Costa Rica Trip

While one can do many things with one's time, travel with family certainly takes the cake during the school holidays. This time around, we made a trip to Costa Rica. Costa Rica is one of the seven Central American countries. Central America connects North America (the southernmost country of North America is Mexico) and South America (the northernmost country of South America is Colombia). The other Central American countries are Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to the North of Costa Rica and Panama to the south (remember Panama Canal or Panama Papers). 

You can find the detailed itinerary in this blog but I want to highlight some of the special moments and the people.

On the first day, while traveling from San Jose airport in Costa Rica to Tirimbina Lodge in the Sarapiqui rainforest, our brakes failed. The animal instinct kicked in and I veered the car into the bushes and used the hand brake to stop the car. However, the car was fully damaged. A very sweet family came out from their home and invited us over. We spent the next few hours with them, eating lunch and getting to know each other. The single mom Sandra was 43 years old and had 3 kids, Valeria (23), a boy (18), and Louis (14). They were very affectionate and we connected well with each other. Valeria is studying Civil Engineering at UCR in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Our family with the hosts

We engaged in a lot of fun activities over the trip. We did a Chocolate tour at Tirimbina Lodge that taught us all the steps involved in getting chocolate from cacao fruit. It was very immersive and we participated hands-on in a lot of the steps. The tour guides William and Jose were very entertaining. 

Nirvanh breaking a cacao fruit

The process of chocolate making in pictures

The same day we left Tirimbina, we embarked on a rafting adventure. The goal here was to spot wild animals and birds and we did, lots of them. Here is a list that I remember and the tidbits our tour guide Warner told us about them.

1. Anhinga Anhinga- a bird that can dive into water for 3 minutes and looks like a snake when it does.
2. Spectacle owl- a big owl that can eat a small fox.
3. Crocodile- no comments needed, it loves humans.
4. Little Blue Heron
5. Howler Monkeys- howl a lot. 
6. Black and white owl.
7. Long nose bat.
8. Others that I don't remember now. 

Safari Rafting on Penas Blancas River

The other fun thing we did was the Tabacon Hot Springs the next morning. Warm geothermal water was very soothing. 

Tabacon Hot Springs

From the La Fortuna area, we proceeded to the Monteverde area. Our Airbnb host Olgar was awesome and treated us to some freshly extracted sugarcane juice in the morning (we extracted it together the old-school way). We also hiked up the trails in Monteverde Cloudforest Preserve. 

The trails took us to the Continental Divide that divides Central America into two hydrographic regions- the Pacific and the Caribbean. Rain on one side of the divide flows to the Pacific Ocean and on the other side to the Caribbean Sea. 

Monteverde has a Quaker history. Quakers moved to the region in the 1950s and 60s I think. We met a 60-year-old man called Steven Smith who moved from the US when he was 7 years old and has lived in Monteverde since. His daughter lives in the LA area in California. 

Our next stop was the adventure sport of zipling. With 13 things to do, 9 regular zip lines, 2 Superman zip lines, 1 rappelling, and 1 Mega Tarzan Swing, we had signed up for more than we could have chewed. Freyjaa did all of them, including the 1.6-mile longest zipline in Latin America in Superman pose. Nirvanh did all of them as well, including the drop from 300 feet on the Mega Tarzan Swing that is almost like bungee jumping (however he was not allowed to do any of the 2 zip lines in Superman pose but was allowed to do them in regular pose). Shweta and I opted out of the Mega Tarzan Swing. 

Zip lining was a terrific experience (and terrifying too). 

From Monteverde, we proceeded to Bijagua for a stay at a very unique accommodation called the Bitzu Dome (hosted by a nice gentleman called Alex). We did a couple of activities there as well. We hiked up to the Mirador Point to look at the Tenorio Volcano. One of the highlights of that area was chilling out at a roadside dhaba-like place they call sodas. 

Bijagua was a unique experience

Our final leg of the trip was to Nicoya Peninsula, one of the few blue zones of the world, where the longevity is 10 years higher than the rest of Costa Rica on average. We visited Playa Del Coco which is Del Coco Beach. It is a happening place, very boisterous and party-like compared to the rest of Costa Rica. 

