Manuel Antonio: Finding our feet…

Here’s the challenge that I’m facing at the moment: we’re now 6 weeks into our journey and I’m just at the point where I’m beginning to write up the first 2 weeks. It’s tricky because while I’m spending time trying to catch up on the past there is a danger of the present passing by, either without getting recorded or with me not really participating in it. At the same time I am aware of the potential trap of trying to rush through the events of the past 6 weeks so that I can get into the present moment and as a result doing a poor job of it.

Fortunately I have realised that I have a kind of time travel at my disposal…

Right now I’m sat at the side of the pool in a condominium in Rio Oro to the South West of the capital San Jose. I’m not in the pool because today I’ve had a recurrence of the BPPV that I’ve been suffering with for the past week which makes me feel like I’m on a boat most of the time. Hopefully the residents here aren’t too concerned about the fact that sometimes I’m swaying and staggering about like a drunk from morning ’til night. The thing that I’ve realised today is that through the magic of hyperlinks I can catch up on the past and keep a foot in the present too. When the time finally comes and I’m writing up our experiences here I can insert hyperlinks into this text so that it’s possible to link these two moments in time. Just the other day I was thinking about how a website has the capacity to carry the fact that when I begin to think about writing about one thing it seems to branch off into a number of tangents. Unlike a book which has to have a certain linearity about it I can digress with a hyperlink and in that way connect the pages of the site to better reflect the network that exists in the human mind.

With this important little aside out of the way and off of my mind I should get back to the main story which now takes us South from Alajuela towards Manuel Antonio on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica.

From our hotel we caught an Uber down to the bus station to get ourselves onto a big pink Tracopa bus headed for Quepos. It was the first of many Uber rides that we would take around the country; one of the side effects of travelling without hiring a vehicle. It has been a happy side effect too as it’s been the primary opportunity for practising our Spanish. Anywhere between a 10 minute ride to a 3 hour cross country trek means plenty of time to ask questions and get both your ear in for some listening practice as well as trying out putting together your own sentences. We’ve met some really interesting drivers here with fantastic stories and I’m glad that we have ended up travelling in this way rather than driving ourselves from place to place in the solitude of a solo vehicle.

At this point in time (3 days into our trip) our Spanish was still very rusty plus we had made a major error in not withdrawing any local currency either at the airport or before going to the bus station. Arriving at the bus station our first surprise was at the entrance – we were being told that we needed to do something – struggling along with our bags and couple of children whilst not understanding what was being said we were at a bit of a loss until we saw everyone else scanning their elbow to get a body temperature reading after sanitizing their hands. This was something new! It’s got to be said that in comparison to Costa Rica the measures taken against Covid in the UK are extremely lax or that they are very stringent here. This was just the first in a number of cases where we were going to get a bit of a culture shock in terms of the difference between how countries have responded and evolved their behaviour during the pandemic. Once we were through the gate we needed to get our tickets. Possibly for the first and only time in our journey we had arrived early; so early in fact that we were able to catch a bus which was 2 hours earlier than the one that we’d planned on! No big digital screens advertising which bus was going where from which bay, no app to quickly look it up on, we went off in search of people who could point us in the right direction. We were surprised at the counter that here was one place where we were unable to pay by card and even now it seems odd as every little shop and cafe before and since then has taken card payments. Fortunately we did have some cash with us in dollars and we were able to buy our tickets. Twenty minutes later we had found our seats on the bus and were ready to go.

The journey from Alajuela to Manuel Antonio takes about 3 hours. We were a little concerned when we first boarded because when Rachael had been reading about the buses back in England she had read that the journey was without any stops and that there were no toilets on board. With 2 small children that is a definite consideration. Of course about an hour into the journey our girls were telling us that they needed the toilet and probably just as we were thinking that we’d need to ask the driver to make an unscheduled stop he pulled over. We probably stopped for about 15 mins for people to pop to the loo and grab snacks from the roadside stalls.

If you’re travelling without children then there is some gorgeous countryside to enjoy looking out of your window on this bus ride but if you’ve got children with you then firstly you probably won’t get the window seat anyway and then you’ll be spending your time entertaining and seeing to their needs for most of the journey whilst telling them that “no we’re not there yet but it won’t be much longer… honest.”

We arrived in Manuel Antonio a little flustered because the instructions that we needed to enter our apartment were on Rachael’s iPad which was completely flat because the kids had used all the battery on the bus journey! Lucky for us that my laptop has a large spare battery which I’d charged the night before and we were able to plug into it and get enough power to load up the instructions. This was of course after we had managed the walk to our new apartment – in our experience in Costa Rica people always tell you that something is about 200m from such-and-such and it never is – anyway after we’d gone ‘200m’ we were in!

