Landed

After years of waiting and wondering if we would carry through our plan and following a hectic few months packing up our lives, on January 3^rd we made our way to the airport to spend the night and set off the following morning. There’s not a great deal of interest to write about that particular part – long queues, new airport restrictions and protocols and long haul flights have all been reported on plenty in the past. The flight was 12 hours in total and we took off around 11am UK time. Allowing for the 6 hour time difference here in Costa Rica we landed at a very sociable 5pm local time but for us and our 2 young children it was already 11pm (UK time) and they had hardly slept at all on the flight. At that point tempers were frayed and after getting through passport control (which was very straight forward thankfully) the wait for our bags seemed was infinitely longer than we might have hoped.

Once we were in the transport making our way from the airport to the hotel I remember looking out the window to see some of the scenery in the dark and noticing that the moon was the wrong way up! This hadn’t at any point occurred to me before that rather than a crescent moon on its side (with a point at the top and bottom) that we would see that same crescent rotated 90 degrees as if it had fallen over. In addition to our heavy feeling of tiredness it was a sure sign that we had travelled a huge distance.

The next few days were all about adjustments. We had booked a hotel just 20 minutes or so from the airport as our first stay to make that first adjustment comfortable and easier. First of all the girls wanted to have a quick look at the pool and gardens in the dark as a short second wind fell upon them but soon afterwards we were all falling into bed. Inevitably by 4am we were nearly all awake in spite of Rachael’s best attempts to tell everyone to go back to sleep! However, body clocks take a little while to adjust and as we had all been asleep somewhere around 7-8pm we’d done with sleep for that session.

Making the most of the early start we went out to watch the first sunrise at around 5:30am and by 6am we were the first ones into the hotel restaurant to feed our hunger. It was a great breakfast too – traditional and typical Costa Rican fare with various incarnations of either rice, beans, plantain, eggs and local cheese and a good selection of fruit.

Those first few days there was not a huge amount for us to do. Travelling without a car we really didn’t stray too far from the hotel and our plan had always been an easy few days to acclimatise, settle the girls and get over our jetlag. When we did venture out for a short walk to the local shops we probably timed it badly! In spite of our early starts we were never early to get out and would find ourselves heading to the shops around 10 or 11am when the sun was already starting to beat down. Within 5 mins we were being asked for ice-cream before we’d got anywhere near the shop!

Food has been one of the most interesting areas for us in our time in Costa Rica and will doubtless continue to be the thing I’m most often writing about. Perhaps this is at least in part amplified because of my background working with food for so many years. In addition to this both Rachael and I are interested in the providence of our food and how it fits into the wider picture of landscape use and how humans are interacting with the land. Perhaps at its most basic though is the simple fact that we need to feed ourselves and our children 3 times (often more) each and every day.

Our plan in that first stop had been to take it easy and eat at the hotel. Although that was the plan I think we were at that point very aware that we have a finite budget but without a proper grip on exactly what that looked like. As a result we were trying to go out and find things to eat outside of the hotel but the local shops were our first disappointment – small shops that in addition to being completely unfamiliar to us didn’t carry very much fresh produce at all. This was not really the picture that we had of Costa Rica – where were the huge stands of fresh fruit and vegetables?! In hindsight we should have stuck to the plan and just accepted spending more on eating in the restaurant. This was again the beginning of themes which we have found repeating throughout our travels so far – without a car you need to find what is within walking distance and when that it precious little you face a problem…

We did on one evening wander out and find a local pizza place which was excellent. The pizzas were really good and also a nice easy meal for the children. The owner was really friendly and fun and when we sat down he asked us if we would like to order drinks. Early evening and I asked if I could have a beer (we were pulling out our rusty Spanish at this point and slowly getting warmed up but more of that particular strand to come) – he began to explain that unfortunately he wasn’t allowed to serve alcohol because in Costa Rica there is a law that you cannot sell alcohol within 150 metres of a church. He nodded towards the church just slightly less than 150 metres from his pizza place as he cocked a finger-gesture gun to his head. Turned out he didn’t know about that particular law until it was too late! Good news for us in the end as we ordered the ‘fresco’ that he offered us after clearing up the difference between ‘fresco’ and ‘jugo’ and also making clear that in Latin America they don’t use the Spanish word ‘zumo’ for juice. We were brought 2 delicious bottles of soursop juice (guanabana) and a sour guava juice. This was a lovely balance – to finally get to taste some fresh, local tropical produce to tip the scales against the heavily processed food on offer in the local shops.

We were only 3 nights in that hotel in Alajuela before the next chapter in the journey was to begin. We’d taken our first tentative steps in Costa Rica under the cover of a hotel with a pool. From here on we were planning to book self-catering apartments and houses and enjoy cooking with the broad spectrum of wonderful ingredients we’d been dreaming of. Next stop, Manuel Antonio…