Into the Blue

Costa Rica’s Tamarindo Beach has become a second Cancun—a sandy playground for wealthy American and European tourists, with proliferate McCondos, S.S. Minnow fishing charters, and shuttle-bug golf courses. But Dan Buettner isn’t here to follow the tourist bloat. He’s here to explore the not-so picture-postcard part of the subtropical archipelago. Costa Rica isn’t the Siberian plain or the Sahara Desert, but Buettner, one of a dying breed who’s made a name in the adventure trade, has conquered those places already. He’s here to find the fountain of youth.

It isn’t as Geraldo-at-Capone’s-tomb as it sounds. In 2005, Buettner published “The Secrets of Long Life,” a long article in National Geographic, describing his “quest for the modern fountain of youth.” While Buettner claims he isn’t looking for a “magic bullet or a secret potion,” he has carved out a fountain-of-youth beat and is reporting on parts of the world that have high concentrations of people who have extraordinarily high life expectancy. He was inspired, he says, by an academic paper on the unusual number of centenarians on the Italian island of Sardinia. That report—which coined the tag “Blue Zone” that Buettner has since built his brand around—was written by Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain. Pes, a Sardinian physician, and Poulain, a Belgian demographer, are now members of Buettner’s Costa Rican quest team. Their ongoing research is funded in part by a National Geographic grant.

Buettner’s 2005 article identified two additional Blue Zones—in Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California—and attempted to synthesize the similarities and differences in the lifestyles of these “longevity all-stars,” as Buettner called them, and pass along certain components of their long-life styles to National Geographic’s audience. Next year, Buettner will publish a book that will include a fourth area: the small region on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula he’s investigating now—a hilly, eighty-by-thirty-mile swath of land populated by 100,000 natives, a population that he and his team says has a freakishly good chance of living to 100.

Right now, I’m in a van following Buettner as he hangs out the back end of a jeep, jostling with four Costa Rican sabaneros (the Tico word for “cowboy”) while his cameraman steadies himself against the back of the jeep’s cab, filming Buettner while he interviews one of the men. It’s ten in the morning, but it’s already hot, and the jeep is kicking up the red dirt of the unpaved road. This isn’t, I repeat, postcard Costa Rica; it’s more like something out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. There is dry cattle-country grass on either side of the road, and the occasional lonely guanacaste tree provides the only respite from the sun’s glare. Buettner and his cameraman are shooting a video on sabanero culture, which will be broadcast on the team’s website two days hence. The jeep comes to a halt by a wooden corral that in an hour will be full of Brahma bulls, but right now Buettner and the cameraman are unsure of the relevance of their footage. “That was gay,” Buettner cracks dismissively as he jumps off the back of the jeep.

While his chosen profession may seem anachronistic in an age when the world’s deepest, coldest, most dangerous parts have been thoroughly illuminated on the Discovery Channel, Buettner has made an extremely successful career out of it. He won an Emmy for a PBS documentary on his cycle trip across South Africa, which he coproduced; he is mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records for his grueling bicycle treks across Africa, the Americas, and the former Soviet Union (he’s written two books about the bike trips). And twelve years ago, he became an Internet education pioneer when elementary school classes using satellites directed him on his adventures: Each day, school kids across the country voted on what they would like Dan and his retinue to do next in their quest for Mayan secrets, and Buettner and his team would comply. After five “Maya quests,” classrooms followed and directed the team as it retraced Marco Polo’s route to China. Last year, classrooms interacted with Buettner’s first Blue Zone quest in Okinawa, and now the kids are following him in Costa Rica. “I’m big with sixth graders,” he says. “But with Blue Zones, I’m trying to reach out to an even larger audience.” He’s no longer pursuing record-breaking bicycle treks; he now spends most of his time chasing down stories in a van or a jeep, using his laptop to take notes and a camera-wielding sidekick to get the film. He’s been working on this dusty hacienda since before daybreak, yet his khaki shirt and bush pants are still clean. At forty-six, he looks more like an explorer than ever, with a tanned face that crinkles up attractively around his eyes and gray just beginning to touch his temples. He lumbers around with a modified simian swagger, carefully overpronating. When in front of the ubiquitous video camera, he does a creepy news-anchor thing, switching into an extra pleasing demeanor to address his disembodied audience. He avoids the “Hey, kids!” pander and imbues each shot with an earnest, movie star cool. He looks comfortable, engaged, and empathetic no matter who he’s with or what he’s doing. “I’ve bicycled 120,000 miles, and I understand what it’s like to be hungry, to be tired, to sleep on the ground,” he explains. “I have a certain compassion that’s come out of that.”

