Again I felt that the Universe was teasing me, but only in a way that was playful. I enjoyed a great dinner solo and walked back to my hotel with leftovers to spend the rest of the evening relaxing, reading, and watching Eat Pray Love on Netflix (no shame).
The next morning I got to the airport early again to try again to get home. This time, I finally had luck and switched to a flight with a brief layover in Phoenix. I had called my mom and stepdad to see if they were free and wanted to get coffee at Sky Harbor with me, and they made it happen. We chatted for the hour that I had in Arizona, had coffee and pastries together, and I told them all about Costa Rica and the craziness of the last two days in Dallas. Seeing them was the silver lining of the whole experience.
Once I finally made it back to SFO, I was thrilled just to be taking BART back to the East Bay – finally familiar territory in a place that felt like home. I walked from the Rockridge BART station back home, backpack and all, and it was so incredibly pleasant. I felt so happy to be back in the beautiful Bay.
Every time I come back here, it feels more and more like home. This time in particular I felt extremely grateful. I think that the introspection and journaling I did on this trip really cemented in me how happy and thankful I am for this life, and actively living in a moment where I’ve been able to leave the career that wasn’t for me in the rearview, looking forward to my new reality as I prepared to enter grad school and a field that I feel so strongly about. Costa Rica was an adventure of its own, but it was also a time marker for the pivot I made from construction management (and having an income) to environmental planning and restoration. It was the turning of the corner at which point I could finally see the reality of the alignment of my future career with my life and personal goals, all laid out in front of me to be experienced and explored over the next two years. I am so thankful I was able to take this trip, for the amazing people it brought into my life, and for all that it taught me about myself.
hannah hansen 