I Live On A Volcano: PART TWO

Everyday life on our farm in northern Costa Rica feels like a callback to simpler times. This is very much on purpose, a planned lifestyle that @michelios and I chose when we decided to leave our homelands. We knew we needed certain things like fast internet and good healthcare, but we didn't want the high cost of living and stress that comes with life on the hamster wheel. He's from France and I'm from the U.S., so the added bonus of expatriating to a country neither of us were born in is that neither of us got home field advantage. We set off on a new adventure together, and what an adventure it's been!

Costa Rica is not a cheap country to live in. To maintain the same kind of lifestyle one had in a "first world" country, a person should expect to pay the same or perhaps more to live here than they did in their homeland.

Below is a YouTube short I uploaded last year after seeing a woman in one of the Facebook groups I've joined complain because washing machines here don't typically heat their own water, and she must wash everything on warm.

So how do Michel and I do it? The trick is in the lifestyle hacks that make absolute sense here. In Costa Rica, we have more options, more freedoms. A person can take more responsibility for their own environment. Such as, foregoing "modern standards" like air conditioning, microwave ovens, fully automatic washing machines and tumble dryers for clothing, hot water heaters...simpler living without some of the creature comforts and conveniences people mistakenly think they "need," in exchange for a monthly electric bill that averages $30 USD a month and no social or HOA pressure to live a more "appropriate" life. Things like that.

Another example is in the cost of construction for a home. Sure, you can go the North American route and build to those standards and codes, but it's gonna cost you. If you're like Michel and me, you're done with airtight houses and a pseudo-sterile environment. Give us an outdoor kitchen, open air living room, metal roof, no glass in the windows, and zero insulation. That is exactly how we plan to restore the old farmhouse that came with our property. We will only modernize certain critical elements, like the electrical system and plumbing. And guess what? We don't have to update them to any code, pay for expensive permits, or get tangled up in inspections. Double-edged sword? Sure, it can be, unless you hold to your own high standards and refuse to cut any corners that affect the safety of your installation.

Here is an extraordinary build by a couple who bought land in Nosara, constructed to the standards I've described for our farmhouse.

For approximately $1500 USD, we put a new roof on our barn, fenced roughly half an acre (with secure welded wire, not single strand or flimsy chicken wire,) plus scored enough gravel and sand to put down a half-inch layer in the barn as well as in the yard near our front steps. I kid you not: we paid the equivalent of $16 USD a panel for an identical product that sells for more than $30 a panel at Home Depot in the U.S. It's high quality laminated metal that doesn't need to be painted or maintained, manufactured right here in Costa Rica and retailed to the public at half the cost of the same product in the States. In addition, I got what amounts to a pickup truck load of fine gravel for about $40. Not to mention the builder only charged me $400 for labor to complete the entire job.

And we haven't even talked about the low cost of pharmaceuticals in Costa Rica. That's a whole other post, but let's just say I get over a thousand dollar's worth of cardiac and neuro medicines here for less than $200 per month. Name brand, in date, and without a prescription. Lifestyle hacks. They make it work.

Overall, it's just a healthier, less-stressful way to live. But there's definitely some backbreaking work involved. This is not the life for anyone who prefers to lounge in a recliner all day drinking sodey-pop and eating Pringles out of the can. Michel is strong and healthy but he grew up in the city. Here, he's had to learn to use power tools and a whole lot of elbow grease.

Our farm does produce plenty that we can eat and sell. For two years in a row, we've sold our manderina (tangerine) harvest to a distributor from San Jose.

Bananas don't fetch enough of a price for us to bother selling them (I can buy ten at a time in Pali for about 75 cents.) But we eat the heck out of them. Even our doggos love them. They'll come for a fresh banana snack as quickly as they will come for a bite of hot dog. We have around fifty banana and plantain trees on our farm and they all produce abundantly, year round. Sometimes the bunches are almost too big to carry!

I don't believe that growing and selling produce on our six acres will be worthwhile for anything but self-sustainability. A full-scale farming operation will never be a reliable source of income. It takes more land and more manpower than we have in our basket of resources. However, we do have a plan to make this land profitable, and it might provide some investment opportunities for others as well.

