In March and April of 2018, we spent six weeks in Nosara, or Playa Guiones as part of our one year of world-schooling our three kids. We arrived in Guiones after more than thirty hours in transit from Bangkok. At seven in the morning in Costa Rica and after skipping two nights of sleep in a bed, Thailand was just getting ready for bed. Our biological clocks were officially scrambled. The two-and-a-half hour drive from the Liberia airport to Playa Guiones (Nosara) was a haze – a sleepy montage of trying to a steal few moments of sleep with my head on top of an ice chest and lifting my head to see fields of white cows, dry hills that looked like my California childhood and narrow one-way bridges. Once we arrived at our Airbnb, we wanted to let the kids do a quick catnap before waking them for a dinner to help get on local time. Wishful thinking. But after trying to rouse them for about an hour, we gave up, found some snacks at the oxymoronic “mini super” and surrendered to our collective exhaustion.
Long, sandy beaches with a regular surf break make Nosara a perennial favorite
Will and the kids woke at 4am to eat some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wait to watch the sun rise. I, surprisingly, stayed asleep. They found the beach and walked all the way to the end where they came upon a few other gringos in a circle. There was a large turtle burying her eggs along the edge of the beach. Dazed and disoriented, they didn’t realize that this was a sight most never see in Nosara. This momma was seasonally very late and she was on a popular human beach, but not a popular turtle nesting beach. When we told a few disbelieving people in the days to come, they all wondered if indeed we actually witnessed a nesting turtle. Perhaps it was a collective dream?
Momma burying her eggs in March, Playa Guiones
It took us a few days to really feel like humans, knowing night from day and up from down. We had booked a house in Guiones (Nosara) nine months before and were paid in full but in my first moments, I felt that we had made a huge mistake. Sleep it off, everyone recommended this place; it will get better. But it didn’t. Guiones, is a gringo suburb of Boulder, Toronto, Vancouver and Manhanttan all rolled into one. We felt like we were back home. Everyone was white except the workers, everyone spoke English to us, quinoa superfood salad was on the menu and shops preferred US dollars to the local currency, colones.
Homeschooling poolside, specifically drilling multiplication flashcards
Juan Surfo is one of the first local characters who gave us a glimpse of Tico- gringo relations. As the only locally-owned surf shop, we took a lesson and rented some boards by the week – a real chance to meet a local, we thought. Lorna and I walked our long boards about six city blocks to the beach in back of a water truck that looked to be spraying dirty water all over the road. And it smelled a lot like Christmas. My flip flops were getting sticky and great black blobs were being flipped up on the backs of my legs. Gosh that smells like molasses, I finally said to Juan.
“It is. Most gringos break their flip flops on the fresh coat. You guys actually did well.”
Most Ticos are much kinder but there is the sense of us vs. them. And with most rentals costing way more than locals could afford, there was not much opportunity to meet a local unless they were somehow working in the tourism industry. And so being the brunt of the joke in the molasses-flipflop fun seems a fair price to pay.
The trail to town, not a bad way to get around.
In our first week, Will, Lorna and I decided to head to downtown Nosara to check it out and visit the grocery store while the little ones were at Nosara Kids Camp. It was only a few kilometers so we decided to walk. It was hot and the dust was intense. Trucks and bikini-clad ATV riders passed us with goggles and bandanas tied around their necks. Where are we?!? The jungle to the side of the dirt road was a muted-green with the dust free layer far to the interior. After walking just ten minutes three cars pulled over to see if we needed help. Apparently, people don’t walk to town around here. After lecturing Lorna that she should never do as we are doing by getting into a car in any country with a stranger, we accepted a ride with some of the kindest Ticos we met in our entire stay. The driver was a tamale maker and the front passenger laid tile – if my Spanish was accurate.
“Just drop us at the plaza,” I said assuming that this was like every other Central American town.
“Where?” asked the tamale maker.
“The center of town.”
“But what do you need to do here?”
“Look around and then buy groceries.”
“We will drop you at the supermarket then.”
There really is no town center except the soccer field that never seemed to have soccer players. After shopping, the grocery store delivered us back to Playa Guiones. I sat up front and Lorna and Will sat in the back on a upside down milk crates that bumped and slid from the ride on the dirt road. The supermarket has free delivery, even it’s mostly delivering the gringos back to their playa, but the supermarket trips were some of our most authentically Tico experiences during our stay. And when you’re a gringo staying here, you are staying in Guiones, not Nosara, no matter what your AirBnb search tells you.
The best part of living in Guiones was to be near the wildlife. Our AirBnb had a great garden with a resident iguana in the mohagony tree. He sidled down the tree each morning and seemed to expect treats poolside. He particularly liked watermelon and did a series of quick pushups in thanks. And then the crabs came all at once. Some said it was because we got the first rains and others said it was simply mating season, but our pool was an obvious hub for the local crabs. Each day we would try to rescue between four and eight of them out of the pool just to see them run back in. So we stopped swimming in the pool and started to use our pool for crab watching instead.
Christmas crabs rule the pool. They’re the most attractive crabs I’ve ever seen.
After we’d been in Guiones for few weeks, we began to relax into the groove of being a gringo. I mean what were we so bummed about? Yoga, surfing, easy English, quinoa burgers, and great camps for the kids. Really, it was prep time to return to our life in Boulder, time to wrap our heads around homecoming. Unplanned, we ran into friends from Boulder and also had great friends plan to come and visit us for their spring breaks. We were no longer just our family unit experiencing the world. Our circle widened to include a social life beyond Paradise. After being on the road for nine months, we have just three more months until we return to our previous yoga/superfood/social American life. This is a glimpse of what it will be like. And the familiarity of life Guiones, was the culture shock. We were expecting cultural immersion, but what we got was expat lifestyle.
In our last week, I went out for a run without my phone at about 6am. (I’m convinced that the best things happen in life when there’s no phone for photos. Maybe the universe respects the impulse for the undocumented mystery.) We had been in Guiones for five weeks and for some reason I looked down to see, what looked like, a tiny turtle scurrying to the surf. No way. Then I looked up and perpendicular to the water marched an entire highway of them. Bikes and other runners were zooming by looking out the horizon or out to the sea. My momma bear impulse kicked in hard and I played crossing guard, slowing people down and asking them to pick their way carefully. Another runner from New York joined me and we spent the next hour doing duty. When we thought they were done, we walked up to their source and watched a whole new bloom bubble up from the sand and make their way toward home. Was this the nest that Will and the kids had watched on our first morning? As we traded details, we think it was. Perfect bookends to our time in Nosara.
These little coati, or pizotes, skittered around the jungle on the way to town, bigger than a raccoon.
We often talk of the difference of being a tourist versus a traveler. The unscripted life of a traveler relies heavily on the luxury of time, the fluency of language and the insider connections. A tourist needs to go no further than TripAdvisor and the information kiosk. Their path is well worn and marked by Birkenstock and New Balance imprints. What we missed is being a traveler. Would we come back to Guiones? Yes, but for a spring break or quick trip when you’re looking for all the comforts of home with great surf and iguanas in the garden, not for rich cultural immersion. Sometimes, it’s perfect to be a tourist.
