An American coast guard named Craig once said to me “You know, people seem to think that you can take a big trip and get all that restlessness out of your system, but it doesn’t work that way. You never come back from an adventure satisfied, you come back wanting more.”
“It’s like change smoking cigarettes to get rid of your nicotine cravings,” I agreed.
He laughed and said ” Kid, I think you’ll find its more like heroin.”
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Since I was very small it has struck me as tragically unfair that we only get this one life to live.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been grateful for my absurdly privileged assignment as a middle class white girl in a first world country with free health care and public libraries.
But I want to know how it feels to be a courrier du bois.
I want to know what life looks like from a remote fishing outpost in Norway and from a tenement in Brooklyn, from a thatch hut in Sub-Saharan Africa, from an indigenous village in the mountains of Peru, from a cattle ranch in Texas.
I want to live my life one hundred different ways. I want to build an existence for myself in one hundred corners of the world, see the universe from one hundred different vantage points. And I want to write about it because by nature I am a compulsive scribe.
This is my challenge to myself- to spend my allotted time on this planet living my life one hundred different ways. I already know how to live the life I was born into, and I’ve gotten a glimpse into what it is like to be a Canadian nomad. Two down, 98 to go.
And as of January 15th I will be taking off again, this time for remote rural Costa Rica to spend three months living and working on an organic permaculture farm buried deep in the tropical rain forest.Three months is a good time frame- long enough for any one experience to begin to feel like home.
What I will be doing is called wwoofing, which essentially boils down to working for room and board at one of the member farms of WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities of Organic Farms). These farms are located all over the world, and are united by a mandate to teach sustainable ways of living off the land to anyone who wishes to learn. Volunteers are not paid (hence volunteer, duh), but are typically given three meals a day and a place to sleep in exchange for 4-6 hours of manual labour on the farm. The farming experiences themselves are as diverse as organic vineyards in Italy to cattle ranches in Australia, and wwoofing has gained a lot of popularity as an inexpensive way to travel and to immerse yourself in another culture and lifestyle.
The farm I’m going to is called Villas Mastatal and is located in Central Pacific Costa Rica. Villas Mastatal is an organic permaculture farm and Eco Lodge that grows pretty much all of their food on site. There are chickens, cows and pigs, a hydroponic system and a medicinal herb garden. Pretty much all of the buildings are built using the indigenous methods of the region (so, a roof and not too much in the way of walls). Their hot showers are powered by compost. Check out where I’ll be sleeping-
Some reasons I’m crazy amounts of excited right now-
1) For three months I will be living, eating, sleeping pretty much entirely outside, in the tropical rainforest. I don’t count it as indoors if there aren’t any walls, and in one spot on their website they advertise their toilets as having “great views”
2) More or less everything I’m eating I will have played some part in growing. Talk about the 100 mile diet, this is how humanity survived pretty much from when we invented the house until a couple hundred years ago. In our world of fast-paced, large scale, and wide spread, where the ingredients of my breakfast most likely came from five or six different countries, I will be removing all the intermediaries and doing what one might say is the least common denominator of human existence- working to feed myself. Not making money to go to the grocery store. Literally putting the things I eat in the ground, harvesting and cooking them to survive.
3) Villas Mastatal is gorgeous. Check out the Gallery page on their website which I linked to above (double click on the words that show up blue Grandma!). There’s a waterfall on the property. It’s a fifteen minute walk away from La Cangreja National Park which has a massive network of trails, a bat-filled cavern and another waterfall to explore.
I can’t wait. Yes, fan club, I’ll be blogging when I’m down there. I’ll be aiming for weekly updates as blogging will involve a 20 minute walk into town to an internet cafe that is described as “fairly reliable”. I don’t know what upload speed will be like, but I’ll do my best to get you some pictures too.
Part of the experience is that I will be more or less without my technological tethers and thus a pain in the butt to get a hold of, but your best bet is to email me at walker_kelsea@yahoo.ca, leave a comment on the blog or send me a message on the About Me page (as those will be the things I’m checking most regularly). I’ll have my phone for emergency, help-mum-I’ve-been-detained-at-the-border purposes and I’ll be receiving texts but not sending them.
Oh, and as of late I’ve gotten a couple people asking questions about the first trip, and how to go about planning a gap year adventure. I’ll put up a how-to guide post later today for you precious people who seem to be under the impression that I actually know what I’m doing.
And lastly, thank you thank you thank you to all you wonderful souls who read this blog for reasons unknown. The fact that I’ve garnered an audience besides my mom and dad never fails to amaze me. Follow me along, its adventure time again!
Am I scared? Of course. I’m headed to work on a farm in a remote part of a foreign country that I had to get a bunch of vaccines to even get a doctor’s okay to visit, the only things I reliably know how to say in the local language are “where is the bathroom?”, “can I get a beer?” and “I am a female Canadian”, and I’m doing it alone. But you know what? The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all, and as Jack Canfield said
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
Let’s go get lost.
The Wander Year 