Costa Rica Part 1: Everything We Own Is Covered In Mold

Uvita
Sept 30 - Oct 12

Our next stop was to the town of Uvita, which sits on the Southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and where we had lined up a work exchange through a website called workaway.info at a treehouse hostel that was tucked into the rain forest. Below, Eian will recap our time volunteering in Uvita:

After a six hour ride from David, Panama, we arrive in Uvita. The bus ride is like riding in a cramped refrigerator and there's a Jackie Chan movie called A Police Story (in Mandarin with Spanish subtitles) on repeat. When we get off the bus and look around we soon figure out we're in the middle of nowhere. 

Uvita is in the least developed part of Costa Rica. We walk from the bus station/restaurant to the main part of town, which consists of a bank, grocery store, bakery, and a weirdly big appliance store. After stocking up on groceries, which are more expensive than back in the States, we take a cab down a terrible dirt road to our hostel. The road is so bad that drivers charge four dollars just to take you on this five minute drive. We get to our hostel and are taken aback. The hostel is a huge treehouse with a beautiful terrace overlooking jungle all around. There's a waterfall nearby. Minutes after arriving, a howler monkey family starts screeching just one tree away. Our plan is to stay for three weeks, and we're thinking this will be perfect.

The owners are two German ex pats with a two year old daughter. The first thing they say to us is, "you won't be as good as our last volunteer." After a tour of the hostel, they take us to a small shack out back -- this is the "volunteer house." In the center of our room is a moldy mattress with moldy pillows. In fact, all our clothes and our backpacks would also soon become moldy. There's no escaping it.

Moldy pillows

Our living quarters

Our jobs are to clean the kitchen, two hours in the morning, and two hours at night, water the plants, and to babysit their kid for four hours in the middle of the day. And to do whatever else they want us to do, at any time. Six days a week. In exchange for a goddamn moldy mattress!

Baby sitting the two year old is the hardest of the jobs, especially since every side of the hostel ends in a 20 foot drop over the edge. It takes all of our energy to keep her entertained and from falling out of the hostel. She's a smart kid for her age, and she knows three languages, but she also throws tantrums every single day. By the end of a shift I need a beer. The cleaning part of the job isn't that bad, but when we're done the owner always re-cleans everything after us anyway, which is a bit annoying.

We have some free time during the day, but it's hard to go very far, or do much because we're hanging around this place basically doing free work (excuse me, working for a moldy mattress). And just buying food is costing us more than it cost us to travel all over Colombia or Panama for a week. After a week and a half, the decision is pretty easy to never do a work exchange again, and we decide to keep traveling North instead.

But we got some good stuff out of staying in Uvita, like surfing and Spanish lessons. On our day off we went to Manuel Antonio National Park, which is the most famous park in Costa Rica, and it was amazing. The rain forest is alive with sounds of monkeys and birds. After hiking for a half hour the main trail leads out to beaches. White faced Capuchin monkeys play in the trees and try to steal tourists' phones. Huge raccoons roam around and steal bags and food from sun bathers. It's great.

Phone-stealing monkeys

And everyone we met coming through Uvita was awesome, including our fellow volunteers Roxana and Jay, and a tour guide named Nancy who helped us come up with our plan for escaping Uvita and seeing the rest of Central America. Honestly, if our experience in Uvita had been better, we wouldn't have decided to keep traveling, so it all worked out for the best. Our advice about doing work exchange would be to make sure you are 100% clear on what you are giving in labor and exactly what you're getting in exchange for it. Otherwise it can be easy for hosts to take advantage of volunteer labor (and even lean on volunteer labor too hard instead of hiring locals, which they should be doing for most of their work in the first place, the damn cheapskates). Thanks for the life lessons, Uvita.

The sun sets on our time in Uvita

Our next stop would be Puerto Viejo to experience the Caribbean side of the country!