A friend of mine owns land near Turrialba and has turned part of it into a campsite and adventure tour. The three photos below are all hers, credited to Quijote Experience/Erika Hope Prescott. They are actual photos of her campground, which I have seen with my own eyes and experienced for six months while living on her farm in our bus.

Her campground stays busy year-round, not just during tourist season. We are far enough apart that we would not be competing with each other for guests, so we have discussed working together to promote both of our projects.

On our farm, we don't have the amount of acreage that Erika does, but we do have a very similar environment for a campground. All of the photos below are of our farm, of us enjoying its spectacular features, and guests we have already attracted based on the merits of this area and existing tourism.

Yes, this next photo is where my profile pic comes from.

Money is needed to build a driveway beside the river into the campground area, and a pavilion with an outdoor kitchen as well as bathrooms and shower facilities. We have some ideas brewing about how we can make this happen, so stay tuned.

Eventually we will also restore the farmhouse. But we don't want to turn it into a boring saltbox. In fact, we intend to preserve many of its original features, perhaps even some wall graffiti done by kids as quirky, postmodern artwork to display. Generations of the Perez family grew up here. We won't be obliterating all traces of them.

Yesterday I promised a story about our parrots, Lollie and Esther, being abducted by poachers. I'll share that story now, including the epic adventure of going to rescue them in the middle of the night, neighbors armed with machetes and determined to bring these birds home.

Lollie and Esther are both rescues. They were in captivity, and we have worked hard over a period of several months and years in Lollie's case to rehabilite them. The goal is for them to fly freely, even if they need support on the ground with feeding and other care.

Esther took to flight immediately and understood that human interactions might not always be in her best interest. Lollie struggled more. She also retains her knee-jerk reaction to "step up" when any hand or stick is presented to her at chest level. This very much worked against these birds when strangers in our community found them in a tree near the road.

These people were not from Costa Rica, but from another Central American country. They were workers and renters on a farm about a mile up the road from us. The locals, our neighbors, all knew the story of Lollie and Esther and would never dream of poaching them. But these strangers to the community either didn't know or didn't care. One of them lured Lollie onto a stick and Esther followed in flight. Once they got the birds to their rented house, they clipped Lollie's wings so severely that she could not even break her fall if she happened to tumble to the ground.

I was devastated when these two birds suddenly disappeared from the canopy above our farm. I could only hope that they'd joined a troop of wild Amazons and flown away. There was nothing I could do about it except hope for the best.

Enter Wicho, a relative of the family who grew up in this farmhouse and a regular feature of our community. He has been very familiar with our birds since we first moved onto the farm, always talking to them when they shout at him from the treetops. He gets excited about very few things, taking great care to appear completely stoic at all times. He deliberately refuses to smile for photos, even when he has a lot to smile about.

Don't misunderstand--Wicho has a great sense of humor and can be hilarious. But for whatever reason, he likes to give the impression of being completely stone-faced. On that particular night, however, he came banging on our gate and shouting about loros.

I know that word means "parrots," so I went to see what the fuss was about.

I speak very little Spanish and Wicho speaks even less English. So you can imagine the convesation we had while Wicho was literally jumping up and down and pointing outside my gate. I understood "loros" and "otra casa," and I could tell he wanted me to follow him.

While I went back into my house to find some shoes, Wicho assembled a posse of two--him and one of the Perez sons named Javier. Javier came armed with a machete. They took me directly to the rented house up the road, where the people who lived there had enough sense to say absolutely nothing when Javier climbed a thirty-foot tree and brought my birds down.

Needless to say, I was grateful beyond anything words could express. I tried to thank Wicho and Javier, but both just waved me off and went about their way. I felt that we were all very close as neighbors before that incident, but since then, maybe they've started to feel a little bit like family.

Karma has a way of dealing fairly with people. I'll close with a really cool ending to the story. Wicho had refused any compensation for his help with my parrots, even brushed off my attempts to thank him. But a few weeks ago, someone's small dog went missing in our community. The owner offered a substantial reward, even though we all thought it was a lost cause. Then the dog was spotted on the road halfway to the nearest town. No one could get near her. She could not even be lured by food. But again--enter Wicho. He and his brother successfully cornered the dog in an abandoned house, and she was reunited with her owner. Of all people who could have received that reward, thank God it was Wicho. No one on this mountain deserved it more.