The bank teller peered at me through the plexiglass that separated us, then frowned at the thousands of Costa Rica coins spilling over his station.

I’d contacted three different bank employees the week before my arrival at the main branch location in San Jose – a five hour drive. I needed to close my account, wire the proceeds to our US bank and, of course, deal with the mess of coins.

The teller was the fourth employee I had spoken with since my arrival. The branch manager was supposed to help me but when I arrived (at 2:00 pm) he was still at lunch. Thirty minutes later his status was upgraded to “…not coming back today.”

I bounced between various bank employees who wanted nothing to do with me until landing in front of the poor teller pulling stray coins out of his lap. He said that my trouble getting help stemmed from the coins.

“But I called last week and they said you have a coin machine?”

The teller sighed and rolled his eyes. “Yes, we have a coin machine. It’s been broken. For a year.”

And so, the unlucky teller and I began hand counting the collection of coins my family and I had inadvertently started back in 2015. It took us about a half hour, explained by the fact that the highest value coin involved was worth about a US dime – and the final total was over $175.

Just as the count finalized the teller’s screen went blank. Several minutes of general commotion amongst bank employees later he pushed back from his desk and announced that all bank systems were down.

“How long does it usually take before they come back online?” I stupidly/innocently asked.

He shrugged and said, “Pura vida.”

All further transactions, including the account closure, involved a blizzard of forms which required repeated, intensive examination and approval from the assistant branch manager. This took another two hours and, I believe, only ended because the branch was closing for the day. I left with a handful of long, yellow paper receipts and a growing feeling of dread that proved justifiable a few days later when the bank notified me that they wouldn’t wire my proceeds to the US until I could again prove that I was not a Narco (based on the amount involved, not a very successful one).

This kind of experience is one side of life in Costa Rica, and one side of “pura vida.” For those who don’t already know, pura vida is the Costa Rica expression for…anything (think of the F-word minus the profanity). You won the lottery? Pura vida! Your dog got hit by a car? Pura vida.

Life in Costa Rica, and pura vida, is similar to life after children are added to the household. The highs are ridiculously glorious, far exceeding anything experienced before you felt compelled to bring a new, hopefully better, currently shorter version of yourself into the world. The lows immediately remind me of the time my bride had to leave the house and sit on the curb for a few minutes, utterly wrung-out from ten-years of non-stop crying on the part of Thing 1.

What Costa Rica, in particular, Monteverde, gave us is incalculable. Things 1 and 2 spent the bulk of their childhood away from social media and the increasingly stressful life in the US in favor of daily experiences with nature that most of the world is lucky to have once in a lifetime. All of us benefitted from immersion in a different language, and culture, and the opportunity to interact, and befriend, a lot of truly wonderful people.

Costa Rica also gave us the opportunity to spend a significant part of our lives living as a minority. It wasn’t easy – with many bouts of Pura Vida – but the perspective and empathy we gained from that extended status changed us all. For the better.

Our time in Monteverde was a bit of a bubble, a bubble which burst completely when we moved to the Guanacaste region in 2025 so Thing 2 could attend a high school with an actual twelfth grade (almost all local schools stop at eleventh). Blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an abundance of coastline easily accessible from the Liberia airport, Guanacaste is the hottest, and poorest province in Costa Rica.

I say cursed because while in many spots in Costa Rica you might find yourself stuck in traffic behind a guy on a horse (usually on his cell phone) but in the beach areas of Guanacaste (only forty-five minutes from the Liberia airport) you are more apt to find yourself stuck in traffic behind inebriated gringos piddling along in a rented golf cart or a whole series of gringos on a four-wheeler tour. Since our arrival in Costa Rica places like Tamarindo have gone from fishing villages with some amount of tourism to deforested, paved play-lands for the rich (and those living there need to be rich: https://nomads.com/cost-of-living/in/tamarindo)

And so: my notes. I should say up front that it’s not my intention to anger any of my friends in Costa Rica. Yes, absolutely every country on Earth has its problems. I’m writing this from our new home in the US, which you may have noticed is…ahem, not exactly perfect and pretty far down the list on places I want to live (now I’ve got everyone mad at me).

My not-asked-for-notes have to do with Costa Rica’s much deserved reputation as a biological wonder and the reality of the development and destruction of the beach areas taking place on both coasts. Our last rental home in Flamingo (part of Guanacaste) sat next to a forested area of about seven acres. Within a year that forest, including several towering, eighty-foot-tall trees, had been leveled and replaced with 150 extremely tiny condos set behind a new shopping center.

The troubles begin with the fact that water has long been an issue of Guanacaste. Hotels and businesses have long had to truck in fresh water during the dry season. In time before gringos there may have been enough water for the locals, but the gringos/tourists now significantly outnumber the locals – and more of them choose Guanacaste as their new home by the day. Every new development means additional water needed for that construction, the accompanying new pools and the new inhabitants.

In sleepier times I suspect the locals burned their trash. There is now, largely courtesy of tourism and gringo immigration, a crushing amount of trash that the municipalities do their best to keep up with – with mixed results. When we moved to Monteverde in 2015 a truck came to town once a week to pick up the trash. By the time we left the truck came twice a week and still left behind large piles of plastic bags for which they had no room. Monteverde definitely has its share of tourists, but it’s an empty water bottle in a bucket compared to the trash produced at the beach. And, no, I don’t really want to know where all my recycling ended up (same is true for what I’m attempting to recycle here in the US).

With more residents comes more traffic – and traffic in Costa Rica is unbelievable. Most towns set on or near the beach are serviced by one small road (one lane for either side) with no shoulders or sidewalks and long lines of cars, motos, golf carts and quads. It often would be quicker to just walk instead, but where? I almost feel sorry for the occupants of that new condo development when I think about the time they’ll spend waiting to make a left turn out of their new community.

Another odd facet of Guanacaste beach communities is the unofficial/only language: English. Whenever we communicated in Spanish we startled the listener. I was told more than once that, “Gringos don’t speak Spanish.” I don’t claim to understand why, but the gringos who have settled/time-shared in Guanacaste often have no interest in Spanish or local culture and many spots, including Tamarindo, look and feel more like Miami (but with less Spanish). It probably doesn’t help that, minus rows of metal shacks along the beach, the locals (Ticos) have been largely pushed out of these areas because of the unhealthy combination of low pay working in the tourist trade and real estate prices so high that only Americans and Canadians can afford them.

So, yes, there are problems. What’s different, at least to me, about my Costa Rica kvetching is that we watched a lot of these problems significantly worsen, first-hand, over a relatively short period of time. If I had been alive when the US systematically eliminated fifty million buffalo I’m confident that this too would have generated notes.

It took the US thirty-plus years to manage that awful feat. Costa Rica isn’t deliberately exterminating a particular species but the rampant development is destroying huge swaths of what was not that long ago a vibrant, connected habitat (both in terms of the wildlife and the people who inhabited it).

If humans are present, development is going to happen. If rich gringos want to buy things they are going to buy those things (although Costa Rica did manage to say no to at least one celeb). There is still time to save a lot of what makes Costa Rica amazing. That effort is going to need actual planning (particularly in regard to infrastructure) and, probably most importantly, enforcement. There are, for example, already laws in the books protecting eighty-foot-tall trees.

So, thank you Costa Rica for welcoming us for a decade. The good far outweighed the bad. I’m hopeful that the same country which protected large swaths of land for an amazing system of national parks can find a way to just say no, or at least maybe, to the developers.

Pura vida.