His cool-guy demeanor doesn’t change when he’s back at the team’s home base. This is Buettner’s largest quest team to date, comprising two video cameramen, one still cameraman, two other on-air talent types, a video editor, a web producer (Dan’s brother Nick), another producer, two demographers, a physician/statistician, a psychologist who used to work at the World Bank, and a local research assistant/fixer who’s familiar with the Costa Rican bush.

For nineteen days, the team is staying at a spartan log-cabin resort in the village of Hojancha, situated high enough on the peninsula to cool down considerably at night. Everyday, the team eats breakfast and dinner together—simple meals usually heavy on beans and rice. They work on the quest’s website nearly around the clock, typically waking at seven and working until two or three the next morning, checking how the kids voted the night before. (Are they interested today in alternative medicine or cowboys?) As the group’s alpha explorer, Buettner leads with the unassuming aloofness of a popular camp counselor. And although, according to his brother, “Dan has delegated on this quest more than on any previous trip,” team members seem insecure at times, unsure of what their leader really wants. They’re constantly asking him to check this script or that rough cut. They seem eager to work hard for him.

Buettner in turn is quick to advise his younger teammates—“Don’t be afraid to dig dry wells” or “Don’t rely on the interview with your taxi driver”—and he has a penchant for concluding conversations with the phrase “at the end of the day.” He insists that everything the team does—whether it’s a 500-word dispatch about alternative medicine, a video about family life, or a “mystery photo” of the papaya and its role in the Nicoyan diet—include, in DanSpeak, one “actionable gem,” meaning a kernel of information the audience at home can take to heart. Buettner believes he can’t gain anybody’s attention with just a “jagged information stream.” You have to tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, he says, and hide the “actionable gem” somewhere in there, so your audience will take it away almost subliminally. “At the end of the day, you want a program or a book that’s actually going to change behaviors,” he says. “You have to evoke emotion. You have to make people feel and not make people think.” During the van ride back from the peninsula’s cowboy capital, Santa Cruz, Buettner surprises me by saying, “I never cared about bicycles. I did [the bike treks] because I knew they would get attention.” In fact, Buettner says, he was a below-average athlete growing up in St. Paul’s North Dale neighborhood. “I sucked at hockey, baseball, swimming . . . I was OK at cross-country,” he says. He wasn’t a travel junkie early on either. His father, a teacher in South St. Paul, would take him and his brothers (Dan is the oldest of four) on a two- to six-week vacation every summer, usually to a place such as Montana or the Boundary Waters. Now he says all those painful, disease-plagued miles across four continents—broadcast on CNN and covered in all the papers—were basically a Guinness-sized publicity stunt.

Buettner is unabashed. He says he grew to love cycling and world travel and being acknowledged by fans as the heir to Will Steger’s education/exploration legacy, but in 1987—when he was a twenty-six-year-old University of St. Thomas graduate who had worked at the Twin Cities Reader for a year and at National Public Radio for a couple more—he got on his bike with his brother Steve and a couple of guides and did that AmericaTrek 15,536-mile bike ride from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the southern tip of Argentina because he believed he had “stories to tell” and had to create them away from home. And, evidently, the farther away the better. “I was just going to go someplace else,” he says. Now, after a two-month itinerary that includes Singapore, Chicago, the Bahamas, Los Angeles, New York City, Costa Rica, Virginia, and Mexico, with stops in Minneapolis between trips, an older, presumably wiser adventurer/storyteller claims that for him a vacation would be staying home for two weeks.

