Jurassic Park

Most of the ocean cargo has shifted from Puntarenas to the nearby port town of Caldera, but there is still plenty of life in the town, and there are still plenty of boats. The fish market, on the northern shore of Puntarenas’ thin spit of land, full of fisherman and their haggling buyers, seemed as good a place as any to start my search.

My Spanish is decent, so I didn’t have any problem striking up conversations with some of the captains sitting around the dock, though I had some trouble being understood. I found I had to repeat myself several times. “Yes, I want to hire a boat. Yes, the crew too. Yes, that is there I want to go. Yes, I’m sure.” After half a dozen fruitless conversations, I came across José, captain of the trawler El Inventado. There were a few false starts, and a protracted hour of negotiation, but aided by a round of cervezas bien frías, we struck a deal. They’d take me where I wanted to go, a small island far out in the pacific. In truth, like the rest of the sailors, they thought I was loco – they were probably just the only ones who had nothing better to do.

“But amigo”, José said. “This island you are looking for. It’s a fiction, nothing more. It does not exist.”

“Don’t worry, José”, I told him. “That’s what they want you to think. But it’s there all right. I read about it in a book. You know what that means? That means it’s true. Everything you ever read in a book is true. Don’t ever forget that.”

The crossing was arduous. The seas were as calm as could be expected, but with  El Inventado only averaging eight knots, it would be thirty seven hours after we left the mainland before we sighted land again. To pass the time we mostly talked  about football. We dissected the forthcoming world cup in minute detail, and of the five men aboard, all but one plumped for Spain. The other went for Mexico, though he was half mad, and no one paid him much attention.

Finally, we spotted a spec of green on the horizon. Land.

I watched in awe as it grew larger, larger, larger. We anchored barely a hundred yards from the shore, the lush vegetation shimmering in the sunlight above us and crystal clear waterfalls plummeting down into the ocean below.

“Finally,” I said quietly. “I have made it to Isla Nublar.”

“Actually, no”, José replied. “Isla Del Coco.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I guess it could be Isla Sorna”.

“No, Isla Del Coco. It’s part of Costa Rica. It’s a national park and a world famous scuba diving destination. We think it was an inspiration for Micheael Crichton, but that’s all. It’s not like I didn’t tell you back in Puntarenas, amigo.”

“InGen are smarter than I gave them credit for,” I conceded. “They’ve rewritten history. They must have paid off the Costa Rican government. They’ve even changed Wikipedia. Goddamm it, they’re good.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You leave me here. Come back for me in six months. I’ll photograph the animals. I’ll film them. No one will be able to deny it them. Once a week, I’ll light a signal fire on the eastern tip of the island. When you come back, wait in this bay for a week. If you don’t see the fire, you’ll know I’ve probably been eaten.”

“Much as I’d love to humour you, no can do”, José said. “It’s a national park. Only park rangers are allowed ashore, and you’re not a park ranger.”

“Of course”, I said. “How convenient. How very convenient.”

Rain

This is the story of a tropical storm. For most people, that isn’t maybe as dramatic or exciting as it sounds.

I woke at 5am to the sound of heavy rain clattering the thin, plastic roof. As I set out from the hotel it was raining hard, fast streams gushing along the storm gutters. When I climbed aboard the 6am bus from Monteverde to the coastal town of Puntarenas, it had eased, but it was certainly raining. As the bus descended down from the cloud forests down towards the coast, it was drizzling, and drizzling still as it pulled into Puntarenas.

I wandered round the town, through the streets, through the rain, through the fish market, past the football stadium. At the ferry terminal it was raining. As the ferry left port, it was raining. For the hour and a bit across the Gulf of Nicoya, it was raining. Grey sea, grey skies.

I left the ferry and joined the waiting bus to the hippie-beach-surfing town of Montezuma, and it had almost, so very nearly, stopped – but it was raining. The bus twisted and turned through the green, wet landscape of the Southern Nicoya Peninsula, and it was raining. When we arrived in Montezuma, two hours later, the heavens were wide open again.

I found a hotel, and sat down to catch the last twenty minutes of the England Mexico friendly. Outside, the rain was running off the roofs, running from the trees, running down the hills. The rain picked up as I set out to find some food, and it was cats and dogs when I returned to the hotel. It was raining as I sat on the terrace, and raining as I gave up on the day and went to bed at 9pm.

The next morning, when I learnt that the wind had whipped up the seas and my snorkeling trip was canceled, it was raining. As I wandered down the rugged coast road, watching dirty brown streams gushing down from the hills, dirty brown rivers churning and threatening to sweep the bridges away, it was raining. As the land crabs warily retreated into their holes before me, it was raining. Through lunchtime, teatime, through a fruitless visit to the broken internet cafe, through a temporary insect invasion, though a visit to the supermarket, though six hours reading, waiting and watching the rain, it was raining.

