The Crescent City Absurdist: A Sketch of Liberia, Costa Rica: Away from Tourism

Liberia, Costa Rica, Volcan Rincon in the distance

What I love most about Costa Rica is that everyone knows the names of the birds. Ask your taxi driver to roll down the window at a stoplight and listen to the song of a bird in a tree and he’ll tell you it’s a white-throated magpie-jay (but in Spanish). When hiking on a trail, stop and ask the man in rubber boots cutting back plant growth with a machete what the mechanical hiss from the trees is about and he’ll tell you it’s the mating call of the black-faced solitaire, and then maybe he’ll dramatize its song, a door closing on a rusty hinge.

Costa Rica is full of birds, and full of people proud of its birds. And with this kind of beauty and pride comes tourism, a lot of it. It can be hard to find the real Costa Rica, a cultural identity of a nation or a community not predicated on servicing foreigners. But it exists. To find it you might have to go to a place the guidebook dedicates little space or none at all. I found it in Liberia after escaping beautiful but touristy Monte Verde. I could tell stories of my time there, but instead want to provide a brief sketch of the capital of the Guanacoste region, which offers services to travelers—mostly passing through on their way to Nicaragua—but has not altered its identity to serve them. It is a beautiful place. The fabric of its community is tangible, there to touch and see with only a short walk around its busy but casual streets.

Liberia is nicknamed the White City because the paint from its buildings has been ostensibly sunwashed of all colors, but most one-story homes are faded pastel pinks, greens, blues, and yellows. Men keep small warehouses and factories open to view from the sidewalk, and you can see them working, grease-stained faces and long leather gloves working the fire of machines, cutting metal, fitting engines, trimming wood. On the main avenue a paintless fort occupies a city block. The Museo Guanacoste is atypically vacant. There are no galleries, exhibitions, or information posted on walls. It’s an old prison and its rooms, cells, and showers are empty and open to explore. Nicaraguan women wash the floors in the morning and at night students come to practice orchestra music or perform theater.

At dusk the parque central throbs quietly as the city nucleus. Thousands of great-tailed grackles, with tails like long black triangular fans, hustle noisily back and forth along the park’s trees and are loud enough they nearly overwhelm the euphonious start of the evening church service, where the community begins to sing hymns audible through the open doors of the white, and incompatibly modern, cathedral. Teenage boys skateboard on ramps they set up in front of the church and the high school girls, still in uniform, gossip and watch. A trampoline is placed in the corner of the plaza for the children, and the older brothers lean against its protective mesh net and watch their siblings play.

In the morning mothers ride bikes in packs to the school, their children sitting on the frames with both legs folded over and a new set of birds sing in the park.

Volcan Rincon looms over the city in the distance. I catch a ride from a local driver named Diego to its national park, and he stops on the way to show us the birds he knows, which are many. The national park has several trails that lead to secluded pools and waterfalls, and I swim in the clean clear water of Poza Rio Blanco by myself and for the first time in awhile, feel like I’m truly and beautifully alone, swimming quietly in a blessed place without having to share it, and it’s a joy that’s not greedy, but profoundly quiet and peaceful, and I’m reminded that earth was once full of such places. At the waterfall, the sun sits on top of the ridge and blue dragonflies mate on floating bits of driftwood. On the other side of the park are boiling mud pots and steaming lagoons that smell like rotten eggs being cooked in mud, and it reminds me that nature can be gross, too.

I leave the next day and find a small quiet beach town, Jonquillal, that doesn’t exist on most internet maps and attend a wedding of a friend's friend at sunset on the beach where all the groomsmen wear white see-through pants and the groom wears a sharp dark-blue suit but no shoes. We party until late, and I sleep in a guesthouse where black iguanas nest under the red tin roofs. In the morning I can hear them scatter.

That day I leave Costa Rica, and all the way to Nicaragua I can hear and see the birds from my window, and from the back seat of the car, I recite their names to myself, quietly.