Hey all, sorry for the absence.
No excuse this time, except for being so busy living life that I kept coming up empty when I tried to sit down and write about it. To think I ever thought myself an introvert… I have an extraordinary amount of trouble forcing myself to sit down with my journal and write when people are constantly proposing waterfall hikes and acro-yoga sessions (yes, that happened). At home I always recharge by spending time alone in my head, but being in such a cool community of interesting and like-minded people, Im finding more and more that I get my energy and strength from the time I spend with others instead.
I had an interesting conversation to that effect with one of my farm sisters who just left today as we sat in the tall grass of the cow pasture and watched the orange-pink sun seep down into the horizon (I can barely fathom that I ever lived happily without seeing a spectacular, technicolour sunset every single evening. As the farm sits on the end of a ridge with deep valleys and then mountains on either side we get inescapable 360 degree views of the transitioning sky at 5:30 each night). We talked about how, in many ways, my two gap year journeys thus farm have been near opposites. I spent a vast majority of my time out west alone in my skull, getting to know my pysche like I would another person. But so far, this leg of the trip has been so much more about getting to know myself through the lenses and mirrors of other people, making connections, and learning from them.
I have never lived this communally before, never spent quite this much time talking to and seeing soul-soaringly beautiful things with people I sometimes feel I have more in common with than my best friends, but whom I met days, or even hours before. And I find myself loving it instead of being exhausted by the constant interaction. Case in point, this conversation unfolded when I had retreated to the cow pasture because I thought I wanted some solitary sun-gazing time and Jessie came and found me. I think I’m able to enjoy the constant interaction in our community because I am more open and myself here than I have possibly ever allowed myself to be. Its not tiring to be around others 24/7, its exhilarating, all because I’m not putting on a mask or maintaining any sort of facade. Two entirely different types of self discovery working together like ying and yang. I couldn’t have planned it any better had it actually been intentional. Just goes to show that if you give yourself up to the world and take a leap of faith, the experiences you need to have are often placed in your path.
On the subject of sunsets, the other thing that Jessie and I talked about that I wanted to share was about how amazing it is that we get to intimately experience what this uncaptureably stunning place looks like at every time of day. And its so true. I can call to mind what the rocky, looming face of La Cangreja looks like at the break of dawn and by the light of the full moon at 2 am. I don’t think I can say that for any other place in the world.
One of the things that I was most excited for in coming here was that there really is no indoors to speak of at Villas Mastatal. The internet cafe I’m currently typing this in is the first fully closed off structure Ive been in in weeks, and even still a breeze is blowing through the open door. At home, being outside requires a concious descision, an act of decisively leaving the comfy, climate controlled boxes we pack ourselves away in. Here it is just how we live, totally exposed and in tune with the natural wonderland around us.
I havent woken up to an alarm once since I’ve been here (except the one that got my butt out of bed to catch the bus to Puriscal at 4:30 this morning). On an average day I’m roused by the sunrise and the chickens at 5 am, and I usually get sung to sleep by the rainforest while gazing out the gap in the roof at the stars by 9. The rhythm of my days here, so in tune with with the earth and the animals and the sun make it feel like I’ve been at Villas for years and also barely at all.
It also makes it difficult to follow my usual formula for these blog updates because everything blurs together so beautifully and I honestly can’t remember what happened on any particular day. So we’re going to do this like a highlight reel, starting where I left you last, in Puriscal.
I didn’t really take the time to talk about it in my last update, but Puriscal is a neat little place. Totally off the tourist trail, its a worn-down, washed out collection of bakeries, anything-and-everything outlets and farm supply shops sitting in the shadow of a massive and very much abandoned cathedral that looms on a fenced off-hill right beside the central park. I’d love to know more of the story of that building, I’m sure its an interesting one. The central park in town is very European feeling to me, but Maarten tells me that theyre quite common throughout Central America. Teenage couples kiss behind trees and old men watch little kids run along the paths from sun-soaked benches or the steps of the weird, modern-art looking bandstand type structure that we always use as our meeting place. Gotta say though, despite my legs being a good 3 inches to long to sit in any sort of comfort, the bus rides to and from Puriscal have been one of my favourite parts.
To travel within Costa Rica, you either have to rent a car eith four wheel drive or take the bus. And unless you can accept careening along unpaved roads a mere half foot from a 500 ft drop to certain death as a personal challenge, you’ll probably end up on the bus. The state of the road isnt any less dubious, but at least it clunks along at a steady 20 kph. The bus from Mastatal to Puriscal costs 1350 colones, roughly $3. The only out out leaves our stop at 5 am and the only one back departs at 3 pm. You don’t miss that bus.