Definitions of “raining” are changed. “Raining hard” becomes “raining”. “Raining” becomes “not really raining”. “Drizzling” becomes “not raining”.

I’m sure Montezuma is lovely in the summertime but even for an Englishman, two full days of rain is hard to swallow.

Tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun. Since my boat to Jacó was washed out by rough seas, that means the road back to Paquera, the boat back to Puntarenas, then the road south.

Jeep-boat-jeep

Monteverde, like Volcano Arenal, is one of Costa Rica’s top tourist attractions. Though only 15km away as the crow flies, it takes a disappointing six hours to reach by road. Well, there’s a big lake in the way, after all. Strictly speaking, I guess Lake Arenal is actually a reservoir - a dam was added in 1979 to expand the existing lake to three times its original size.

We tourists are a often money-rich, time-poor bunch, so it’s no surprise to see enterprising tour operators solving the problem of the six hour journey. The so-called jeep-boat-jeep is a quicker way to make the trip: a jeep (actually a minibus) to the lake, a boat across it, and a 4x4 from the other side of the lake to Monteverde.

The bumpy road from the lake up to Monteverde was easily navigated in a 4x4, though at one point, as the road passed through a little village, we had to slow for speedbumps - even though we couldn’t get above walking pace anyway. It was a nice touch. Overall the JBJ turns a six hour bus ride into a pleasant, scenic two hour journey.

When tourists speak of Monteverde, they’re usually talking about the Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde, a private cloudforest reserve. The reserve gives people an opportunity to walk though unspoilt primary and secondary cloudforest. It’s a beautiful, if busy, place, and a surprisingly good place to spot wildlife. Instinctively, you might think that a forest full of guided tour-groups would make it difficult to spot wildlife - actually that isn’t wholly true. While the noise of all the visitors undoubtedly scares many animals and birds away, the tour guides all help each other, shouting and whistling to each other when they spot something. Despite all the visitors, we were able to get good sitings of Quetzal (possibly #1 on many peoples lists of birds they want to spot in Costa Rica), some monkeys, a viper (possibly this one), the Three Wattled Bell Bird, with its distinctive, metallic call, a group of monkeys, a forest hawk and a trogon.

A short distance away, the reserve at Santa Elena offers a contrasting cloudforest experience. To the untrained eye (that’s me), the forests look similar. Actually there are some crucial differences, as they sit on opposite sides of the continental divide and they have quite different histories. Nevertheless, the real differences in the experience of visiting stem from the number of visitors. While at Monteverde tour groups flood in and the paths are pretty busy, at Santa Elena I walked through the forest for four hours and saw three people. At Santa Elena you feel like you’re walking through the rainforest – the paths are muddy and rutted, the forest dense and disorientating. At Monteverde, it’s more like a walk in the park – the paths are wide and well-maintained, the forest more airy and open. I’m over exaggerating the differences, of course, but if I could only go back to one, it would be Santa Elena. It’s a shame that more people don’t visit it, and at the same time, that’s what creates its charm.

Here are the pictures from Santa Elena. Here’s Monteverde.

Heat And Paying For Waterfalls

The locals in Costa Rica often talk about their tiempo loco, or crazy weather. It could be a baking thirty five degrees, it could be torrential rain, it could be both on the same day. Their are microclimates everywhere, and different parts of the country have their own weather and their own rules, but, to someone accustomed to the changeable British weather, it all seems quite predictable.

Meteorologists will shout at me. It’s an oversimplification. Nevertheless, in May it tends to be sunny in the morning, rainy in the afternoon. It’s gorgeous by six in the morning, with the sun already high in the sky and a temperature already past 25 and reaching for 30. By midday it is starting to get a bit too hot, then the rains come for a spell in the afternoon, cooling everything down. The day ends cloudy but humid. The nights are warm to start with, but cool off. You may need to reach for a blanket about 3am, but it starts to warm up once the sun reappears, about 5am. Of course, all rules can be broken. It could be muggy in the morning instead of sunny. Sometimes it could just rain, rain, and rain. More on that later.

There’s a waterfall you can walk to from Fortuna. It’s about 5km from the town, and while most people will drive, I thought it would make a nice early morning hike, using one of gorgeous mornings I just described. Yes, it’s the tropics, but the sun can’t be that strong at 6am, can it?

