We’re just sitting in the bus while writing this. We’re going from Cocles back to San Jose to take another bus there to our next stop Santa Elena. There we want to explore the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in the next few days. The sad thing about this is that our first period in Costa Rica has come to an end and we’ve had to say some goodbyes. The last 18 days we lived in the house of Manu and did some volunteering work there. We hadn’t really known what to expect since we had never done that kind of thing before. Now we can say that it turned out great!
The house was full of lovely people and we felt welcomed right away. The first people we had met besides Manu were our co-volunteers Carla and Christina from Spain who greeted us with hugs and kisses right away. We quickly learned that the both of them were always ready to smile and laugh. Also we have never met a person before who was always in such a good mood than Carla! A bit later that evening we met Izzy and Jenn from England and Manu’s friend Cesar. We’ve often enjoyed the british humour and interesting conversations Izzy and Jenn provided and Cesar treated us from the first moment like we knew him already for years. At the following day then Mica and Ellie from Germany arrived. They were the youngest of the group and were already travelling for some weeks after having finished school. This great mixture was topped of by our caring and relaxed italian host Manu. We all seemed to get along without any effort and Manu made it feel like some sort of loose patchwork family rather than a group of relatively strangers. In addition to that he’s just a great and funny guy who’s led an interesting life and has some stories to tell about it. Last but not least there was also Manu’s local worker Victor who always was joking around and trying to have conversations with us in spanish. He never seemed to mind that we didn’t understand much yet.
In the mornings we all would have breakfast together which consisted of pancakes and coffee and we took turns preparing it. At around 9 a.m. we began work on and around the house till midday. The work wasn’t too hard and with music and people to talk around you it always passed quickly or was even fun. We also had lots of free time on our hands and used it to explore the surroundings or to go swimming in the warm ocean almost every day. Cocles and the strip of carribean coast it is located on is a wonderful place and comes with it’s very own flavour of live one can instantly adopt there.
The Ticos coined the term of pura vida and use it a lot. During our time in Manu’s house we feel that we experienced exactly that – the pure life without the stress and hectic we knew from home and all that in a paradisical environment. This was enriched even further by sharing it with some great and interesting people. We’re very thankful for this experience and the memories we’ll keep of it. Despite of all that we were keen to move on in the end to see some more of Costa Rica but we also noticed almost instantly that we left a special place behind. Thank you all for that Manu, Carla, Christina, Izzy, Jenn, Ellie, Mica and Cesar! We wish you all the best and would be very glad if we stayed in touch!