I arrived in San José expecting very little. Most of the commentary I´d read or heard directly from others suggested that San José was a city best experienced not at all.
To my surprise, then, I discovered many pockets of this city easy to appreciate, including the vibrant central market (with its delirious lunch-time parade with marching band and mascots) and the common scene of friendly Ticos gathering for a mid-morning break to appreciate a World Cup match.
The rains — my first encounter with Costa Rican "wet season" — were impressive, as well, but thankfully fairly brief, and confined to afternoon hours best spent in repose or over a tasty cup of café con leche.
I caught a performance of one of my all-time favorite pieces of classical music (Grieg´s "Aase´s Death" movement from Peer Gynt) at the National Theater and enjoyed the leafy enclaves and mostly well-translated exhibits at the National Museum of Costa Rica.
So, I remain confused about what´s not to like about San José, even though I would not pretend that my 36 hours were sufficient to get to know it. Having somewhat arrived, at least, in my temporary country, I boarded a bus bound for the coast, off to the beaches of Playa Sámara.
The beaches were impressive! I´m not 100% certain the horses were wild, but they certainly appeared to be, and their morning wanderings along the shore lent a certain "lost somewhere far away from home" quality to the beach. Being awoken by the eerie cries of howler monkeys certainly had the effect as well.
In many respects, Playa Sámara was an easy place to linger: the swimming and body surfing were lovely, and several restaurants did great business by broadcasting the morning and midday World Cup matches, but after a few nights I found myself not quite craving the same surf-and-cerveza vacation that most of the beach combers seemed to be pursuing. I followed my own cravings north and inland, to Liberia, regarded as a more rural "cowboy" town, a side of Costa Rica that my guidebook suggests many fear will vanish.
Liberia proved to be an easy place to arrive, largely because of the immensely helpful staff of the Hotel Liberia, centrally located just a half-block off of the central park. After wandering Liberia´s streets for an afternoon, I decided to break the heat with some air-conditioning... and a Spanish-subtitled screening of "The A-Team," known here by its Spanish title, "Los Magnificentos." Magnificent entertainment (of the summer-block-buster variety), even with my limited familiarity with the original.
The next day took me further north to the nearby Rincón de la Vieja national park, regarded as Costa Rica´s little Yellowstone. Yellowstonita, indeed, with many examples of paint pots, gurgling mud pits and a baby volcano (or volcancito), in addition to the two full-size volcanos whose craters are accessible via a day hike. Not liking the potential for clouds rolling in, I chose lower elevations, and enjoyable walks to glorious swimming holes and waterfalls through lush forests and rolling hills.
The next day, I headed south for more mountains, this time the cloud forests of Monteverde. They´re known as cloud forests because the clouds are often resting lazily on the mountain-side, and even when it´s not raining, plants extract moisture directly from the clouds, making it one of the mossiest places I´ve visited. The cool temperature and high humidity are so constant that the trees do not even develop rings as they grow. They just grow more or less continuously, robbing arborists of the seasonality that produces tell-tale rings.
The bus-ride up the mountain on rugged gravel roads, often in first gear with passengers packed to the rafters, was also memorable because my trip happened to coincide with the last day of school. (The public buses winding up the mountain also double as the region´s school buses.) It was great fun to see the affable driver greet every single child by name as they boarded or exited the bus, and the little gifts many of the children´s families had packed to give the driver (fruit, juice boxes and cash being three examples I could make out). A lovely little slice of Tico mountain life.
Another aspect of Monteverde´s climate (and Costa Rica´s in general) is that it is very hospitable for insects. Lots and lots and lots of insects.
Those who know my predilections best are probably aware that I am not the biggest fan of bugs. Well, I should say that intellectually, I marvel at them. I have a great appreciation for their diversity, the ingenuity of their adaptations, the complexity of the social orders created by some of them, and the sheer physical beauty of many creepy crawlies. I´m just not a huge fan of being surprised by insects. In my room. Or on my body.