But home is two places. Since 2001 he’s had a well-known relationship with model Cheryl Tiegs, and the couple flies back and forth from Tiegs’s place in Los Angeles to Buettner’s home on Lake of the Isles a couple of times a month. Talking to Tiegs, you get the sense that Buettner is much more comfortable in Hollywood than Ponce de Leon would have been. “He is so popular here in LA,” she says. “The first thing people ask me is ‘Where’s Dan?’ I’m like, ‘What about me?’ ” The California lifestyle suits Buettner, but, according to Tiegs, he hasn’t relocated because he’s very close to his three children, two of whom still live with him, and because “he’s a Minnesotan.” In Minneapolis, the couple enjoy quiet dinners at Cafe Brenda, Buettner’s favorite restaurant; in LA, they hang out with an environmentally conscious circle that includes members of the Global Green group and actor/activist Ed Begley Jr. Recently, Steger has been staying at Tiegs’s home—in fact, Tiegs was instrumental in introducing Steger to a Hollywood producer who’s putting together a documentary on the latter’s global-warming crusade. “They’re just a wonderful couple,” Steger says of his friends. Even in LA, the couple stays active: Sixty-year-old Tiegs is an avid hiker, and Buettner has befriended a group of entertainment lawyers who take long weekend bike rides to Malibu. “Dan is very gregarious,” Tiegs says. “He always finds someone who is interesting.”Buettner’s outgoing personality is also, of course, helpful with the media. Before his Costa Rica trip, Buettner took his familiar swing through the New York media, visiting Anderson Cooper, Good Morning America, and Fox and Friends. In Costa Rica, the BBC tracked him down for comment when 114-year-old Emma Tillman, the world’s oldest woman, died in Connecticut. Steger, whom Buettner met in 1986, just before the cycle trek from Alaska to Argentina, has advised Buettner on how to present his work. “Will told me, when they ask you ‘What did you discover?’—don’t equivocate and qualify your discovery. Say ‘We made the most exciting discovery ever!’ ”

Buettner has also taken Steger’s advice for garnering sponsors for his quests. Before leaving for Costa Rica, he drew me a diagram that looked like an octopus, with “The Quest” circled in the middle and tentacles stretching out to items such as public speaking (he can earn more than $10,000 a gig), his books, and the corporate sponsors that underwrite his school curriculum and quests. “The best thing to do is think ‘What do I have that’s valuable to somebody else?’ If you can articulate that, then all of a sudden you start to see pretty clearly the things that show your value and what you have to add.”

With the Blue Zones, Buettner realized early on that in addition to his far-flung audience of grade schoolers, there are 78.2 million baby boomers keenly interested in longevity. His largest project sponsor is Allianz Life, the massive finance and insurance company headquartered in St. Louis Park. Prior to his trip to Costa Rica, Buettner gave a presentation on longevity to several hundred employees in Allianz’s multimillion-dollar theater. Walking out to the strains of U2, Buettner, himself looking slightly Bono-ish in a wraparound headset and a velvet jacket over an open-collar shirt, asked the crowd, “What if I told you there was a way to add eight good years to the end of your life?”

Here in Costa Rica, Buettner stays on message. He has distilled a few easy-to-remember advisories from the Blue Zones so far, including don’t smoke; put family first; be active every day; stay socially engaged; eat a plant-based diet of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts . . . .Costa Rica has its own site-specific quirks, of course (for instance, there’s a more liberal attitude toward marriage and sex than in the rest of Latin America, including younger girlfriends—that may have something to do with Nicoya’s exceptional longevity rates), and Buettner acknowledges that Blue Zone longevity can’t just be chalked up to common sense. For that matter, some of his talking points make audiences squirm. At Allianz, where the bread is buttered with life insurance, there was visible shifting in the seats when Buettner suggested that nursing homes and assisted-living facilities are not conducive to longevity. But, as team demographer Poulain notes, one of the reasons it took so long to publish his initial Blue Zone study was because of academic resistance to the notion that development and the modern world, with its TiVo, twenty-four-hour fast-food joints, and constant pressure to make a buck, might work against longevity.

