Costa Rica 1999

January 1999

4:00 a.m. New Year’s Eve the car service shows up to take us to LaGuardia. Unfortunately, our flight isn’t until the next day, and of course I’m both too excited and too stressed by everything I have to do to get back to sleep, so I go to work groggy and confused. Turns out maybe this is a good thing, because I am able to get to sleep early enough before

4:00 a.m. New Year’s day, the car comes back. It’s a good thing we leave so early, because we have to wait in line at the airport for over an hour and a half while entire families check their entire households to move back to other countries. The clerks say there is no hold-up; this is a normal morning. Later, we discover the third-world San Jose airport seems to be more efficient, but anyway…

Flights there are all uneventful, which is good considering my record. During our layover in Houston, it’s so muggy outside that the condensation from the a/c vents starts pouring into the cabin. Many of the passengers think it’s some kind of smoke and start to panic. Despite my bad travel luck, I have no fear of crashing, so it’s all pretty amusing.

Anyway, we meet Jonathan and Ben in the San José airport. We didn’t fly separately because Martha wants all her kids on separate flights in case they crash (although she does). It just worked out that way. We spent our first two days in San José, which is a fairly awful city. We are met by a travel agent we didn’t wind up booking through, who keeps trying to impress us by dropping hints about his wild New Year’s Eve (“I slept in two beds last night”) and wants to take us out in the San José nightlife. We decline.

We take a day trip to a nearby rainforest, where we take an low-impact aerial tram through the canopy.

Our guide shows us lots of different plants. We pull pieces off some trees and nibble them. It’s beautiful and peaceful. We see a hog-nosed pit viper and a basilisk.

That day we also visit a private butterfly farm, where we see poison red frogs and eight-inch long stick bugs.

They also have a “museum” of thousands of dead bugs they caught in the countryside around there, including huge beetles and tarantulas. My Spanish is beginning to come back, and I have fun chatting with the museum owner about his forays trying to catch giant bugs.

The third day we drive to Fortuna, under the Arenal volcano. Our hotel has three pet toucans, which we pet, and we reach under the feathers to feel their tiny bodies.

One poses on me for a photo. I’m all excited at my close communion with nature

until it poops on my arm.

As we walk around the hotel, we see parrots, all kinds of tanagers, social flycatchers, and more. We also have a little pool.

We hike to a huge waterfall.

On the way back we buy a pineapple by the side of the road, and it’s good and sweet. While we’re eating it, we ask about some of the other things they’re selling, and take a chance on something else with no idea what it is. It turns out to be a crystallized grapefruit rind filled with dulce de leche. Blech. Two great tastes that don’t go great together.

The next day is one of the best of the trip. We take a boat into Caño Negro wildlife refuge. We see many families of howler monkeys, white-faced (Capuchin) monkeys, baby and adult caimans, basilisks, iguanas, bats, and every waterfowl you can name (which keep making me think of the 20 minutes of waterfowl puns Bob Nickerson told at IJA in Rapid City). We also see a rare owl, a purple gullinule, and two kinds of wild toucans. Everyone says you aren’t supposed to be able to spot sloths without a guide, but the eagle-eyed Fineman brothers are amazing. Jon spots a three-toed sloth, and before the rest of us have even found it, Ben notices she’s carrying her baby on her belly. We see other three-toed sloths too and a rare two-toed one. We don’t see spider monkeys in the park, but we see someone’s pet one on the ride home along with dozens of giant iguanas sunning themselves.

The park is up by the Nicaraguan border, and we get stopped by “La Migra” (immigration) threatening to check all our passports. Thousands of “Nicas” sneak into Costa Rica every year especially around this time of year to pick coffee. Jon and I aren’t carrying our passports, although I can’t see why Ben’s passport wouldn’t prove Jon was an American. Anyway, our guide sweet-talks the inspectors and they leave us alone. Then our guide admits to us that he’s actually Nicaraguan, although he’s a legal immigrant.

