Costa Rica almost killed me. Why I haven't posted in 2 months..

I'm currently stuck on the side of a mountain in Costa Rica one of our vehicles has gone into a dish we're waiting on a tow truck driver and um uh I'm here with the other vehicle it's uh it's terrifying up here uh it's wet the roads aren't uh very uh paved and um yeah we almost slid off uh Mountain a couple times and um we're heading into San Jose to get to a hotel by the airport and uh then we're gonna fly out Monday morning so uh stay tuned [Music] [Applause] so what happened in Costa Rica [Music] foreign Costa Rica photographing a destination wedding for a friend of mine it was uh it was a vacation but it was also work it made me think about what it is I want to do one of the reasons I became a photographer was because I wanted to travel I stopped shooting weddings during covid because the leads I were getting were three and four years out and it was just I just want to be in a client relationship for three or four years prior to the actual shoot I don't mind shooting weddings I enjoy it I definitely enjoy weddings that are shorter it's not the wedding so much itself is that when when the day drags on to like 10 or 12 hours and you know it's a long time to be on your feet your your body aches the next day is like how much punishment do I want to put myself through to do this kind of work destination weddings are different they don't they don't last as long they're you're in a you're in a you're in a foreign place you're in a you're in a different place usually an amazing looking place it's 3am every day [Music] howler monkeys wake up before God usually around 5 a.m today it's 3 A.M [Music] I'm not cute I'm enjoyable it's so loud it's so loud [Music] hey everyone I wanted to come on and give you a quick Channel update I was trying to post a video a day through May I did that through June uh it got to be about every second or third day but in July I haven't posted a single video at all um my last video at the end of June I was I posted right before I was heading to Costa Rica to photograph a wedding which I did um I couldn't get any videos edited or posted while I was in Costa Rica but also while I was in Costa Rica on the final weekend um I went through a very traumatic uh life-threatening uh event we almost slid off uh Mountain a couple times uh that changed changed how I think about things forced me to slow down um really appreciate uh what's around me [Music] the weekend before coming back the couple had rented a beautiful cabin in the cloud forest it's cloud forest it's mountainous roads it's up in the mountains uh it's rainy season in Costa Rica and uh the roads had been washed out in a number of places the the cliff and we're driving up two separate vehicles one a four by four and one just uh uh the equivalent of like a Toyota Yaris you know a small little vehicle front wheel drive not a lot of power the car overheated halfway up and then at some point when we ran out of paved Road and the roads turned into like rock and dirt I took over driving the small vehicle and you know we'd passed a number of sections where the edge had been washed out and then it's just it's just Cliff you just fall down and it's just a like a 100 200 foot drop off a cliff you know there are some trees but like the car goes over it's not coming back you're not probably coming back either so we hit a point where the incline was so steep the vehicle couldn't get up the roads mud the wheels just start spinning and then the car just started going backwards uncontrollably I couldn't control it I tried putting it in reverse steering into it steering us away from the edge and no matter what I did we just kept sliding further and further towards the edge and we were terrified absolutely terrified it's probably the most terrified I've ever been in my life it's an adventure Kevin yeah so that experience took a lot for me to recover from and so I've been spending some time thinking about that dealing with that dealing with the PTSD of that um and trying to get out of that after that we turned around they were trying to find another way up to the cabin and the car got stuck again we had to push it up the hill once you hit paved Road um pitched blackout no street lights on a mountainous Road you can't see what's you know not lit up by your headlights and uh the vehicle ended up going into a ditch and uh we we had to get a load like a local drove by on his uh motorcycle who called a tow truck it cost 600 us to get the car towed out um but we we before that local came by it was a half hour we had no idea what to do we were just stuck there stuck there we thought we were gonna have to sleep there spend the night there do something on this road that just like is continually getting more and more rain coming down it and uh the vehicle had had where it was a ditch and it slid back into a pole that was holding up power lines in the rain and the pole was falling over um and so the more you tried to like steer out of it the more the pole kept going over and over and so uh this this local he helped us and he was able to get a tow truck to come and tow us out and then we ended up driving back to San Jose and staying at the hotel so I'm now safely in a hotel you know outside of the San Jose Airport at the Holiday Inn Express we actually thought we were gonna go over the cliff and slide down the side of a mountain for me probably the most terrifying experience I've had in my life and so yeah peruvita baby we all decided that the best thing to do would just be to come to the hotel because um I was terrified and I just was not going to attempt to go up that mountain again in a cloud rainforest in the rainy season um we could have like the roads could have been washed out and we could have been stuck up there so while it may be beautiful it just was not worth the risk so that's one of the ways in which Costa Rica was not a positive experience for me I'm gonna go have breakfast at Denny's in San Jose I used to be afraid of needles uh for you know many decades and but kovid got me over that when I was getting vaccinations and I realized this is not a problem at all but I have a I have a fear of snakes I think that's a pretty healthy Fear To Have and I had gotten over my fear of needles during covid and while I was down in Costa Rica I encountered a snake by the pool one day and I thought well I've been able to get over my fear of needles I should be able to you know deal with my fear of snakes and I'll just like I'll just I won't bother it I'll just walk by it it'll leave me alone and that'll be fine and I did that and apparently probably the worst thing I could have done in that situation um because this was uh this snake is uh what's called a fertilance and for those of you who know snakes no um that is the deadliest uh snake in Costa Rica it's a type of pit viper and um very unpredictable and I should not have walked past it calmly because that uh could have startled it into attacking me and biting me and it's incredibly venomous and um uh deadly potentially deadly I did get to do some zip lining that was a ton of fun [Music] the day after the wedding I did a surf lesson and that is easily the hardest thing I've ever done in my life I had no idea how much energy that was going to take to try and and do and get up on the board I've got a belly and getting my feet up in front of my belly was not easy or even possible and the water there where I was in Manuel Antonio uh down on that Beach uh it's about like uh Waist Deep up to maybe your chest height and when you fall off that board coming into the shore you get bounced off the bottom of the ocean floor and turned over like uh clothes in the dryer or washing machine and um I screwed up my shoulder I felt like I tore my rotator cuff it's been sore for a month I've only just two days ago was able to get to see an osteopath who has fixed it up incredibly well and the range of motion that I have again is phenomenal I swear by osteopathy it has changed my life now on a couple of occasions one of the things I'm most bummed about my trip to Costa Rica is my insta360 X2 camera which is supposed to be waterproof dyed in about an inch of pool water that's it it's gone and so I don't have that to use to record videos anymore I bought a an inexpensive water housing off Amazon and took that with me and was able to get some underwater photos on my R6 in the pool and those look great I'm going to be using that that again in the future so that's going to be a great really inexpensive it was like 40 bucks uh probably cheaper in the US but uh I highly recommend it if you want to do anything underwater it's a it's a great thing just to have handy so you're going to see some changes here on the channel you're going to see a lot more Vlog type content you know a little less of me behind the desk more of me out in the world because being a photographer was for me all about getting out from behind a desk and and that hasn't been the reality for me for 10 years and so I want to be getting out more I want to be out in nature I don't want to be a landscape photographer but uh I just want to be out and about I want to have the freedom to uh come down to the lakefront and enjoy an afternoon and so I'll be filming more content out in the world so let's get back to uh the channel and uh I'll see you in the next one thanks that is scarier yeah that terrified me you're doing great foreign [Music]