Development isn’t all bad: The Nicoya Peninsula was selected as a Blue Zone in part because of the accurate birth records and IDs the government has kept on Costa Ricans since 1888—information that Louis Rosero– Bixby, a demographer at the National University in San Jose, worked from to publish a paper that initially captured the attention of Buettner’s team. The team’s stories rest on empirical demographic research, and it’s been easier to track down and verify the peninsula’s 129 centenarians than a similar task might be in, say, Pakistan. When I was there, Poulain was only halfway through the 129 surveys that he was conducting, but he was already reaching a conclusion. “These people don’t talk about being tired, they have no reason to be stressed,” he says. “They’re religious and they work hard, but they’re not pushed by the pressure to gain a large amount of money. And because of the dry weather, there is less chance for disease, and the water is harder with more calcium. The soil is productive, and everything is organic. These people have everything they need.” However, the barbarians are at the gates. Nicoya recently opened its first Burger King (some locals already derisively refer to it as “Belly King”). Poulain sounds a little like a continental version of Supersize Me’s Morgan Spurlock when he asserts, “Burger King will be the end of these people.” Buettner himself, though, isn’t as bothered by the outside intrusions as might be expected. In the rural community of Juan Diaz, he is filming a video on what life was like fifty years ago. Up here in the hills, unreachable by truck, without electricity or plumbing, families of small subsistence farmers survive in simple shacks. Each family has a cow or two, a horse or a mule, a few banana trees, maybe a bean field, and a dirt yard full of dogs and chickens. Water is poured out of earthenware, and meals are cooked on an open wood-fired flame. The scenes are right out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with subsistence farmers in 2007 Central America instead of Depression-era sharecroppers in the Deep South.

Sitting in one family’s front room, drinking coffee with sugar in a tall glass, Buettner types on his laptop as he interviews the residents in his competent Spanish. “What do you do for entertainment?” he asks one of the women. She takes a moment to reply: “Oh, I find a sunny spot and maybe eat an orange.”

On the way down the hill, I wondered if Buettner believed that these people should be left alone by the developers and entrepreneurs—and, if so, if he’d be using his bully pulpit to say so. Pausing at an outdoor tavern on the way to Hojancha, as the sun set behind the hill, I asked him why he hasn’t been more vocal in advocating healthy lifestyles, why he hasn’t generally adopted a more activist stance like Steger’s.

“Because people don’t want to hear it,” he replies. “Look, I like Will. Will and I are cut from the same cloth. We both understand what a privilege it is to be able to do this. But I don’t think it’s all that effective to get on a pulpit and shake my finger at an audience and scold them for not spending enough time with their kids. I would rather do it in a more subtle way. To give them some information that helps them live richer and fuller lives.”

But what about these people here on the Nicoya? I persist. Don’t you worry about what they’re going to lose? “Look, it’s sad,” he says. “But it’s too late. It’s like leukemia and it’s already in the lymph nodes. As soon as the first gringo buys that spot on the top of that hill that whole area is gone. I see myself as a forensic investigator. I’m sifting through the wreckage of this civilization, trying to figure out a mystery, trying to give my audience something positive they can take away from it. So why not just enjoy it, and have a beer in front of this beautiful sunset, while we still can?” Give him this: Buettner understands his audience. He knows that they love him, and they want to experience these exotic locales through him and his team. His heroes are first-person, in-somebody-else’s-shoes writer George Plimpton, who Buettner met while working at NPR, and “experiential” journalists and storytellers such as the late travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Buettner’s “forensic investigations” are legitimized and assisted by the scientific community. He works, for instance, with the University of Minnesota and the National Institute of Aging, in addition to the demographers on the team, and he constantly refers to epidemiology studies by academics around the world. With the National Geographic byline that he aspired to and finally acquired in 2005, he believes he can now focus on big-picture concerns and not worry quite so much about squeezing out fresh content every day.