Gelatos, sunset, and snacks were the main attractions at the Blue Zone beach of Del Coco. 

We were staying close to the airport in Guardia at an Airbnb with a nice host called Jose. We met another family staying at the same Airbnb- Kevin, Cory, and their two children Fiona and Calvin. We had some fun chatting with them before we retired to our cottages. 

The next morning, we flew back to SF on our nonstop flights from Liberia. Needless to say, it was one of the most fantastic trips of our lives. It was so good that Shweta told me half-jokingly to sell my trip (which I planned and executed by myself) to others. Since I am not going to do that, I am putting down the self-planned itinerary for free below :). Have fun and plan a trip to a very sustainable and biodiverse country. 

Our broad itinerary with lots of details removed

A short trip to the Tahoe Region

We have the utmost privilege of living in the Bay Area, where there is an abundance of natural beauty.

Every now and then, we make trips in the direction of Lake Tahoe. Hence, this Labor Day, we rented an Airbnb in the middle of a forest in Camino, CA for a couple of nights.

One of the highlights of this trip was a hike around Jenkinson Lake in the Sly Recreation Area. It is a 4-hour loop but we only did the 1-hour portion of it. For the rest of the time, we hung out by the lake.

We also heard about a waterfall around the Kyburz area called the Bassi Falls that requires a 1hr 30 minutes (4 miles) of hiking out and back to access it but we did not end up going there.

What we did instead was that we drove to White Hall. We used to regularly lounge on the rocks by the river there but this time we just took a short walk in that area. There is a favorite motel of ours called Kyburz Motel (now called Sierra Inn) that we used to go to often because it is by the river. We went there to check it out and on the way back, ate excellent food at a new Korean restaurant called Moon's Korean Kitchen in Silverfork, a town that is next door to Kyburz. 

Earlier on Sunday, we had lunch at the Apple Ridge Farm because our Airbnb was in the Apple Hill area of Camino. 

On Monday, we took an hour-long walk in the hills/forest on Copperton Road. It was a fabulous walk.

This place is in close proximity to towns like Fresh Pond, Pony Creek, Pollock Pines, and Placerville. The Airbnb itself had so much to do. There was a zipline for the kids and a play area as well. 

All in all, we had a great relaxing time on this vacation. 

Documenting family history

I probed my dad today, asking him questions on my grandfather's and his journey during the mid and late 20th century times.

My dad was born in December of 1951 and moved to Dhanbad in 1952. They lived in Dhanbad until 1958 and moved to Muzaffarpur thereafter where my dad attended a convent school for a couple of years before moving to a Government school in 7th grade. 

My dad's family moved to Chaibasa for some time thereafter.

My dad has the fondest memories from the Chaibasa days. They used to go on tours with my grandfather (Dadu) to different places like Jamshedpur. When in Jamshedpur, they used to spend some time with Bade Nana (my mom's uncle) and his family. My dad sang songs for Bade Nana who appreciated my dad's singing skills. They lived in a big Government bungalow in Chaibasa.

After Chaibasa, they moved to Patna. My ancestral home in Srikrishnapuri was built in 1965 after the land was bought in 1964, on the insistence of one of Dadu's colleagues. The house was rented out until the early 70s since Dadu still moved around a bit. BTW, our famed Ambassador car BRR73 was bought by my Dadu from Bade Nana in 1965 for mere Rs. 9000. It was a 1958 model. For the record, we kept it until 2012 (nearly 50 years).

When they were in Patna in the mid-60s, my dad and his two brothers started frequenting Bankipur club on Saturday nights, where my dad performed on stage and collected a lot of accolades doing the same. 