Thus the line starts to gather at 2 across from the Supermora on what I suppose could be called Puriscals main drag. When it arrives people pile in on top of eachother sardine style. Sacs of groceries are passed through windows, children curl up on available laps that are not otherwise occupied by oversized backpacks (hallmark of the gringo), sacs of rice or the occasional chicken or puppy in a cardboard box. Eventually, painfully, the bus creeps forward, inching uphill with an ominus death rattle thats replaced with the frenzied gasping of brakes on the subsequent down slope. Everyone on the bus knows eachother, shaking hands and patting heads as they find their way to seats. Wizened little Doñas frown up at no one until muscle-tee sporting teens with punk rock hairdos sheepishly forsake their seats. People rocking on porches or gathered outside little “sodas” (small convenience store, cafe hybrids) wave as we pass. Snack breaks and baño stops are random and upon popular demand. Food is passed around and shared.
One of the reasons I like the bus is because we actually see the women our age. We work alongside the men, and play futbol with them in town during the week, but aside from the occasional middle-aged matriarch holding court at the bar on Saturday night the ticas (female Costa Ricans, dudes are ticos) are elusive creatures. Nick said that many of the young women either get married and stay home or move to San Jose. The girls I’ve seen are all stunning, done up to the nines in skinny jeans, eyeshadow and Hollywood sun glasses, standing beside cow pastures like its 5th Avenue. I can’t help wondering if they hate us though. They want their men, and from my experience thus far, the local men sure seem to spend a lot of time chasing light hair and coloured eyes. The constant “no thank you, I’m not going to move to Costa Rica”s and “sorry, not interested, don’t have a phone number”s all us girls have to dole out in town raise questions for me about the sort of impact the large international prescence is having on Mastatal. Villas isn’t the only farm that accepts volunteers in the area, in fact theres four or five, meaning a constant stream of gringos into this relatively isolated community. I know that we’re bringing money into the local economy and helping to support permaculture projects in the region, but I do wonder about whether our impact on the local culture and way of life is positive or negative. I personally have never felt threatened by the attention, its usually relatively benign and the men are quick to back down, not to mention that we more or less always travel as a pack. Its more of a constant annoyance, and something that I feel weirdly guilty about bringing to the community.
Enough about that though, you probably want to hear about the farm. The Tuesday after I last posted we went back to the bean feild for my personal hardest day of work yet. We had to gather up all the piles of bean vines we had left to dry in the sun and carry them down the hill to be beaten with sticks on a tarp by our two tico helpers (Randal, who works on the farm, and Carlos who was apparently just helping for the day) to get the actual beans themselves out. Problem was, the sun had dried the vines out so much that every time we moved the piles pods would fall off and get lost in the undergrowth. The newly exposed soil where we had pulled up plants was also dry and dusty, making climbing the steep feild ridiculously treachourous, a massive hill of loose earth with no hand or foot holds to speak of. It was also really really really hot. In an excercise of mutual frustration and teamwork we formed an assembly line and gently passed the piles down to the boys on the tarp. It was awful and extraordinarily frustrating, but I could feel the shared emotion coming off everyone in waves, and somehow knowing that I wasn’t alone in the suck of the morning helped tremendously.
The day after, I finally got my tour of the farm from Javier. He walked a group of us around and explained the plants and the various systems at play, but he also talked about how Villas came to be. When he and his wife Raquel took over the farm 8 years ago from her parents, it was primarily coffee and cattle. There was a lot of tension with his inlaws when javier decided that he wanted to revamp the entire system by changing over to subsistence farming- trying to grow everything they needed off their land and hosting volunteers. It sounds awful to say, but that was so crazy inspiring to me, because the only stories we really get told along those lines usually just feature educated white yuppies but here was this born and raised farm boy from a tiny Central American pueblo going against the tide to do something he had barely any reference point for and fighting really hard for a different way of life, just because thats what he felt was right, not because he saw it on the news and thought it looked cool. It gave me so much hope that living symbiotically with the earth is something that humans are drawn to as naturally as we seem to be drawn into the web of constant and unsustainable growth and the endless march of progress. Javier is amazing, and I have such massive amounts of respect for he and Raquel for doing what they do, opening up their lives to educate people about living better and farming responsibly.