Sidebar: why sneak into Costa Rica? Well, it is the only country in the world with no military. It’s literacy rate is higher and it’s unemployment rate is lower than the U.S.’s are, and it’s gorgeous. Nicaragua’s unemployment rate is about 55%. (We also unfortunately meet a ton of gringos who have moved there to avoid paying taxes, or in some cases, child support—do us proud, expats.)

Anyway, that night we go to the natural hot springs under the volcano. We sit on rock ledges in natural waterfall/jacuzzis, and sip fresh blackberry daiquiris and “coco locos” at the swim-up bar. Let me just say that again, because it’s so great: swim-up bar. Who knew credit cards were waterproof? There are gardens lining the different natural springs, and we find a few relatively private ones just for the four of us, and we’re in paradise.

The volcano is active and supposedly explodes several times every day, but we never see the whole volcano because it creates its own climate and is shrouded in clouds.

The next day we drive to Santa Elena. The drives are beautiful. Papaya, coconuts, bananas, and oranges hang off the trees. We drive through coffee, yucca, and palm plantations. A coatimundi runs up to the cars begging for food like raccoon do sometimes here.

That night we go to the Monteverde music festival and see a cellist.

Monteverde and Santa Elena are neighboring towns and neighboring cloud forests. Monteverde has a large population of American Quakers who left in protest during WWII. It also has a lot of tourists who want to see the cloud forest. To keep the numbers down, they don’t fix the roads. Even in our rented 4×4, we’re having problems with potholes bigger than we are.

Just right at our hotel we see a motmot, the bird I most wanted to see on the trip because of the funny “tennis racquet” tail, and an emerald toucanette.

The next day we hike into Monteverde cloud forest on our own.We see a female Quetzal and more howler monkeys. The cloud forest is so satisfyingly exactly what you expect. Every plant has more plants (epiphytes) growing all over it, and they have more plants growing on them. Everything is covered in moss, and vines climb up every tree and stretch across the canopy. Air plant roots hang from the tops of the trees down and eventually connect with the ground.

Back at the park entrance, they have set up lots of hummingbird feeders, and we see tiny bright purple, yellow, and green birds everywhere. We also visit a cheese factory. Mmmmm. Cheese.

That evening, we take a guided night hike. We see lots of little frogs and lizards and all kinds of bugs. The mammals are also more active at night, but we can only see their red eyes glowing in the flashlights. Jon spots what the guide thinks is a paca (a large rodent), and we also see a pair of either alingas or kinkajoos. The guide pokes a stick in a hole, and a giant tarantula emerges. They move a little faster than I would have liked to think.

Our radio gets stolen from the rental car while we’re on the hike. D’oh!

The next day we visit a pretty lame “serpentarium.” Jon, Ben, and I take a very wet hike in the rain through Santa Elena cloud forest while Jonathan hangs out, does laundry, and explores the town. I had fun, but he might have had the right idea.

The next day we drive back to Escazú, a suburb of San Jose, where we stay at this beautiful bed and breakfast run by, as it turns out, this total asshole American. He asks Jon what he does and Jon says he’s in law school, so the guy starts going on about how lawyers are the lowest of the low. Jon says he’s heard some stories about bed and breakfast owners. Anyway, we ask him why he moved to Costa Rica, and he says to avoid taxes and because he emerged from an ugly divorce and the California family courts sentenced him worse than a murderer. Since I actually believe in both income taxes and child support, I am not sympathetic. He asks me what I do, and I tell him I extradite American tax evaders.

Anyway, up the road from his place is a hotel run by someone obsessed with Gone With the Wind. It’s this amazing mansion and grounds all done up like Tara. We pay $10 bucks each to spend the next few hours in their spa with whirlpool, steam and sauna, exercise equipment, etc. We were going to all get facials and massages (all of which had names from GWTW, such as “Miss Melanie’s relaxing massage”), but there weren’t enough employees, so we mostly lounged around in plush bathrobes. Ben did get a facial, and I tried to reduce in one of those machines you see in I Love Lucy or something.

The next day we drove eight hours south to the Osa peninsula near the Panamanian border. We have to cross a “Precaución, cocodrillos Xing” sign on the driveway to the hotel, but we never see crocodiles. The hotel is a set of little bungalows.

