Travel Book Reviews – Americas Part 2

By Suroor Alikhan

Click here for reviews from: Africa – Americas Part 1Asia – Europe – World

Beautiful view of the Valle de Cocora with iconic wax palms and lush green hills in Colombia.

Amy Field seems to have it all: a degree from a prestigious liberal arts college and a good job in downtown Los Angeles. But something is missing. She isn’t happy: she often has nightmares of being strangled.

It is time to make a change. She decides to learn Spanish in Latin America and picks Costa Rica at random (there seem to be more books written about it than about other destinations). 

The idea is to spend six months in San José, and another six months in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a close friend. 

But as a poet once said, the best-laid plans often go awry. Her friend drops out of the trip, and when her year is up, Field isn’t ready to go back. So she stays on in Latin America for two and a half years. It is a life-changing experience: her self-confidence grows and she becomes more comfortable being on her own. 

When she first arrives in San José, she can barely speak Spanish. The couple she stays with, Daisy and Pascual, speak no English. They manage to communicate, especially when their son Marco visits and is able to translate. 

Field travels around the continent to Panama, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. In Chile, she climbs a volcano almost by mistake (she was fairly sure she would not make it to the top), hikes in the Torres del Paine National Park and goes to the end of the world (Tierra del Fuego, Chile). She goes to the San Blas Islands in Panama, Machu Pichu in Peru, and sleeps in a hammock in the Amazon forest in Brazil (she doesn’t get much sleep—she’s too busy worrying about snakes and other creatures crawling in with her).

But Costa Rica is her centre—specifically, the Hotel Las Tortugas, an ecotourist resort in Playa Grande. The hotel is run by Louis, an American, and his Costa Rican (or Tica) partner, Marienela. He started the hotel so he could save the beach—which is one of the places that the Leatherback sea turtles spawn—from being taken over by developers. 

Field eventually gets a job at the hotel, answering emails in return for board and lodging. Louis becomes something of a mentor to her. He provokes her, teaches her to surf and offers her bits of wisdom. One of the first things he tells her when she arrives at the hotel is to take off her watch: “we live on moontime here”. 

The chapters about Playa Grande are scattered throughout the book, which can get a little distracting. I was reading about Chile (which I was especially interested in, having spent part of my childhood there), and then suddenly, I was back in Costa Rica in a chapter about the joys of surfing, when I wanted to continue with reading about her trip to Chile. I did enjoy reading about Hotel Las Tortugas and all the people there, but sometimes the chapters felt a bit jarring when they turned up in the middle of another section. 

Having said that, I have to take my hat off to Field, arriving in not just in an unfamiliar country but a continent, for a long stay with barely any knowledge of the language. She pushes herself out of her comfort zone. Not only does she survive, but she thrives on a sense of adventure. The trip helps her decide what is really important to her, as opposed to the roles that society expects her, as a woman, to fill. As she writes, the aim of her travel was not the destination: “It had been about opening my eyes. It had been about learning, and moving, and observing, and listening. … It had been about finding out—and believing—that I am more powerful than I ever could have imagined.”

And surely that is the point of travel.

You can also read great book reviews about AfricaAsiaEurope, the rest of the world and Americas Part 1.