The rest of our work mornings since then have involved a whole range of things, many centering around the major construction project currently under way to build a new dorm on the site of the current lower one. Its pretty ambitious. Javi hopes to make it significantly bigger than the currrent one which has 14 beds, and one day use it mainly to house the short term volunteers and vacationers, reserving the upper dorm for the greater numbers of interns he hopes to take on. The new dorm is going to have a bigger rooftop yoga deck and an aromatherapy room. Its very cool to me that one day there will be this building in the jungle of Costa Rica that I had a hand in building. The work we’ve done on it has varied from a particularily memorable day when we moved roughly 500 cinderblocks down a hill in another human chain to shoveling massive quantities of dirt, sifting sand for concrete, to shaving the bark off teak logs with machetes (I’m getting really good with a machete, something about which I am a bit absurdly proud).
Its amazing how much job satisfaction I get out of this hard manual labour. Its not mentally stimulating, but the people I’m sharing it which certainly are, and I can feel it making every muscle in my body stronger just as it builds the calluses on my palms. Work like this comes with a sense of completion that I’ve never really experienced in anything else I’ve done as well. Sure theres a good feeling that comes with finishing up an essay or making a really good sale at work, but the satisfaction that comes with being able to look at a massive stack of wood and say “yup, my arms and my shoulders and my will put that there” is bone deep and addictive.
We’ve also done lots of general planting and maintenance work around the farm. As an intern, Nick (our foreman of sorts, an English speaking Javier from Colorado who lives at Villas half the year) has designated me responsible for a garden area called Zone Two. Zone Two is a tiered hillside running alongside the driveway down to the main road packed with banana trees, papañame, pinapple, cayote, loads of stuff. I walk through it every day to keep an eye on how everythings growing and let them know when things are ready to harvest, and do general tidying work moving leaf litter into the vegetable beds to protect the soil from the parching sun. This week I led a project to transplant a bunch of citronella grass along the rim of the hill where breezes will carry its bug repelling scent up the hillside to waft over the rancho, the gazebo type structure where we all congregate in the afternoons and evenings. It feels really good to take on leadership roles, even on little projects, as I think somehow I learn best when I’m responsible for something.
Speaking of responsible, our morning work also includes a list of pre-breakfast chores that everyone is assigned to every Monday. They include cleaning of the common areas, putting out old fruit for the birds, taking out the compost and feeding the animals. The last two weeks I have been assigned to chicken duty, so I get up a half hour early to give the gallinas (hens) and polloquitos (chicks we’re raising for meat) their food and water and collect their eggs. My seven year old self would be so happy, I remeber always wanting to keep chickens as a child and now look at me.
In the afternoons we’ve been doing the usual hikes to waterfalls. They’re all over the place, including in the national park on our doorstep. When I was visiting one with Maarten, Evan and Kat the other day I had sat myself down on a rock by a pool and luckily looked up just as a Jesus Christ lizard jetted by me, clear over the water on its hind legs. It was an awesome moment because I had literally just seen a thing on the Discovery Channel on these lizards that run across water on their hind legs due to massive feet allowing for perfect weight distribution that keeps them topside and gives them an awesome escape route from predators. And there was one not even two metres away from me. I am living inside a Discovery Channel nature special.
When we aren’t hiking or comatose in the multitude of hammocks, a group of us often go into town to play futbol with the locals. You really only have to walk through the pueblo with a ball under your arm and ticos will come venturing down to the field and start lacing up their cleats. I don’t play (they’re verrrrry serious for people who play in rolled up jeans) but I love to watch.
I was doing just that with my friend Avi (whos left now) when three local kids came up to us smiling boldly and saying “Hi! Hi! Hello!” before looking at us expectantly. That’s how I ended up running around the endzone of the community soccer field playing taca helado (freeze tag) and pato pato ganso (duck duck goose), chasing the kids and tickling them when I caught up. Then it was soccer, then frisbee when a gringa from another farm showed up with one. It was one of those moments when I just hit me that here I was running barefoot through a feild hacked out of the jungle in central America with a bunch of smiling, laughing little kids trying to explain they wanted piggy back rides in Spanish. At what point did this become my life. They know me now, and run out to greet me with their friends whenever I pass through town. I’m finally staring to feel like not just a member of the villas community, but one of the larger community of Mastatal.
I have so many stunning pictures of this place, but unfortunately no where to upload them easily as of yet. I’ll keep working on that, as even what the limited powers of photogrpahy can capture is extraordinary. Thats all for now, I need to go grab lunch before I catch the return bus. Love to you all, thanks for sticking with me and coming along for the ride!
The Wander Year 