Eventually, my dad moved to the hostel in Patna College in 1969/70. He continued with his interest in music and visited Bombay in 1971-72 with a bunch of friends to sing at a friend's wedding. He had also visited Bombay with his brothers in 1971 and stayed with Mohanjee Prasad. After he came back from Bombay, he visited Bade Nana who asked him to visit Girija Samanta (Shakti Samanta's brother) on his next trip. He got several letters from Dadu's contacts via an Ex Income Tax Bombay chief and visited a host of actors like Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor on his next trip to Bombay. He started working for Shakti Samanta as the assistant director in movies like Ajanabee, Amanush, and Charitraheen. He also appeared for a couple of Pune Film city auditions (once in Delhi and once in Mumbai) around this time where the likes of Jaya Bahaduri suggested that he pursue singing instead of acting. He never pursued singing and returned back to Patna in 1975. 

Back in Bihar, he started a string of businesses. First, he dabbled with the "Glass tinting" business in Patna and then with "Varnishes and Paints" in Dhanbad and Patna. In both the Patna operations, his older brother was his business partner. 

In the late 70s, he started Pizza Hut, which ran until 1984. After Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, everything was shut down for a month and he lost his staff, which prompted him to close down operations.

He thereafter also started a dairy/milk business in Patna, Bihar Sharif, and Koderma, with my mom which he ran for a year. 

This was a brief summary to capture the first 35 years of my dad's life. He is nearly 70 years old now. 

Read to your child

You can start reading as early as 6 months. No need to stop.

E-reading, while better than no reading has lower retention because of physical stimuli absence and distractions.

Audiobooks while better than no reading still misses the visual cues. We have 200:1 visual to auditory nerve endings in the brain.

Closed Captions are thus helpful. An interesting idea is to watch TV with no volume and closed captions on.

TVs have some small advantages for young watchers. It can improve their vocabulary. However, after 10 years of age, there are no advantages. The main problem is what is missed while the hours are spent on TV. Hence, the research recommends not more than 10 hours of TV for kids 2 and older, and no TV for kids younger than 2. Another idea is to mandate no TV on weeknights or TV with no volume and only captions.

The Defining Decade

Some key lessons learned from the book- The Defining Decade- Why your twenties matter and how to make most of them now.

Work:

Build identity capital. Identity capital means skills, experience, and connections that establish the foundation of a strong long term career. It is not impossible but much harder to do this later. There is more long term satisfaction in building a good career in the 20s than frittering time as if the time in the 20s doesn't matter much since everything is happening later in life these days. 

Love:

Be intentional about finding a partner. Understand "The Cohabitation Effect". Don't move in with a person with whom there are no strong commitments. Living together without marriage makes sense only if both of you are somewhat committed. Otherwise, living together leads to the Cohabitation effect with a lock-in and people end up marrying these people even when their personalities are too different and later this ends in a divorce. WHAT YOU WANT is less important than WHO YOU ARE (OCEAN personality type) when it comes to finding a partner. A personality match is the number one indication of a marriage working, more than what you externally think you want in a marriage.
For eg, there are 5 personality traits- OCEAN. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. One can be high, low or average in these 5 categories. The only deal-breaker is if someone is highly neurotic (extreme). Otherwise, most other personality differences can be bridged with hard work on the relationship.

Overall Satisfaction:

This has to do with future orientedness. People who are future-oriented with plans and goals tend to be more satisfied. Yes, being future-oriented means more sacrifices and more hard work but that tends to give more meaning to life so that when you look back at life, you tend to feel more satisfied. An example the author uses is starting a family. Having and caring for a child is not easy (and is not for everyone) but it tends to give a lot of overall satisfaction to life. Fertility peaks for women at 28 and starts declining rapidly after 35. Before 35 is the time to have a child since, after that, a lot of medical interventions are needed which have low success rates and are expensive. Despite IVF and Inuterine inseminations, the safest time to have a child is pre 35. 

Adventures in Africa

There was a Masai boy in Kenya, who wanted to be a warrior. He was guarding his family's cows one night when he heard the sounds of rainfall, out of the blue. He suddenly realized that it was not raining, rather, it was all the cows peeing at once.