We’d booked this first apartment through AirBnB back when we were in the UK. Our decision had been to head down to the coast for the first couple of weeks because we thought that it would be best to be near the sea while the children got used to the heat. In our imaginations we would be jumping in and out of the sea to cool off while they got used to their new position much closer to the equator and therefore closer to the Sun. It didn’t exactly work out as we had planned. At least for the 2 weeks that we were there we found Manuel Antonio to be quite hot and dry and especially in the middle of the day. It only took one or two occasions where we found ourselves at the beach around midday and returning home burnt (in spite of being on the ball with sunscreen!), tired and hungry before we needed to find a new routine. Getting down to the beach first thing in the morning is definitely one good strategy and I think that we found that the days on which we managed to be out early (we had a 10 minute bus ride down the hill to the beach) worked out best. We would take some fruit and snacks with us, grab a fresh ‘agua de coco’ down at the beach and then make our way back around lunchtime.

One problem with our apartment was that in spite of the fact that it had air-conditioning and plenty of ceiling fans it seemed to be something of a hot-box. So when we would return back to get out of the midday heat we’d find ourselves sometimes stepping out of the door and realising that it was in fact cooler outside of the apartment. I definitely think that if you can find a shady spot outside with a little breeze it seems to feel a lot cooler than being inside. There are lots of reasons for this being the case and a lot of it has to do with the kind of construction that is often used here which I will write more about another time and can then put in one of those magical hyperlinks. In summary, our apartment was a very thin construction and did a bad job of keeping the heat out or of keeping any cool that might have been provided by the air-con in.

It was at this first stop in Manuel Antonio that our adventures and discoveries around food were to begin. I’d like to introduce at this point a phrase which I’ve ended up using to describe the kind of transition we have had to go through numerous times; that phrase is ‘domestic infrastructure’. Now for all I know that is a phrase which is already in use and perhaps has a different meaning to the one that I have attached to it. The kind of ‘domestic infrastructure’ that I’m going to refer to is all of the things which we buy and surround ourselves with in order to make our lives more comfortable. It’s the way in which we adapt our surroundings to suit our needs. Some examples of domestic infrastructure could be the big things like an oven, a hob, a microwave, washing machine, tumble dryer, etc but it goes right down to the smaller things too – measuring jugs, oven trays, a wok, a cafetière and so on.

As part of the process of packing up all of our belongings we had to in effect let go of the domestic infrastructure which we had built over the past 15 years or so. Until you pack it all up and let go of it you probably don’t realise exactly how much you have and also that like any infrastructure it becomes inextricably linked to the routine of our lives. So at this first stop we realised that one of the things which we had at least anticipated to some degree was now a reality that we would have to face repeatedly. An example. When we were in Manuel Antonio Rachael decided that she would like to bake a cake for the girls. At home this would be a simple matter of getting out the baking things (which had been carefully curated and refined over years to become the ones that she preferred to use) and putting on the oven (which we were familiar with all the settings). Now it was a process of having to do the same thing but without all of the familiar domestic infrastructure. We had a microwave but it turned out that the cups were not microwave-safe and so we had to abandon the idea of trying out that new method. We also didn’t have lots of the little items that go towards making up the kitchen larder: baking powder, vanilla essence and so on. All things that you use once in a while and wouldn’t want to buy for a one-off and then cart around for the rest of a year.

We did the best we could with what we had. We ended up with a rather flat tray bake. This was partly to do with the oven which seemed to heat more from the bottom than we were used to and so scorched the bottom of the cake. Once again, we didn’t know that until we’d tried it once and at least on the second cake we were able to apply that knowledge and put the cake higher in the oven. However, similarly the knowledge that we were acquiring of the nuances of this new domestic infrastructure was going to have limited applicability because the next time we moved it would become largely obsolete.

This process has repeated a number of times now. Some of the things we have learned are becoming useful. Some of the domestic infrastructure repeats from one stay to the next and you find that a recipe that worked in one place can be recycled. This process also feels familiar to me because often you’ll go to work and you might not have all of the tools that you need for the job. Consequently you have to improvise and be able to see how else you can achieve what you are trying to do. This is another example of a kind of infrastructure that we build around ourselves – it becomes familiar and can be hard to let go of. Within all of this it feels like there are valuable lessons for an uncertain future. To take this story back to it’s beginnings – global pandemic as a backdrop and facing the uncertainty of climate instability – we have all had a taste of having to adapt to uncertainty. Of going to the shops and not finding what we were expecting and having to adapt and improvise with what is available. Right now, as a family we are experiencing life with various kinds of infrastructure removed – we have left our domestic infrastructure, left our social infrastructure and left the national infrastructure that we have become so used to. To begin with everything has been unfamiliar. At first that is stressful and disorientating but as you find new ways to operate within that state of change it is highly rewarding you because you begin to become more dependant upon your internal resourcefulness and ability to adapt. If we are to invest our time and energy into any one kind of infrastructure then that at least would appear to be the most dependable, transportable and most useful of them all…