Thankfully, Monteverde offered a great opportunity to appreciate bugs in their own environment, and few occasions to experience them in mine. Perfect!
I lost count of the variety that I saw, in the forests around Santa Elena (the region´s principal town and tourist accommodation), but I am sure I stood next to far more than I identified, thanks to incredible camouflage, like this walking stick:
There´s a bug museum in Santa Elena, as well, which I didn´t visit but have on good authority was rich with examples of amazing insects and spiders. A night hike gave me a chance to see a tarantula in its den, guarding its eggs, a blue morpho butterfly the size of a dinner plate, fluttering right next to me, and countless insects that look like leaves or sticks or, strangely, polished, high-sheen-metallic-painted Volkswagens.
The next day, my new hostel friend Amy and I had a chance to walk across a series of suspension bridges, gazing down at the forest below while some of Monteverde´s fauna performed morning rites.
And then came the ziplines!
I confess to being a little skeptical about the ethos of this particular brand of eco-tourism. But my poseur pretensions aside, the skepticism was quickly replaced with exhilaration as the little boy in me finally had a chance to experience what must be the best way to get around a dense forest: with a pulley on a high-tension cable!
I´d ridden a zipline before, with travel buddy Daniel, across a lake in China after a fantastic hike on the Great Wall. This zipline experience was completely different, passing through a lush tree canopy ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred feet off the ground was absolutely thrilling, trees whizzing by left and right. Whereas my last zipline experience was 30 seconds of pure adrenaline, this time riding the cables quickly became peaceful, even serene, as I developed confidence in the systems to control speed and orientation on the cable.
Well, serene until it came time for the "Tarzan swing!" (Think low-altitude bunge jump.) Our last ride, though, was in some ways most spectacular, allowing riders to be hitched to the pulley from the back, traversing the highest and longest stretch in "Superman" position. If that´s not the fulfillment of a childhood dream to fly, I don´t know what will be.
But the fun in Monteverde was far from over!
Ficus trees grow into giants here, and the manner they do so is quite remarkable: they are known as strangler trees because they use another tree as scaffolding to establish themselves, eventually completely cutting off the original tree´s access to light, strangling it. Sometime later, the original tree rots away, leaving a hollow core which, in two unforgettable cases, allowed Amy and I to climb up the inside of the tree toward the canopy!
It is hard to describe how it feels to have a living, organic tunnel so perfectly shaped to permit your passage upward (a feeling that one fellow-climber described as "safer than any ladder" he´d ever climbed). To me, it felt a bit like a vestige of an elf city, or something you´d see on Pandora. But there were no movie sets involved. Truth, as they say, is stranger...
After the thrills in the forest, I also participated in a deeply informative tour of a coffee plantation, lead by one of the plantation´s roasters. (Costa Rican coffee, tending toward the lighter roasts that I prefer, will be sorely missed!)
Finally, the time came to bid adieu to Monteverde, via a scenic mini-bus ride through the mountains and foothills, to my date with a boat that would take me toward a volcano!
The Arenal volcano, one of Central America´s most active, is a stunning, towering cone as one approaches it from the west. Its entire west flank is scorched by the nearly continuous lava flows and ejected material. Even a dozen kilometers away, one can regularly hear the rumble of the volcano expressing itself.
I stayed a night in the town of La Fortuna, a place overrun with tourists and tour operators, whose proximity to the volcano (facing its verdant, eastern side) will probably keep that arrangement in place for the foreseeable future. Shame on me, but I kept imagining the modern Pompeii that might be created if Arenal ever exploded so dramatically, Americans frozen in ash, shielding themselves with their MasterCards and their tiny cocktail umbrellas. For the blight of the town, though, the volcano dominates. I had the good fortune to see two eruptions on the western side at night, a stream of red lava and incandescent boulders flowing like a river that has burst its banks down the side of the mountain.
Lots of unforgettable memories so far in Costa Rica. In a few minutes, I head for the Caribbean coast. More to come!
