Marina Rose Travels

Across Town

Saturday morning, after a week of hectic tech problems and emotional intensity of all forms, I was finally getting ready to go on a weekend trip to Manuel Antonio, a beach town about 3 hours outside the city of San Jose. I was meeting some news friends across town to take the drive together and was grateful Costa Rica had welcomed Uber as part of its day to day.

After the Uber dropped me off, I sat at one of the small tables in our meeting spot and waited for my ride to arrive. Sitting in the chair, facing the window, I could hear the couple to my left speaking softly and to my right, a father and his two sons having ice cream.

The family of boys had a woman on the phone, and she started to sing “Happy Birthday” on speaker to the younger one, who was maybe celebrating his 7th or 8th birthday. To my surprise, she sung the song in English, then went right back to Spanish after. She may have been a grandmother based on that light, shaky lilt her voice took as it moved from song to prose.

The tones, the body language, the relationship between the family felt so familiar. I felt such peace as I noticed their interactions. Like in that moment, this country where I had felt so othered by my own anxious emotions in the last week, suddenly opened to me.

A few minutes later a man in a yellow shirt, mid 30s perhaps, came into the market and greeted the father. He gave the young boy a classic bro hug while beaming. His energy was that of an uncle, though they didn’t appear to be family. It reminded me of all my Theos and Theas growing up. Some were blood, some were friends, but everyone was family.

There was something so heart-warming about seeing people causally love each other. So many kinds of relationships, so many different love languages, and so many moments that were made special by people showing up in whatever way they could.

capuchin Monkeys

My ride pulled into the market, and I breathed a sigh of relief that we would be on the road soon. I had gotten back my taste for exploring and wanted to see more of the country I decided to call home for the next few months.

The ride was a beautiful, long, and windy one. I hadn’t realized the trip would take 3 hours, but I was in the car with 3 new friends, and we were able to fill the time with all matter of conversation from what brought us to the country, what kept us here, to our lives before those moves.

We drove through small towns and large tourist areas. The car wound through gorgeous mountain ranges and hills that swayed over and under each other, then disappeared into the clouds like waves on the ocean. The canopies held species of trees that I had only seen in nature documentaries, each one so different than the evergreen forests of upstate New York or the oaks of Northern New Jersey. We then passed palm oil plantations with gigantic palm trees for hundreds of rows.

The ocean started to peak out and the beach town appeared around us as we approached the hotel my companions would be staying at. We passed restaurants inside wagons and the cockpit of planes. Empty alcohol bottles were used at almost every store as colorful decoration.

When we pulled up, I saw a flash of black and white out of the corner of my eye. I noticed the slogan of El Hotel Verde “Still more monkeys than people”, and I saw them, three adult Capuchin monkeys messing about at the side of the parking lot. It was my first time ever seeing monkeys in real life outside of a zoo. My heart swelled and I will admit I literally jumped with joy at the sight of them.

After putting down our things, we ventured to the patio for some lunch and low and behold, an even larger group of Capuchins were sitting on the opposite patio, play fighting, and one was even lounging on a tree branch as close as 6 feet from us.

A number of them were smaller, adolescent monkeys and they acted as such, causing trouble with each other and the restaurant. One of them even scaled the beams to snatch a napkin off the neighboring table. At that point one of the men said to me that they steal food and phones, so to keep my own device in hand at all times.

Grasping my phone tightly, I felt like I was 6 years old. None of the pictures I took could do the moment justice, with the ocean and its California-esque islands floating in the sea and monkeys playing just to the right of us. The experience was surreal. From there we went to meet some other friends at the beach, and we found refuge from the sun like many other species here, under some Mangroves.

All that and a baby toucan

And in that tree, hopping along was not 1 but 2 Toucans! These were not just any Toucans but Fiery Bill Aracari; their color pattern perfectly camouflaged them in the green and red leaves. Lots of pointing and cooing later, we saw the mother flying from branch to branch, then reaching her bill into an opening in that tree.

As she left, the beak and head of a BABY TOUCAN appeared from that opening! I was informed by an off-duty tour guide that we were extremely lucky to be seeing this, that he had brought people deep into the Manuel Antonio State Park and they had never seen a baby Toucan, let alone at such a close proximity.

Its beak was so short, and its tiny, black eyes were the shining, warm black of morning coffee. They seemed to hold the innocence of any young creature in them, and it was one of those moments that doesn’t even prompt you to pull out your camera, because such a wonder becomes part of you.

My whole life I loved the wild and I had dreams of “Marina the Biologist”, the “Marine Life Researcher”, or of studying primates in the Amazon like Jane Goodall. The natural world, the trees and beaches, all the life they hold, have always felt more real than any home or building I had ever lived inside.

Chalk this up to camping vacations or something hard-wired inside me, in my soul I know we are all one. In the mountains I saw my courage. In the monkeys, my playfulness and in these toucans, the safety of home. Even from the extended family in the market, I saw the promise of love in all forms.

So, as I put my feet in the sand of the Costa Rican coast and let the warm water flow over my feet, it felt the way a mother’s hand would as it soothes you to sleep. It was the feeling of home that I thought I wouldn’t feel again for months or years during my travels. And yet, in a perfectly choreographed dance, so many small and large moments that day reminded me that home is where I am and where I continue to choose to be.