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.
