Exhilaration of Terror

Stepping off the plane for the first time in Costa Rica was as exhilarating as it was terrifying, and five years later I still get goosebumps every time I reminisce about the experience. Call me crazy, but the rush of adrenaline and the endorphins that followed me around for a month was enough to kick-start my lifelong addiction to travelling.

I was 20 years old, and not only was it my first international trip, it was also my first time traveling alone. It was extremely late at night, the air was so humid that it hung on me like a drenched wool blanket, and everyone kept shouting at me as if by increasing their volume, I would magically develop fluency in Spanish and understand what they were saying.

It was close to midnight by the time I found the man picking me up from the airport, and when he shuffled me into the back of his enormous van that was on the verge of falling apart, I began wondering what I had gotten myself into. Against my mother's desperate pleas, and as a single young female, I had willingly just gotten into a vehicle with an older man I had never met, in a country I wasn't familiar with, where they spoke a language that seemed light-years above my comprehension, and I had done all this in my attempt to 'embrace life' to honor my best friend who had tragically passed away.

As we sped away in his duck-tape embellished van towards my new home in this dingy and chaotic city, with the airport disappearing into the distance at an alarmingly fast rate, I realized that I was in for the ride of my life. Whether that ride was going to be "Taken" style or more a la "EatPrayLove", I wouldn't entirely find out until morning...