Much by accident, I assure you!

Over the last few days I´ve been climbing Cerro Chirripo, Costa Rica´s highest mountain and the tallest point between Guatemala and Peru. To put it simply, the hike has been incredibly intense and took some three days in all. Not quite the vacation from work I was hoping for, but really, how many times can you stand in one place and see the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the same time? Incredible. More impressive pictures to follow [eventually].

At the same time, it suddenly occured to me after reaching the summit that I´ve come a long way from both the Smokeys and Mexico, hiking-wise. I have this habit, it appears, of over-estimating my previous climbing experiences* so when I thought my latest attempt - Cerro Chirripo, 3820m or 12532ft - was about on par with my earlier exploits, I guess I thought wrong. By, oh, about half. I mean, I´ve already made it to the top (getting back is a different matter entirely, actually), but it truly is an order magnitude greater than anything I have tried before: the next tallest thing I´ve climbed might actually have been Cerro de la Silla (1820m or 5971ft) all the way back in the early days of Monterrey. Even Maderas, which brought me such endorphin-induced joy a few weeks ago was smaller than that. I mean, that makes sense, in a way (both were one-day climbs, whereas Chirripo has become a three-day affair) but you try telling that to my aching feet...

Still, tired though I may be, the same old feelings are there: equal measures exhaustion and exaltation.

* Maybe this has something to do with the metric system or maybe it´s just a way for me to feel better the next day when my knees don´t work, but who knows?

Coming to terms with Costa Rica

If I have remained conspicuously silent about my life as it is now in Costa Rica, there is a reason: compared to what has recently transpired both my life and the country itself are exceptionally dull.

The former is obviously the easier of the two to explain: having moved the travel bag into storage for the duration and being somewhat gainfully employed, I now have what approaches a routine. As much as I like the consistency after so much that was decidedly not consistent, even I (in retrospect) am bored to tears by the minutiae of my day-to-day.

The country itself is a harder nut to crack. It is wonderfully beautiful and its residents are possibly even kinder than their Central American brethren, but still it leaves me wanting. Let me put it this way: after so many weeks on the road, in so many alarmingly different cultures whose various eccentricies prompted no small number of ¨only in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.,¨ I find it all but impossible to say the same thing about Costa Rica. Wonderful it is, but different it is not. I mean, perhaps it is exceptional for its normalcy - the banal has historically been in short supply in this neck of the woods - but as beautiful, orderly, and safe as it is, at times I think I am no longer in Central America but rather Middle America.*

I like it here a lot, don´t get me wrong - I even like my job, such as it is - but I do miss the sense of adventure.

* This may mean nothing to the rest of you, but when I saw, in the central market of San Isidro, market stalls not only with electricity but refrigeration you could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, imagine it - fish that stays cold from the catching all the way to the cooking... This is certainly a land more akin to Grand Rapids than Guatemala.

8-25 [Long Overdue]

All good things must come to an end, but fortunately for Seth and I, some good things end well, too. Just today he flew home, our whirlwind tour of Central America - the "impossible" five countries in twenty-five days - sadly at an end. Still, we arrived in Costa Rica with time to spare and electedto break with tradition. After so many temporary friends, here of all places we have the unique opportunity to meet old friends rather than make new ones. The world is, as I have come to know it, a strange and wonderful place made all that much more so by good friends, life of late has been made better still in the company of two of the best a fellow could ask for. My friends Kevin and Brooke - the former with whom I studied at UF and the latter his lovely wife - recently relocated to Costa Rica for work and [lucky us!] has spent the last few days playing host-cum-guides for both Seth and I. Indeed, it is with a happy heart that we have passed the last few days in northern Costa Rica not in hostels but in their homes, not with strangers but compadres. It is certainly the kind of thing a fellow could get used to: forget the perfect beach days - after so many weeks on strange roads with stranger people, perfect friends will do and then come.

8-23 [Welcome to Costa Rica]

Trip planning is, by its very nature, so completely removed from the actual act itself as to be almost absurd. What is talked about, sketched tentatively, and even planned for is inevitably so far off - and likewise foreign in fact and conception - that it is with no small sense of disbelief that I stand here, at long last, in Costa Rica. My first impressions of Costa Rica are, like so many of the countries before it, mixed. Neither overwhelmed of disappointed - I was, I knoq now, spoiled rotten by Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua - I am nevertheless looking forward to putting my bag down for a minute and cultivating roots. Still, after eight weeks of travel, five months abroad, and no less than six countries, even I knoq that this will be less "journey's end" and more of "journey's respite." Still, whatever you call it, it will be a welcome change. Even if I know already that Costa Rica will not be a fantasyland of possibilities and opportunities, to my weary feet and aching back nothing sounds more sublime at the moment than going to a local market more than once, of finding a "favorite restaurant," of making honest-to-goodness friends again.* So here's my notice to the world: I'm on travel hiatus again; for now I'm just a resident.

* Not to knock "travel friends" - I love them, I do! - but they are decidedly temporary in nature.