A day at the beach

About two weeks ago, our family took us to the beach for a get away that would take us to the western province of Guanicaste. Melana and I were excited by the prospect of the family relaxing and spending a couple of days free from the constant barrage of new people that descend upon our house daily. Not that we don’t love them, but a change in atmosphere was something of a welcomed prospect. 

Boy, did we have the wrong idea. 

It was revealed to us about a day before we left that not just our family in its entirety would be going, but also a couple of family friends and their families. The result of all this inclusivity was a caravan that ultimately included about six cars carrying roughly thirty people… possibly more. The true highlight off all this was that fifteen of the thirty to be going on the trip with us would be children. That’s right, fifteen kids between the ages of three and twelve with two surly teenagers thrown in for flavor. It would be like a really dysfunctional class trip.

To prepare for this familial excursion, Melana and I spent the day prior to departure helping our host mother to prepare food. For Melana, this meant doing something with a couple of former chickens and mixing them with about twenty pounds of rice. For me, this meant going off into the forest with the children to pick fifty pounds of oranges that would be turned into a giant vat of juice. 

We emerged from our room at about 5:00 the morning of departure to behold a truly miraculous site. All the bleary-eyed children were not only up, but showered and holding their bags ready to go on the porch. It was a little incredible. I would challenge anyone who has ever had to organize children (or people in general) to think otherwise. After waiting for the obligatory one family member that slept through their alarm, we were off around 7:00.

It was much like a large family road trip in the states. Well, the trip part, not the roads. You know that road that mom or dad insisted that needed to follow “just a little further” despite the protests of the rest of the car? 

You know the one. 

The one where the pavement dropped out after a time but the driver was too invested at this point to turn back now. The one where maybe you had to drive through a “puddle” in the middle of the road that turned out to be a small river. Where you had to get out of the car at least once to let the driver know that they were “ok on that side.”  Or slow to the point of a light stroll due to the harshness of the terrain and the effect it was having on your small family car that clearly wasn’t built for this sort of thing. And so on.

Anyway, the drive was something like that, except for the fact that it was all perfectly expected as that’s how roads seem to be in the rural areas of a developing nation.

We did hit a bit of a snag, however. When we showed up at the beach around 11:00, we found that they didn’t have room for the six cars and thirty people to camp out on the beach. In fact, there only seemed to be about 10 parking spaces total in the whole of the park. 

Well, now we’d done it. Still, in high spirits we stopped for lunch before proceeding to get completely lost looking for a plan B. We tried every national park we could find and made a lot of wrong turns. Around 5:30, ten hours and about as many U-turns after departure, we wound up in the little beach town of Playa Coco looking for a place to stay. We waved at all the freshly sun burned tourists as we drove past the night clubs and ritzy hotels and into the back-alleys where our host sister negotiated a deal on a little house where we’d all stay for the next two days. Thirty people in two rooms for about $50 - perfect. 

We began unloading all the food, snacks, drinks, toiletries, cloths and whatnot that a large family would need in such a situation and began to cover the poor, unsuspecting floors with makeshift mattresses (large pieces of foam insulation) that we had brought. As the kids began to get cranky, our host sister whipped up an industrial sized dinner with surprising speed and sated the youngsters before they could cause a ruckus. 

Soon, all the kids were in bed and the adults were sitting around the kitchen table shrugging off the day. At this point, Melana noticed that some of the younger women were changing into nicer clothes. After inquiring further, Melana told me that we would be changing out of pajamas and into our “club cloths”. And so, at 10:30 at night, after being in the car for close to 10 hours, our host family took us clubbing. 

For better or for worse, there is really not much to tell about that night. The night clubs were very, VERY tame. I spent most of the night practicing various forms of Latin dance which I am very bad at. However, knowing how to dance a good Salsa is a requirement to cultural integration here… one that I have yet to meet.

The next day, the kids were up at 4:30 and making a racket by 4:31. It was all a blur at this point but I’m pretty sure the kids all ran around the house while their parents vainly attempted to put them back in bed and keep them out of the sugared snacks. Eventually, the parents gave up their dream sleeping in and took to cornering their kids in the bathroom or catching them around some of the sharper turns in the house in order to rub them down with sun cream and get them into their swimsuits. 

After a rather dramatic awakening followed by breakfast, it was off to the beach. Beautiful. The beach itself, being volcanic in nature was covered in mostly black sand and was not necessarily much to look at, but to see the mountains falling right into the sea was definitely something.  

Initially, I thought that I’d try to hold off and stay out of the sun for a bit. The prospect of swimming was altogether too inviting though and I decided to take a quick dip in the ocean. As soon as I entered the water, every adult within fifty meters decided to split and I was left there, floating quietly among a troupe of unsupervised, not-so-buoyant children. From that point on, I spent basically the entire day in the water. Hey… someone had to watch them.

The kids really enjoyed having an adult in the water. Mostly because this meant that they could try their hand at swimming in the deeper water. This was especially exciting because most of the people in Costa Rica (and the rest of the world for that matter) don’t know how to swim. I spent a good deal of the day holding their heads above the water and teaching them how to float comfortably on their backs while the less patient of the youngsters gathered rocks and seashells that they wanted identified. Occasionally, just for laughs, one or two of them would give drowning a go, but I made it pretty clear that I frowned upon that sort of thing. I think we were in the water for about 8 straight hours before finally stumbling home to collapse. There would be no clubbing, at least as far as I was concerned.

The final morning, the adults were a bit more spry and were up and making coffee around 6:00. The kids, having not slept well the first night, had collapsed after jumping around until about 3:00 the night before and were slow to avoid their parents as they slowly rose around 7. Like sick gazelle being stalked by lions the children were easily caught and rubbed down with sun cream before they knew what hit them. 

Again, it was off the the beach. But this time we would be trying a new beach a short drive away called Playa Cocatal. Playa Cocatal seemed to hold promise initially, it was absolutely beautiful and there was almost no one there. All seemed to be going according to plan until Melana and I tried to get into the water with the kids and we realized that the steep drop off and strong current were not ideal swimming conditions for the kids. We needed to save about three of the smallest ones from nearly being pulled out to sea before a collective decision was made to find a new beach.

And so, after about twenty more minutes in the car, we all settled down and set up shop at Playa Panama. There Melana and I continued with our life guard duties for the majority of the day.

At the end of the day, the drive home was shockingly short. We had backtracked so far in our being lost that we only had to drive about two hours to get back to our site. 

I got terrifically burned, by the way. Six applications of sun cream did nothing to shield my Irish skin from the horrors of the outdoors. Yikes! 

Pictures either below or to come… we’ll see what works.