Was talking the other day with someone and the topic of happy places came up. Like, places you have a good memory of that you can go back to if you feel down. I couldn’t imagine a happy place at that moment but I just figured out my happy place.
It’s a public natural swimming pool made in a river in a tiny village in the Provence, France. I went there for my first holiday with my girlfriend when we were not even two months together. We met and we just felt like going on a three week trip together through France. Never went to France before and never went camping before. So we went camping in this small village in the Provence and I had the time of my life really. That specific pool deserves to be my happy place.
How about you guys?
A small, isolated jungle beach on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. When I was little, around 10, my family never had much money, but that summer we were incredibly lucky and were invited by family friends, who were on a military deployment in the country, to spend a few weeks with them. It was nothing fancy, but I consider those weeks an incredible and pivotal part of my life and development, and there is one part that I will always remember.
Starting early in the morning before the sun had even come up, we took a bus from the small seaside town we were staying in. After about an hour we got off at a coffee plantation in a lesser developed part of the country, and then with a guide my family began to hike a small relatively untraveled, winding trail through the rainforest. While it took about 2 hours and my 10 year old legs were on fire, I loved every second of it. Seeing the insane variety of wildlife, such as toucans, parrots, various monkeys, and a young curious ocelot, along with the intricate plant life and massive trees was breathtaking. But at the end of our hike, we ended up at a very small beach on the coast. It was in a small cove and the beach itself couldn’t have been more then 100 meters long, but I felt like I had stepped into another world.
As I stepped past the thick border of palms onto the beach, the sounds of the rainforest quickly faded and were replaced by a tranquil silence, broken only by the gentle lapping of small waves. The water in the cove was a vibrant turquoise and the sand a deep white color. There were schools of small colorful fish darting around and a few lemon sharks lazily swimming around. And among all of it, I just remember feeling truly at peace. A feeling I have rarely been able to recapture. My family spent the entire day at that beach, well over 12 hours, and I barely felt the time pass, I feel like I could have stayed there forever if given the chance.
It is definitely one of my life’s goals to revisit that beach, and that probably won’t happen for a very long time, but it truly was a special place.
On a bit of a funnier note, a few of the remora that were with the sharks decided that I was interesting and also in need of a cleaning, so they would constantly try to swim right under me and latch onto various parts of my body. They didn’t do that to anyone else in my family, and even if I got out for a while, the second I went back in the water they would seemingly teleport to me. The more I think about it, it was probably because my swim suit was really shiny a resembled the shark’s scales, but it was still a fun experience.
When I was around 10 I also went on a trip to a tropical beach but to the Dominican Republic instead. I was mostly held up in the resort and didn’t go on any jungle walks like you did but it was still exotic and great and I did get to swim with nurse sharks in an enclosed area which we got to by boat. Another thing that made that time special for me was that it was before my mom and dad breaking up and then my dad passing away a little after that.