The American teens fell in love with the miles of pristine beaches and the laid-back atmosphere of Puerto Viejo. Shaun Sellers relaxes on the beach with dogs that the she, Emily Eagen and Emily Howell adopted together.
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Dreaming of good life
They arrived in Costa Rica in January and moved into a hotel in San Jose, an old-world city considered to be the safest large metropolitan area in Latin America. But San Jose seemed crowded and buttoned-down to the young college students, so on a hot March weekend, Eagen, Howell and Sellers jumped on a bus looking for something different. They found it in Puerto Viejo.
Laid-back residents fish in dug-out canoes in the morning and play dominoes in rusting tin-roofed buildings and bamboo markets late into the night. Horses wander unattended in the alleys. Vultures squat on the streets, moving grudgingly when trucks lacking mufflers rock through the potholes. Surfers smoke pot on the beach. Day-Glo butterflies flit through lush green jungle.
There are none of the fat-cat tourists who frequent the posh resorts on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Here, in a village on a finger of Costa Rica jutting into the Caribbean,the crowd is young and adventurous, sleeping in hammocks in $8-a-night rooms and dancing to reggae in the discos. It’s spring break on Prozac, and it never ends.
Nestled at the edge of the jungle, 200 meters from the shore, a plot of land is for sale.
It is beautiful, charming and seductive. It also is four hours across a mountain range and rain forest from where the three friends are supposed to be living during their school program, and from the job at a radio station Howell is supposed to keep. They know practically nothing about Puerto Viejo — they’d never heard of it before they arrived there on a bus — yet, listening to the waves crash on the coral reef, any doubts are washed away.
“The lot is very private, surrounded by rain forest,” Eagen gushes in an e-mail to her mother. “I will see tucans (sic) and monkeys. You have to come down here, you will fall in love with this place like I have.”
In Puerto Viejo, they have found a world of innocence and beauty, where residents with their dreadlocks and wide smiles seem as untainted as the pristine beaches. Here, the girls think, is a place they can love, and can love them back. They can volunteer to teach English at the local elementary school, pick up a few colons (Costa Rica’s currency) baby-sitting and waitressing, and live what Costa Ricans call La pura vida, the good life. It’s what their school always talked about — helping others — and they’d be doing it at age 19, their own little Peace Corps in Paradise.
Consulting neither the school nor parents, the three young women decide to move from San Jose to Puerto Viejo; they’ll buy land and build a house; they’ll do much of the work themselves, despite having no experience building anything; they’ll drop out of school, at least for awhile.
Sellers takes $10,000 more of her stock money and buys the land, and withdraws another $16,000 for the materials for a house.
On a Saturday morning, in a beat-up rented SUV, they pack their suitcases, a dog they’d rescued from the streets of San Jose and its eight puppies. Also in the back are two shovels to dig ditches.
Three American co-eds are going to build a house in the jungle.
Thirty-six hours later, two are dead.
