A wellness quest in COSTA RICA

See those deer over there? I eat just like them.” The man sitting across from me is greying above his ears, and the wrinkles around his eyes are verging on leathery.

“Grass?” I ask. He gives a hearty laugh, taking a sip from his bottle. I haven’t seen any deer on their second beer today.

“I eat like them. The same thing at the same time every day. Then I can smoke and drink beer. It’s why we live so long here!”

Navy waves crash against the shore, and sand crabs scuttle around our feet. I’m not sold on his

gical accuracy, but I’m in Costa Rica to learn the secrets of longevity, so I’m not ready to completely dismiss his theory.

We’re sitting in a chiringuito — a local open-air bar — just outside the town of Samara on the Nicoya Peninsula, one of the world’s five “Blue Zones,” made famous by the Dan Buettner bestseller of the same name.

These are regions where people are thought to live the longest and healthiest. Having spent the past two years feeling cold and tired in Toronto, I’ve settled into this beach town for a few months to see what I can learn about longevity myself.

“What about exercise? Eating more greens? The keto diet?” I ask. At home, I spend much of my energy trying to fit 30-minute runs, fish oil capsules, meditation and eight ounces of veggies into my daily routine.

But the man at the bar is committed. “Same thing. Same time. Every day. It’s pura vida.” Pura vida — hello, goodbye, cheers, life is good and, literally, the pure life — is said around the country in response to anything and everything.

The man lights a cigarette and offers to buy me a beer. I refuse. It’s only noon and I don’t digest gluten well. I take a bite of the grilled fish on my plate and the warm, buttery flavour runs down my throat.

I’ve been dutifully eating the traditional food: plates of beans, rice, plantains, vegetables and fish. But I leave most of the rice behind, still not ready to believe I can eat this many carbs.

“If you want more answers, you have to go into the mountains,” the man tells me.

As a taxi takes me to Hojancha, a small mountain town outside busy Nicoya, cheap clothing and electronics stores fade into jungle as we shift gears to drive up hilly dirt lanes.

My first stop is the Diria Coffee Tour, offered by the sustainable agricultural co-op Coopepilangosta R.L. Coffee is another staple in this region, and I’m ready to get one of the secrets to longevity straight from the source.

Sweat cakes my skin as the guide, a certified coffee taster, leads a group around the farm where reddishbrown beans sprout on thin trees for kilometres in all directions. A wiry and energetic man, he tells us how the co-op started with just a small group of farmers and now has over 100 active producers. I try to attention, but I’m too distracted by the fact that you can be a “certified coffee taster” to think of much else.

At the end of the tour, coffee is poured into small white bowls. I take a sip to find it light and a little sour. As a lifelong insomniac, I’m vigilant about only having one cup of coffee a day and never after 2 p.m. It’s 2:30 now. But for the sake of journalistic integrity, I finish three cups of coffee and feel jittery energy g through me.

After the tour, I wander through Hojancha, looking at the mural art in the main square, where a group of aging men are drinking coffee and laughing.

In a small fruit shop, I find plastic baggies of handmade tortillas sitting on the counter. I grab a couple of bags and ask the woman in a white apron at the till for a taxi number. There’s only one taxi driver in town, and it happens to be her husband.

The driver carefully negotiates the bumpy road as he talks to me in slow Spanish. What do I think of Costa Rica? Why did I come to Hojancha? He takes a small mango from his dashboard and bares his teeth to rip into the skin, but then closes his mouth.

He hands the fruit back to me. “Pura vida,” he says.

Despite the jolt of caffeine, I sleep through the night. Am I finally starting to learn the secrets of this Blue Zone? Was the mango magic?

As the weeks pass, the undercurrent of tiredness I was carrying starts to leave my body. I’m less concerned about how many carbs I’m eating or how late I drink coffee. I stop even pretending to go for runs and quickly give up on surf lessons. Perhaps good health isn’t 30 minutes of exercise or butter coffee squeezed into a busy day.

I spend more time wandering dirt roads, jumping in waterfalls, chatting to my neighbours, and watching the waves at my local chiringuito. Food, coffee, wine, relationships and natural movement become the entre of my day. Despite my lack of fitness and measured greens, I feel stronger and full of life.

On my last night on the peninsula, I decide to go for a final glass of wine. But the chiringuito is out. “Cerveza?” The waiter asks. Beer? I think about carbs and gluten as I consider the offer. The waves crash under the pink rays of the setting sun. A fisherman jumps on his beached boat as a big wave comes crashing high on the shore.

I look back at the waiter and nod my head yes. “Pura vida.”

If you want more answers, you have to go into the mountains. LOCAL MAN AT SAMARA BAR