Lost Girl

I'm pealing a little bit on my nose and my chest; I have little pink splotches and flaking skin, but other than that, I survive the Costa Rican sunshine just fine, probably thanks to the bottle of 45 sunblock i carried around with me and sprayed religiously every 2 hours. After the horrible, probably cancer causing sunburn from Bear lake last summer, there was no way I was taking any chances this year. The slight burn can be attributed to a 45 minute laying out after swimming and toweling off without reapplication.

Oh, you want to hear about Costa Rica, and not just my suncare regiment? Well, it was lovely. Costa Rica is an amazing country of mountains and forests and beaches. I went with a tentative plan, and it changed nearly every day.
I started off in the beach town of Quepos and went to the Manual Antonio national park, where I saw monkeys! and sloths! and black sand beaches! sunsets! amazing fruit juices! After a few days of that, I decided to head down south to Dominical, a surfer town on the pacific coast. However, since I'm not a surfer and I'd already spent a few days in the hot sun, I woke up the next morning and hopped on the first bus through town, which happened to be heading into the mountains. So off I went, and on the way, with the help of my lonely planet, decided to get off the bus in the middle of Cerro de la Muerte (or ominously called Death Mountain) and stay in a cabin there to see the quetzales (these amazing blue birds). I was tired of people, and this was the perfect place to go, with the mountains and cloud forests and my own cabin. While i love beaches, the mountains are where I can breathe easier and feel more comfortable. All those years of living in Utah have rubbed off on me. I spent days hiking through these amazing tropical cloud forests, vibrant jungles where a mist would come envelope the entire mountain in the afternoon. Totally breathtaking, and perfect for getting lost (not literally, don't worry). I loved it so much, that I decided to stay an extra day in the mountains (despite the freezing temperatures at night. I know, in costa rica? I wasn't expecting it either), and ended up meeting a guy with a lodge/farm tucked away in the mountains and staying there. Better yet, the plan was to make this place totally self-sustainable, and so it ran on hydro-electricity and I learned all about alternative, eco-friendly ways to fun a lodge int he middle of the Costa Rican jungle. Oh, and I got to hang out with cows and chickens and eat cheese that I made myself! Definitely the highlight of the trip. But alas, even there, my skin didn't fit quite right and I made my way back to civilization, to San Jose (not a fan, although I did hang out in the park and see an honest to goodness hip hop dance competition!) and Alajuala, a really cute town near the airport. I stayed at a hostel that was run by a sculptor named Eduardo sporting a moustache with neatly curled tips, and stayed up half the night discussing the woes of society and problems of the heart. And then back home. A week is not nearly enough time to see everything. But at the same time, it was almost too much time.


To be totally honest, I was running away. I needed a trip so badly, needed an escape so badly from the cold and school and especially my broken heart. I thought that going on a foreign adventure alone would be exactly the ticket, as it has been in the past. I've run away and been distracted by adventure and travel romances, coming home with heart bandaged and healing and a sunburnt nose. This trip was about running away, constantly moving from one place to another, thinking that I would find the place where I could feel comfortable in my own skin and not so damn lonely. However, as Tilly and the Wall say in 'Lost Girls', no one can ever save you if no one can ever find you. It was in the mountains that I started singing this song almost non-stop in my head, realizing that I was trying to run away from the intense loneliness that I felt, and it was only making it worse, because the only company I had were my own thoughts and feelings. Maybe at the age of 28, after 10 years of traveling, I've grown into a new phase. No more traveling alone, no more sleeping in hostel dorm beds, no more vacation flings. As fun as all of those were, they just don't fit the way I travel anymore, or maybe they don't fit the way that i deal with a broken heart anymore. Maybe the thing I learned from this trip was that sometimes, maybe the solution is not to just keep running but to rather stop, turn and go back home. Come home from vacation, buckle down in work, enjoy the company of friends, and just patiently wait for time to heal the heart.

But, I must say, a warm vacation to costa rica certainly doesn't hurt ;)