The Road to Samara

I was beginning to regret the whole thing.

It was just about 10 years to the day and I was back on the dirt road from Tamarindo to Samara. I hadn't taken the beach road since Mario and I had been looking for businesses ten years before. The trip had taken us 9 hours the first time, 9 hours to cover 68 miles. 9 hours of bumping down a dirt road with two little kids in car seats. 9 hours of seeing lots of trees, a few beaches, and endless clouds of dust. An endless road with no view ahead but dust.

We stopped for lunch in the middle of nowhere, everywhere was the middle of nowhere. There was a car parked outside and we asked the man who was leaving how was the food. His answer was Tipical. We didn't know at the time that was what they called local food. We walked up into what seemed to be someone's house where they had put out plastic chairs and tables. I remember ordering a bottle of water and when the glass of ice came I tipped the ice out afraid that the ice would be contaminated and drinking the water warm out of the bottle.

The food when it came was mostly rice and beans, it was warm, filing, tasty in a spiceless kind of way. I relaxed a little and it was not until I wanted to go to the bathroom that my fears returned. When I asked where the bathroom was the woman pointed to an outhouse. When I went in there was no toilet seat, and no flushing ability. Actually no running water was connected as far as I could tell. Next to the toilet was a bucket of water to flush with. Of course I didn't understand that was what the bucket was for.

I walked out of the shack of an outhouse and had to walk into the woman's kitchen to wash my hands at her sink. I hoped she'd washed her hands before she'd made the food.

As I walked back to my table I heard yelling. The sound of an intense argument, screaming, howling. I looked around and the woman pointed up. There above us in the trees were howler monkeys barking at each other and at us. They were my first monkeys and in their cries I didn't hear the warning sounds.

The first time I'd driven this road I had just wanted to get to Tamarindo. I didn't think about what it would be like to live in the country where driving through rivers was a normal occurrence. I didn't think what living in the middle of nothing with a dirt road before you got to anywhere really meant. I thought the monkeys were cute, the food was scary, and somehow in 9 hours of driving I never connected the dots. I never absorbed the reality of the poverty where the only running water is in the kitchen, where rice and beans were the only staples three times a day.

Driving it the second time I looked around at all the things I had learned to put up with. At all the poverty you learn to accept, at the clouds of dust that seep into your car even with the windows closed. Clouds of dust that cover the trees and contaminate the houses of everyone living on the road and I thought, “why the hell did I ever move here.” Ten years later I'd had plenty of time to regret moving to Costa Rica, and I had to wonder why I didn't begin to regret the whole thing then, why I didn't stop everything before it was too late.

We took our time driving south this time instead of north. It felt like closure. My daughter sat next to me 16 now, not 6 we talked while her boyfriend drove, navigating the potholes, the rivers and the dust clouds. We stopped at a few beaches, taking our time, it was an 11 hour trip this time. Only this time I'd known it would be. We weren't going anywhere, we were just going for a day trip to beaches we didn't know. It was an adventure, a day off.

It felt like closure. Like something I needed to do in order to be done with the country.

We stopped for lunch. A nice clean new open air restaurant. The place we had stopped at previously probably didn't exist anymore. Some things had gotten better over the years, and we ate rice and beans and chicken, warm, filing, tasty in a spiceless way. Then I went to the restroom where they had no toilet seat but there was running water and soap and I could wash my hands.

I saw beaches I'd never seen before then at sunset we stopped in Nosara. The beach felt like California. There were hundreds of surfers in the water, more people than I had seen for months lining the beach, there was a recycling and waste disposal center in the parking area. The thing was Nosara had no paved roads leading in or out of it and I had to wonder how or even why all these people, all these white, non Costa Rican people were there, there in the middle of nowhere.

Nosara is a yoga retreat/eco lodge/surfing capital and I'd heard it said the rich people who live there have paid the government not to put in roads, because they don't want more people to come, actually that they don't want Costa Rican people to come and if the road gets paved there will be bus service and they will have Costa Rican's littering their eco friendly little world. I also heard it said when I first was visiting CR that Nosara is full of rich old men and old women and their young Costa Rica boyfriends and girlfriends. Looking around the beach as the sunset it looked like everything I had been told was true. And the ugliness of the vivid beauty hit me.

We drove out into the darkness, Costa Rican's on bikes were still trying to get home from their jobs as maids and gardeners, choking on dust as we drove past them I hoped the flashlights they were carrying would keep them safe till they got home and none of them would be run over trying to get home. In the 10 years I've been in CR I've known, or known of so many people who have died. Silly things, one of my ex's girlfriends 22 years old was decapitated by a bus while walking up the road because the bus didn't close it's door and there are no sidewalks, my 40 electrician was killed by a car while walking home drunk, my 33 year old surveyor who died in a head on collision on his motorbike, or the 25 year old gringa woman who fell off her horse and died of head injuries front of my hotel while my staff tried to help her. Ten years before I didn't see how dangerous it was, I saw girls standing together talking waiting for the bus and I never thought I hope they get home alive tonight and the bridge the bus is on doesn't collapse.

We reached Samara and went to eat bad Mexican food for a ridiculous price served by surfer waiters who were stoned. And I kept wondering, why didn't I begin to regret this back then?

Then I remembered that I'd had a dream. I had woken up in a panic after dreaming that Mario would leave me alone in Costa Rica and I had made him promise that no matter what happened he wouldn't leave me there alone. And I remembered that I had regretted everything, right from the beginning. That I had silenced that little voice, told her that everything was going to be all right. I'd turned down the volume of the howling screaming creature in my head because I needed to believe. I needed my marriage to be better, I needed my life to be better, I needed my husband to be happy. And then later when it was all over, my marriage, my husband and my life as I knew it It was too late. Too late for regrets. Too late for anything but to keep going down an endless dirt road with no view ahead but dust.