The first twenty minutes is lovely. The sun hat got his hat on, but it’s still cool. It hasn’t yet heated the ground and it hasn’t heated me. It’s a stroll. After 1km, I turn off the Sam Ramon road, and towards the falls. The road starts to climb. Gently at first, then steeper. Hills for tiptoes and calf muscles. It’s only just after 6am, but the sun is high in the sky now and it’s heating up. There’s precious little shade and I can feel the sun trying to burn through the sunblock on my neck. I’m sweating pretty hard, but it’s humid, so the sweat just sits on your skin. My shirt is soaked, but it isn’t raining. I’ve nearly drunk my whole water supply, a little over a litre. I have to leave the road to seek shelter, so I’m in the grass where the insects are. Insect repellent on top of sweat on top on sun cream. I don’t want to walk too slow, but if I walked any slower I’d be stopped. I arrive, hot, tired and thirsty, at 7.30am. Conclusion: mornings in the tropics are hotter than they are at home.

The waterfall itself is beautiful, a picture perfect single cascade in the middle of the forest. You might think it would be free to visit a natural phenomenon like this, but it isn’t. Like so much of Costa Rica’s ecotourism attractions, it’s privately owned, and you have to pay $10 to get in. Tourists, of course, are used to paying for attractions, even natural ones. I have no problem with paying an entrance fee to a national park, so that the money can be used to protect it. Here, however, $10 buys you a ten minute walk to see a pretty waterfall. You could use the same $10 to buy entrance to the Corcovado national park, which would give you many miles of paths through 263 square miles of tropical rainforest. The $10 is surely more than is needed to support the maintenance of the paths around the waterfall, so we can only conclude that the idea is to turn a profit. Though property ownership is a cornerstone of capitalism, it’s strange to see it applied in this way. While tourists won’t think twice about stumping up ten bucks, the concept of using the landscape and wildlife to turn a profit is something that frustrates some Costa Ricans, who are uneasy at having to pay to enjoy the beauty of their own country. A guide and conservationist I met later explained how he hiked though the forest, around the entrance to the waterfall, to avoid having to pay for what he felt was his by right. For good or bad, however, there seems little doubt that the commercialization of nature underpins the tourism boom in Costa Rica.

Zona Norte

After more than a week in the largely-derided-by-tourists-and-guide-books-but-actually-not-all-that-bad capital city of San José, I’d exhausted all the day trip options. I struck out for the rest of the country.

Heading north to La Fortuna I passed though the town of Naranjo. It won’t feature in many guide books, but it’s worth mentioning because it looks like the town planners had football on the brain. The football pitch is at the centre of town, and the town slopes up in every direction from there. Pretty much everyone in town can see the pitch and watch the game without leaving their house. Life’s a dream.

Most tourists, including me, head to Fortuna because of the volcana that looms over the town. The volcano is still active, and at night you can often see lava flowing down the side of the volcano. I couldn’t, as it was too cloudy, but a fair percentage of visitors do get to see the lava and leave satisfied. That said, there is a bit of trickery involved in many of the photographs you see of a mountain covered in lava, which tend to be created with long exposures (I’m guessing 30 seconds plus). In practice, you’re more likely just to see a brief flash of red.

You can’t actually go on the volcano or climb it – it’s far too dangerous – but you can hike a few smaller hills nearby. One such hill sits on top of the site of the village of Tabacón. Until 1968 the volcano was not thought to be active, until the top blew off and buried Tabacón, killing 78 people.

Nature has worked fast to reclaim the area – in the 42 years since the eruption, plants, trees and animals are well on the their way to covering it’s surface. Still, in parts, you can still see volcanic boulders sticking though, reminding you how the hill was created.

From Fortuna, you can day-trip to the wetlands of the Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge, near the border with Nicaragua. While Costa Rica is famous for it’s unspoilt forest (I say unspoilt – lots of Costa Rica’s famous forests are actually secondary, rather than primary forest), the Zona Norte is one of the main agricultural heartlands, home to a diverse and exotic variety of crops, plenty of which are visible from the road. The most obvious are the huge fields of small, spiky pineapple plants – I don’t know why, but I always pineapples would grow on a tree, like mangoes – and you can also see oranges, sugar cane, yuca, papaya, rice and bananas. I hear pineapples have actually overtaken coffee as Costa Rica’s #2 export. Bananas are still #1.

Caño Negro is a good place to spot wildlife. I’m not sure there is any more life there, per se, but it is certainly easier to spot. Wildlife spotters often find themselves frustrated in forests. It’s not that the wildlife isn’t there, you just can’t see it. Caño Negro is a wetland, so you explore the still waters on a boat and there is plenty to spot on the riverbanks. I jotted down Anhingas, Roseate Spoonbills, four kinds of Kingfisher, Boat Billed Herons, Black Belling Whistling Ducks, Hawks, Caimans. In truth, there was probably more, but I didn’t write down the names, so I forgot them, which means I didn’t see them. Any drunkard can tell you – if you don’t remember it, it didn’t happen.