In 1970 my family lived in San Jose, where my husband David was the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in Costa Rica. A Peace Corps volunteer assigned to Nosara rode into San Jose on horseback — the Peace Corps forbid the use of motorcycles — and said, “The beach is gorgeous, and there’s a guy selling lots there. You have to come out for a visit.” So David and I and Harry Wilkinson, the Peace Corps Director, said, “Let’s go.”

In those days you could fly from Puntarenas to Nosara for $10, so we flew. Alan Hutchinson, the developer, had bought the big cattle ranch territory from Sr. Baltodano. He used the farmhouse as a hotel, where we stayed in a room the size of a bathroom, with one small bed.

We rode horses up to Section A, the first part of the development, which began at the stone house on the upper Pelada road and continued up the hill to beyond where the Lagarta Lodge now stands. All the lots in A section had ocean views – because there were no trees!

Ralph Peterson was Hutchinson’s sales agent (who was married to Richmond Phipps). He said “Let me show you my favorite view,” and took us to a property of about ¼ acre with some scrub brush and two large trees. We took one look at the ocean and said, “We’ll buy this lot.” The price started at $3,000, but Hutchinson said, “If you build on it within a year, I’ll cut the price by $1,000. And if you build before my New York Times ad appears, I’ll cut the price even more.” So we paid even less.

The view that captivated the Kitsons

We bought land before Wilkinson did, but he built his house before we built ours. His property is where Almost Paradise is now. We built a cabin in 1971, modeled on one we liked in the town of Nosara and came here whenever possible on vacation until we left San Jose in 1980.

Getting here was always an adventure. CA 1 was being built from San Jose (I think the U.S. Seabees built it), which means that it took two and a half hours to get from SJ to Puntarenas on a road that wandered through towns like Grecia and Sarchi.

Once beyond the bomba, there were 32 wet crossings. Some of them were little streams, but others were significant. One river was filled with rocks. Not stones, rocks! There were no tidal rivers on the route, which roughly corresponds to the road from the bomba today. From Samara along the ocean road, however, there were tidal rivers. That was no fun. In December, usually before Christmas, a leveler came through to create a road more or less where the road had been the year before. So the road was passable from December to April. With the first rain, in late April or May, the road closed.

One bridge was planks of wood on top of tree trunks. Once we came out early, before the road had been leveled. The planks were gone. David was determined to get to Nosara, so he and the kids got out and crossed the bridge on foot. Then as I drove across, they gestured to me to keep the car on the straight and narrow.

We drove a VW microbus, with chains (like snow chains) to get through the sand. Coming from Samara you drove from finca to finca until Garza, then took the path near where the Bellagio was, to the beach. We drove on the beach all the way to north Guiones.

Dust! The road was 4 to 5 inches of fluffy dust. It was the dustiest road I’d ever taken. Once we were on the road when suddenly it rained and the dust turned into mud. We drove into a quebrada, but nobody was hurt.

The High Road under construction

You could also come to Nosara by lancha (boat), by plane, or by horseback.

We built our cabin with wood from Puntarenas, brought on a lancha. Once it got to Guiones, the boatmen threw the wood into the water and local kids swam it to shore. This was customary: everything that floated got to us that way. Even things that didn’t float could come by boat. This lancha was pretty big. It brought our refrigerator most of the way, and a rowboat brought it the rest of the way.

People would come and go on the lancha, too. It came every week to the end of Guiones, where doctors and lawyers from San Jose had vacation homes. But Dr. Soto, the surgeon who did C.R.’s first heart transplant, flew in on his plane, which he landed on the beach.

Goods that didn’t float came by ox-cart.

Moving goods, Nosara style

People moved around Nosara district by horse. You would get to Nicoya by going over the mountain through Los Angeles.

We went to Washington, D.C. until 1983, when David got reassigned to Costa Rica. David was a development officer with USAID. He worked with the Ministry of Education on developing textbooks for grades 1-6. The USAID bought a book for every child in the country, the only time that every child has had a textbook. David was also responsible for getting some bridges built from the bomba down to Nosara. He convinced the powers that be in San Jose that Nosara would develop, and soon. USAID put in eight bridges as a result.

That year we added two rooms to our house. I was a dancer and we had installed a high barre for me on the porch. One of the workmen would imitate my dance moves. The foreman (Martin Chacon) said to me, “That guy is better than you are!”

We were pioneers among the ex-pats. There were only 50 houses in the project for a long time. Even so, some ex-pats lived here full time. Everything revolved around the ocean. Mary Yost moved here in 1970, and collected shells like nobody else. She would go out every low tide and amass a huge variety, which she then categorized and labeled. She donated her collection is now housed at the UCR Marine Biology department but left us a small selection, which you can see at the library.