After leaving Rustlers Valley, I began creating a new space called the Pachamama Forest Retreat, on the boundary of the Knysna Indigenous Forest near Knysna, along the Garden Route in South Africa. I convinced ten other people to pool their money and buy a piece of land together, and it was very successful. I built a maloka on the land and managed the forest with a tractor and a sawmill. It was a good project. Over time, though, the focus of the project had become very much about permaculture and hosting volunteers to do the work on the land, with far less focus on the ceremonial work I wanted to do in the maloka.
Then the pandemic began, and I started to question reality again. We went into lockdown. There was a lot of fear. I was locked down with about eight foreign exchange students who were on the land, and I started to look at the reality of where I was.
The pandemic had scared me. When it first hit, I didn’t know what to do. We followed the advice given online, sanitising all our packages when they came back from the store, wearing masks when we went into the shops, and all sorts of things that didn’t feel right to me. Because we suddenly had a lot of time indoors to see what was going on in the world through the internet, I became interested in the world in a different way.
My son Adam was in Costa Rica. He was trying to decide whether to return to South Africa on the repatriation flights or to stay in Costa Rica. I advised him to stay, which was a good decision. In the next month or so of the lockdown, Adam began to help Keith, who ran a hotel in Monteverde called Finca Camino Nuevo. Adam was invited to assist Keith with the maintenance of the hotel and the cooking of food in exchange for his stay there. Keith was a kind man, and he began to communicate with me on Telegram. At one point he said to me, “Come over to Costa Rica. You can stay here for free and I will look after you. Just come.”
And my reality shift became immediate. I realised that what I wanted more than anything was to be with my son, and not to be trapped in a community I had created that was not quite going in the direction I had intended.
I felt it was time to leave South Africa. I wanted to find a country with a pura vida lifestyle, a lifestyle of organic living and farming. I felt I would be freer in a country like Costa Rica.
So I let go. I arranged my things, sold some things, and began to ready myself for the move. Keith also helped me by buying one of the marimbas I had made in South Africa, which was a great help in getting everything together for the move. When I packed my things away, I knew somehow that I wasn’t coming back.
I left South Africa on 13 December 2020 and arrived in Costa Rica four days later. I flew from Johannesburg to Addis Ababa, then on to São Paulo, Panama and San José. We were still in lockdown and everyone had to wear masks. The flight was fully packed, and everyone had luggage on their laps. I have never seen a plane so full as the one that took me to Addis Ababa. It is one of the biggest airports in Africa, and the part I was ushered through was under construction, with people sitting and sleeping on the floor and bags everywhere. It was chaos. From there I caught a connecting flight to São Paulo. It was one of the last available flights from Africa to South America, because after that, during the lockdown, they stopped all direct flights from Cape Town to São Paulo and from Addis Ababa to São Paulo.
There were a lot of mix ups with my flights, and I used all my money to get this far. I got stuck in a hotel in São Paulo without enough money for my connection through Panama to San José, and had to ask friends to send me money so I could carry on. When I arrived in Costa Rica, I arrived with zero. I had about $20 in my wallet for a taxi, and that was it. I had no backup. I made a video of the journey, which you can watch on YouTube here: My journey to Costa Rica.
My first stop was Brave Earth, near La Fortuna and the Arenal volcano, for one ceremony. Then, just before Christmas, I moved over to Keith’s place, Finca Camino Nuevo (the farm of the new road), in Monteverde. Monteverde is on the edge of the cloud forest, where there is almost permanent rainfall, a very beautiful and interesting area. We held Christmas ceremonies there with a group called the Mystical Anarchists, the first ceremonies I ran at that venue. I am still friends with all those people today.
Keith was my benefactor. Without him, it would not have been possible for me to come. He looked after me for five months at his hotel and fed me, and he helped me to maintain myself and get started in Costa Rica. Soon after arriving, I became very ill for about three months. I was in so much pain that I often had to lie still and could not do anything. It often felt that I was being a thorn in other people’s side while they were running around working hard. Even though I am younger than Keith, he was doing more work than me, and it made me feel a bit guilty. It was quite an episode finding out what was causing the pain. I diagnosed myself with a liver fluke, a parasite living in my liver, and flushed myself of it with herbs from Peru. Keith is a great character, and I learned a lot from my stay with him. I will be forever grateful to him for his generosity.
So there were two reasons for me leaving South Africa. The first was my son. I have no bigger love for anything than Adam. I don’t have much other family. My sister is in Durban and she’s well looked after, my parents have both passed on, and I had no possessions in South Africa. At my age, it seemed like a good time to move on. The second was the pandemic. COVID definitely affected my decision to come here, and that was a blessing for me. If we had not had COVID, I probably would not have come.
Although I was very happy in South Africa with what I was doing, I felt cut off from my tribe. I thought that by coming to Costa Rica and being amongst people who do a lot of work with the medicines, I would be in a similar tribe. I was not right about that, because tribes are very different from continent to continent. But that’s a long story for another time.
