Pura Vida in Costa Rica

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San Jose, Arenal, Monteverde, Manual Antonio, Malpais

Here on the rich coast, they say “Pura Vida”. Pure Life. It beats Zanzibar’s “Hakuna Matata” (No Worries) or Nicaragua’s “100% Manana” (100% Tomorrow, which is akin to The Check Is In the Mail). So, as I sucked back my third “happy juice” on a yacht, watching the sun glow across the warm Pacific, I reflected on a week of canyoneering, ziplining, rafting, horse-riding, animal spotting, skinny dipping and beer drinking. The only way to describe it, naturally, would be “pura vida.”

“Technically, um, this might be referred to as Golden Showers,” I tell Nicole, who is clutching her lower leg in pain. Our group had spent much of the afternoon on the pristine beach inside Manuel Antonio National Park, checking out three fingered sloth, white-faced monkeys, iguanas, woodpeckers, and various bugs, before resting up under the shade of coconut trees. The sea was warmer than pee in a wetsuit, and Michelle (Canada) and Margarida (Portugal) seemed content to wade in it all day. Dennis and I went for a jog along the crescent beach, because the scene was begging for it, and he was a little jumpy after a rare armadillo fell off a tree and nearly landed on his head. It was unlucky for Nicole that no sooner had she taken a dip than she’d been stung by something stingy. Since it was a good half-hour walk out the park, the only solution, according to an episode of Friends that everyone could remember, was to pee on the sting. Just my luck that I’d been holding one in, being too damn lazy to get off the sand and flood a shrub. Thus, on Nicole’s pleading, and as the group stared on incredulously, I whizzed into an empty water bottle, and she quickly poured 100% Gonzo Piss onto her wound. Naturally, the pain subsided instantly. “You need to drink more water,” says Michelle, who works in a medical lab, concerned that my output was more Belgian fruit beer than Bud Light. Whatever. Besides that minor hitch, and the odd roving coati (imagine a large rabid badger), it was another day in paradise, and difficult to believe that we’d spent the previous day zip-lining through cloudforest canopy in cold rain and gale force winds.

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