Day 59: Summer beckons

Posted on by stanleyobando

Happy Thursday! I’ve written about how much I love the rainy season and the spots I prefer to visit during those wetter, less crowded months (Arenal hot springs, for example, or Manuel Antonio National Park, which I think is fabulous in the rain and where peak season lines can be considerable). However, there are certainly destinations within Costa Rica that are at their best when the rain goes away.

One, to my mind, is the Río Celeste, whose otherwordly blue can be affected by heavy rainfall that mixes mud into the water – we’re splitting hairs here, since it’s beautiful 365 days a year and I’ve had incredible visits there in the rainy season, but if I had an entire 12 months to schedule a visit, I might pick the summer months. Another is the Volcán Irazú, near my home: again, it’s great whenever, but the view of the crater itself and of the surrounding countryside from its summit are particularly stunning on a clear day. Most of the country’s volcanoes and peaks fall into this same category. Of course, travelers visiting more remote areas of the country often need to choose the dry season to have the best chance to usable roads and crossable rivers.

What about you? What Costa Rican spots do you think are particularly lovely – or just more accessible or convenient – when it’s dry?

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

Day 49: When I look down I just miss all the good stuff

Posted on by stanleyobando

Any Ani Difranco fans out there? One of my favorite lines of hers, and there are a lot, is: “When I look down, I just miss all the good stuff, and when I look up, I just trip over things.”

It’s so true, and particularly in San José – where looking up too much means you have an unusually high likelihood of falling down a manhole, never to be heard from again.

But this morning I was walking on a path just ten feet from my porch and happened to look straight up, and realized that I was standing directly underneath a spider city. I counted 12 webs, some tiny, some massive, unbelievably intricate. It was a spot I have walked under approximately 100 times in the past few months, and never once did I notice that an entire soccer team of spiders was laboring right overhead, creating masterpieces.

It was the second time in less than 24 hours that nature had smacked me in the face, right in the middle of city: as I was having coffee yesterday, a glorious motmot came hopping right up to my outside table. We locked eyes for what was probably 20 seconds but felt like an hour. Having breathlessly surveyed this spectacular bird from varying distances for years, this up-close interaction felt like having a movie star sit down at my table with me. Can you imagine if I had been so stuck to my phone or computer that I had missed this altogether? Add a little more stress or a tight deadline to the scene, and I could have. Easily.

If you can do it today, look somewhere weird. Straight up the trunk of your favorite tree. Straight down from your office window. Find some angle that’s strange or unusual. As the things that draw our attention away from our surroundings grow ever more shiny and exciting and ubiquitous, the joy that comes from a sudden surprise discovery grows ever sharper.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

Day 39: Godspeed, little babies

Posted on by stanleyobando

In the places where I grew up, fall is the time when leaves leave their trees after blazing out in a gorgeous way. In Costa Rica, these same months are when thousands of baby turtles leave the beaches and set out into a vast new life.

I celebrate them on Travel Thursday not because so many of us travel to visit them, but because they themselves are taking such an incredible trip, unimaginable from land. We are lucky to be there at the start. We are also lucky that people like Susan Jackson, who took this photo and is a part of Tambor Bay Turtles, are around to protect these babies from warming sand and other threats.

Here’s to Susan, to turtle champions everywhere, and to you, babies! May the waves be always at your back.

Read more about Tambor Bay Turtles here: https://www.amigosofcostarica.org/affiliates/tambor-bay-turtles.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

Day 9: An ode to my happy place

Posted on by stanleyobando

Though school starts in February in Costa Rica, I still think of September with that back-to-school fondness, aided by the fact that this cool, rainy month does give me some autumn vibes. And what better place to celebrate back to school than a cozy independent bookstore?

If you’re reading this, you almost assuredly love bookstores. You might even own one, and if not, you’ve definitely imagined yourself owning one, probably in a picturesque fishing village where you would wear hand-knitted sweaters and gaze out at the storm-tossed sea in between customers (right? I’m not the only one, am I?). So I’m not convincing anyone here. But this is a love that had gotten away from me, and when I wandered into La Librería Andante for the first time in a long while – it’s a gorgeous, lovingly curated little bookstore in the university district near my house – I felt so many knots inside me come loose. In a world of noise, it’s a quiet place; in a fast world, it encourages you to move slowly and to browse, which is such a lovely, relaxing and somnolent word, browwwwse; in a world of technology, it is timeless; in a world of foolishness, it is an oasis of wisdom and beauty. As I wandered through its offerings, I set myself the second challenge of this year (the first being to get to know more artists): to visit all the local bookstores I can find, and to redirect as much of my shopping to them as I possibly can.

Why is the bookstore or the library more magical than being surrounded by our own bookshelves at home? I think it’s the sense of possibility. If books have altered the course of the life or the way you see the world in the past, then standing in a bookstore makes your nerves tingle, because you know that the next game-changer might be within your reach at this very moment. It could be behind that beautiful, glossy cover over there. It could be wedged into an undignified corner of the used book stacks. You might find it today – you might not. You might walk right past it, not knowing. But it’s there, and that’s such a comfort. As the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes put it (oh yeah, I’m just nerding all the way out today – it’s that bookstore air), there’s “something holy in the darkness… and as rich moonlight may be to the blind, unconsciously consoling.”

If you can, go to a bookstore or a library this week and bask in that consolation, that knowledge that whether you read them today or this year or not, there are wise words waiting for us. There’s something holy in the darkness. Tucked away, bound and covered but ready to break free at any moment – there is light.

(If you’re a sucker for an incredible library story, check out “The Gift of a Public Library” by Deborah Fallows in The Atlantic, featuring beautiful libraries doing the impossible to keep their doors open in small towns including my mother’s: Eastport, Maine.)

La Librería Andante, San Pedro, San José, Costa Rica.
Katherine Stanley Obando

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!