Tonight, he’s been at a birthday party. A woman turned 100, and the entire village of Belen came to the local dance hall to toast their matriarch with plastic cups of Coca-Cola. As a marimba band played in the background, a female reporter from Costa Rica’s major daily, La Nacion, interviewed Buettner. While Buettner answered her questions, the team’s photographer, Gianluca Colla, angled to get a shot of the birthday girl taking a swing at a piñata. Now, in the car back to Hojancha, Buettner turns to Colla to strategize about placing another photo in National Geographic. Buettner has a story on “happiness” scheduled to come out next year (a story that he researched in Asia, Europe, and Latin America a month before this quest), but he believes a photo from Costa Rica will help keep him in the public consciousness in the interim. He asks Colla what they need to execute a “home-run shot.”

Who should they photograph? One-hundred-and-four-year-old Don Felipe near the coast is quickly dismissed as being too surly; 100-year-old Abveda Panchita can use a machete and chop wood with an axe. “Do you think Jorge could find an amazingly vital sabanero who could ride a horse and lift a lasso over his head?” Buettner asks. “He wouldn’t even have to be 100. He could be in his eighties. Late seventies even.”

“Perhaps,” Colla says. “But it’s late in the week, and that would require time and a detailed search.” (Meaning Colla and the group’s fixer, Jorge, would have to go door to door asking sabaneros if they knew of a senior colleague who could ride a horse and whip a lasso over his head.)

“Well, maybe you should e-mail your photo editor and give her three options in order to save time,” Buettner says. “And the more I think about it, I see a small-aperture, low-depth-of-field shot of Panchita’s face. Either right before she brings the axe down or immediately after she splinters the wood.” 

“That might be good,” Colla agrees. “But when we were there a couple of days ago, she didn’t have any more firewood.”

“Well, we can bring her more firewood, can’t we? And see if she’ll use her axe again?”

Colla seems uneasy at the prospect. “If National Geographic ever found out, you and I would no longer be able to walk through their door.”

“Why?” Buettner says. “I’m not changing the facts. We know she cuts her own wood.”

It’s at moments like these when you’re unsure if Buettner is calculating and cynical or just willfully naive; whether he’s an existential hero who has found a way to break the chains to the cubicle world and sell the stories he wants to sell or another pragmatic, manipulative mercenary who peddles a Disney-fied self-help version of the natural world for personal gain.

“Look, Gianluca, I’ll tell you a story,” he says at last. “When I was doing Maya quest, we were down in Guatemala, waiting by these thousand-year-old ruins for ABC’s Primetime Live crew to show up. They came down with talent and segment producers and cameramen. One of the segment producers comes up to me and asks, ‘Um, would there ever be a situation where you guys, uh, might come across heavy vegetation on a trail and you might have to use a machete to hack your way through it?’

“I told him, ‘Yeah, that situation might happen.’ ”Buettner is unsure where next year’s Blue Zone quest will go. The book will be out, but he and the team will keep going in order to fulfill their curriculum commitments to the schools and to the adults out there who take “The Blue Zones Challenge.” There are some potential destinations that have been written about by the scientific community. He mentions Crete, though he thinks the lifestyle there might be too similar to Sardinia’s—Mediterranean climate, good cheese, shepherds who take long walks, et cetera. There’s an area near the Caucasus Mountains in what used to be Soviet Georgia that might be worth investigating. There’s aforementioned Pakistan, though verifying birth records would be a bitch. And, intriguingly, there’s a narrow band of anomalous longevity stretching from Ontario into good old Minnesota.

But Buettner dismisses this last one almost out of hand. I think about something he said on the way back from the cedar shacks up on Juan Diaz, something about how he’s hard to entertain. “Yeah, much harder than that woman with the orange,” he says. “I mean, I’ve had dinner at Buckingham Palace, I’ve crossed the Sahara . . . .”

What would an adventurer do in Minnesota—and who would follow him there?                         

Mpls.St.Paul Magazine associate editor Steve Marsh visited Peru to write about Smile Network International for the July 2006 issue.