Redefining What “Girls Trip” Means

by Seh Ström (New Zealand)

A leap into the unknown Costa Rica

Costa Rica. A place so encapsulating i barely held any concern for as to why i ended up there. My boyfriend’s best friend had roped me into joining his sister there. I hardly knew the girl but decided to just do it. It’s 2020, time’s moving, people are changing; I had no reason not to. Fast forward three weeks and I’m stepping onto tarmac at the quaint island airport. Heat hit us before anything else, having come freshly from the colder half of the world, Costa Rica was an air of newness that neither me nor Erica had prepared ourselves for. Arriving at our “resort” was something else - Erica had offhandedly and without little consideration booked an exclusively reclusive holiday bungalow that seemed to be part of a timeshare the driver of our taxi was part of. The bungalow was really just a large teepee sort of tent, freshly lain with insects of various size and shape, all of which would cause your soul to leave your body. Discovering the bathing facilities was another story entirely - a hidden lake, I say hidden because it was out of sight thanks to a large canopy of trees that shrouded it from sight - i assume for both aesthetic purposes too. Despite the fact that two princesses (I use this term lightheartedly) had somehow gotten over the less than godly living facilites, we set off on a trek led by a stoner Spaniard named Zeh, at least, that’s what he instructed us to call him - I’m pretty sure his dreads had more bugs than the teepee Erica and I were staying in. Zeh led us through a waist deep mud marsh, up an almost acute angled slope, then once at the top of said slope he basically said the only way back down was by JUMPING from a thirty foot cliff into a waterfall that even he didn’t know the real depth of - I should mention that the real reason behind his telling us to jump alongside a waterfall off of this thirty foot cliff was due to the fact that he FORGOT the way back. Naturally, we listened to the stoner and half jumped, half fell into clear beautiful water (we later discovered this was because some farmer man had dumped some sort of teal dye into the water) Erica and I decided we’d avoid thinking too much on that and just pressed onwards. Food was an entirely different experience. The timeshare bungalows were all provided food as part of the deal Erica had “scored” online. Well, did we “score.” The first week of food consisted of raw fish, black beans, rice and some sort of lime and mint alcohol drink. See now as a Portuguese girl, this didn’t sound bad, as a human being, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The fish was more like eel, the rice had a questionable consistency and the beans were probably older than us. I don’t even consider this Costa Rica, Costa Rica is beautiful, the resorts, the people, the food, it’s beautiful. Erica chose Survivor 2.0 not regular old Costa Rica... no no, my traveling partner chose Costa Rica on crack. Thank you for your time, hopefully this was as short and blackout worthy as my trip. cheers 🥂