Ours tends to have lizards and spiders in it, but I don’t mind because I am so mosquito-bitten that I’m hoping they’ll help. Ben and Jonathan’s bungalow has a big frog on the door. We can walk from the bungalows to an ocean cove of warm water. The ground is sandy and perfect, no rocks, dead fish, or other beach ickies, just hermit and fiddler crabs, waterfowl, and mangroves. From the beach or the water we can see tons of wild scarlet macaws, amazing huge red parrot-type things. At night if you run your hands through the water, the bubbles glow with some weird bio-luminescence. Also at night, the hugest bats I’ve ever seen circle the beach.

Did I mention we see turkey and black vultures flying everywhere we go? They look much better in the air from a distance. We also see them frequently up close, and they are as creepy as you would expect.

We try to go to Corcovado national park, which was Jon’s favorite place the year before, but the hurricane and La Niña have completely wiped out the roads, and even our 4×4 can’t get through. We spend the day in the water instead and see pelicans and frigate birds. We also go to some party a grocery store was having to thank its customers. We didn’t try to break the piñata, but we did try to get some candy. In Osa we ate a lot of good, fresh seafood, mostly sea bass, red snapper, black clams, octopus, and shrimp.

The next day we go to Matapalo Bay. We see surfers, howlers, pelicans, falcons, caracaras, and roadside hawks. We never find any kind of real park, and the roads are bad, so we ditch the car and walk, but the beach is beautiful and we picnic in a coconut grove.

The drive from there to Quepos/Manuel Antonio is apparently beautiful, but the sunburn/moving vehicle combination is too much for me, and I sleep through most of it.

Did I mention we were eating rice and beans in various combinations three (huge) meals per day. Also “batidas,” which are like milkshakes with no ice cream, only milk or water and pineapple, papaya, blackberry, or other fruits with every meal. The tap water is fine in Costa Rica by the way.

At our hotel in Quepos we see two giant ctenosaurs having sex. We play in the little pool and ate our fanciest meal of the trip. Unfortunately, it was the one time Jon was a little sick, but he got some nice sushi. I ate an Atlantic lobster (no claws), and the waiter said I had an “accento como nada.” I was amazed how bad the Spanish was of many of the Americans living there and almost all of the tourists. You could totally get by without speaking any at all even out in the boondocks, and so everyone was really nice to me for making the attempt.

The next day we hiked in Manuel Antonio rain forest. No guide. Jon spotted tons of sloths, and we had to keep pointing them out to passersby who saw us gazing up. We also saw white-faced monkeys, and a family of rare squirrel monkeys followed us for quite a ways. One pooped on Ben, which they like to do. We played in the ocean at the park and saw lots of crabs, ctenasaurs, and lizards. I think I forgot to mention huge, beautiful flowers and strange fruit everywhere we went.

It started to rain, so we hung out in a coffee shop and played cards. That was fun, but I don’t have any pictures. Instead, here are some pictures I didn’t know where else to put.

We spent the last day on the beach in Manuel Antonio. Ben and Jonathan found the nude gay beach we didn’t believe existed, but it involved climbing over rocks at high tide, so Jon and I just lolled on the other beach. We body surfed until we got too tired and then lay out and then went back in over and over. Despite our SPF 30, we both burnt, especially me. Afterwards my scalp peeled attractively.

Anyway, we drove back to San Jose and ate a coconut from a roadside stand on the way. We were going to go out karaoke’ing in San Jose, but we just collapsed instead. Ben and Jonathan made it out but didn’t karaoke. The next day, Jon and my flight was delayed five hours, and we were stranded in the airport with nothing to read or do. Their magazines selection included favorite titles such as Classic Armaments, Renaissance!, and The World of Knives. Maybe it’s good to have some minor bad luck on the way home so you aren’t so sad to come back.

Here are more pictures of Costa Rica. Sorry I just can’t find time to integrate them. Also, I don’t know how to remove dupes from the gallery. If you do and are willing to teach me, I’d appreciate it. Thanks!