A Masai boy knows when that happens, it happens only when the cows can smell or hear a lion. The lions were pretty smart. They were two of them. They figured that the wind was blowing from East to West. There was a lion on the West and one on the East. When the wind carried the aroma of the eastern lion to the cows, the cows started running towards the West, recognizing that the lion must be on the east and thus they were captured by the western lion. Game over!

Such is life in Africa.

Africa is a great continent. Even though it has gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to modernization, it is extremely blessed with natural resources.  

I love immersing in different cultures and I do a lot of research before I embark on a journey. After reading a few books and watching some documentaries, I booked the four of us tickets to Kenya, with a stopover for a night in Doha, Qatar. 

We even crossed over to Tanzania for a while and saw a single stone as a marker for border crossing!

We spotted all popular wild animals, except for Rhinoceros. You can see The Lion King!

The trip was extremely eventful and the kids loved every bit of it. The people were very warm and the safari in the Masai Mara Reserve delightful. It's a great reminder to step outside our comfort zones and explore different cultures. It binds humanity closer together and makes this world a better place to live!

The True North: Travels in the second largest country

What comes first to your mind when you hear Canada? A couple of decades back, for a lot of my Indian friends, I am sure it would have been the most interesting and funny pronunciation itself "Kaneda".  (Yes, in early grades of elementary school, my conscience used to debate on how it was pronounced because my exposure of the world was limited to Doordarshan and old Indian cinema. The word sounded like Canada but the authoritative Punjabi characters on the TV insisted on Kaneda)

But now we live in the era of Connected Cows and Connected World, hence people know something about a lot of things these days, thanks to the ubiquitous articles and snippets on social media. However, the best way to find more about a country is by reading books (notice I did not say magazines or articles), traveling to and the best of all, "living" in that country.

Hence, after a decade of living in the United States, we decided to visit Canada for a week for our ninth wedding anniversary, with an eight year old Freyjaa and a year old Nirvanh in the tow.

Beautiful Trails in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

The trip started with an unexpected twist. We wanted to visit British Columbia and hence I was looking for tickets to Vancouver. However, mistakenly I had bought our onward tickets to Victoria (an island not too far away from Vancouver) . I realized about the mistake only after the pleasant lady at the Delta counter announced that she was feeling sorry to let us know that the flight to Victoria has been delayed and they were willing to put us on other flights going to Victoria or "Vancouver". I pounced on this opportunity and booked us on the flight flying into Vancouver, leaving an hour later.

Canada is a very pleasant country and you gauge that as soon as you disembark at the airport. Most Canadians in British Columbia have accents similar to Americans on the West Coast. However, people seemed to be in less rush than folks back home in California.

View From The Top After Taking The Sea To Sky Gondola Ride in Squamish

We covered White Rock, Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet on this trip and the vast lands with very little population density enamored us.

I highly recommend Nita Lake Lodge in Whistler as an excellent place to station yourself and explore The Pacific Province. It is on the expensive side during peak seasons, however they make your stay very interesting by offering free kayak, boat and bike rentals. It is situated on the Nita Lake where you can paddle and offers beautiful trails in the mountains nearby. Another outdoor adventure spot is Squamish, with its famous Sea to Sky Gondola ride, where you walk on a Suspension Bridge when you reach the top. For a sleepover, I recommend the sleepy town of White Rock, very close to the US Border if you are driving up from the US Border. It has excellent Oceanside accommodations where you can enjoy the vistas if you are in a mood to relax. If you want to go very rural, check out the aboriginal history and lifestyle in Lillooet; stopping at a ranch for a horse ride in Pemberton. Last but not the least, Stanley Park in Vancouver is an urban jungle and is highly recommended. I particularly liked walking on the waterfront in downtown Vancouver.

There are more fun things you can do which I have not recommended in this trip report. Hit me up if you need more info. One interesting fact for my Australian friends and their neighbor Kiwis- Canada has bilateral agreements with you guys and you guys can get easy work permits to work in Canada for the summers. Sounds like a fun idea to spend your idyllic summer in the wonderful outdoorsy British Columbia. Go figure!