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.
