Where’s Snarky?
April 2011 Costa Rica
Costa Rica, part two
Life on a volcano; surprising things to do with mud; the dubious life skills of the Costa Rican possum; two’s company, three thousand’s a crowd; jumping out of a perfectly good tree. And monkeys! You want monkeys, we got monkeys!
For the second half of the week, we moved from the coast up into the mountainous area of La Rincon De La Vieja. The rincon itself is a large active volcano surrounded by national park. We stayed at Borinquen Hotel & Spa, which is a old cattle ranch that has discovered that tourists, while in many ways similar to cattle, are considerably more lucrative. The hotel is lovely: it consists of a series of small villas scattered over lush grounds on a ridiculously steep hillside. Depending on your inclination, you can either make the hike yourself or call for a golf cart to transport your pathetic carcass up and down the hill.
The hotel has the usual pool (nice, but not as wonderfully warm as the previous one), but the main attraction is the volcanic spa. My favorite part was the sauna, which is simply a wooden hut built directly over a volcanic steam vent. It’s as hot and humid as you could want, although occasionally more sulfurous than other saunas that I have known. I don’t know whether this volcano is particularly consistent, or whether it occasionally burps extra steam, parboiling a batch of unsuspecting tourists. In any case, I wasn’t personally scalded to death, so I count myself a satisfied customer.
In addition to the sauna, there are volcanic springs that bubble forth scalding hot gray mud. Brave hotel employees are periodically dispatched to balance on wooden walkways out over the mud, which they collect in buckets. Once they mud has been safely retrieved, it’s available for tourists to rub all over their bodies. (Did I say that tourists were reminiscent of cattle? Perhaps I was thinking of pigs). Naturally, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to partake, and we collected photographic evidence for your edification and entertainment.
As I’d hoped, they take their beef pretty seriously around here. I had a couple of outstanding encebollados (beef with onions), but the most memorable meal was the beef Buenos Aires at the hotel restaurant. The beef was excellent, but I was most struck by the 450 gram portion size (that’s just over a pound for those of you reading this in Liberia, Myanmar, or the United States). The platanos and gallo pinto remain excellent and the rice pudding is outstanding (although characteristically drowning in cinnamon), but I am unable to recommend the creme brulee.
The fauna have been fun: lots of birds, including several species of toucan, coati, and a variety of small possum-like creatures. I say they’re possumlike because they’re small nocturnal mammals with bare tails that move slowly and never quite learned how to look both ways before crossing the street. It takes a special kind of skill to get run over by a golf cart, but I’m here to tell you that the Costa Rican possumy things are up to the task.
Perhaps the weirdest thing we encountered was a colony of spiders hiding under a log. What’s so weird about a colony of spiders, you ask? The sheer quantity of the things: there was probably a cubic foot of spidery goodness under that one log. I have no idea what they were doing there, but according to our guide they’re always right there, doing their mysterious spider thing. Personally, I suspect that they’re planning some kind of arachnid insurrection.
And of course there are monkeys. We saw four different troops of howlers and one troop of white-face monkeys, all with adorable baby monkeys. The two species eat different foods (leaves for the howlers; fruit, flowers, and bugs for the white-faced), so they get along well and sometimes even hang out together in the same trees.
We also spent some time doing foolish sporty things. We began with a horseback ride across the cattle ranch and into a transitional forest to see some waterfalls. I haven’t ridden a horse since falling off a not-entirely-tame one as a child, but these horses were rather more agreeable. Also they had saddles, which turns out to be a useful feature. After the waterfalls, we went on a zipline course. The basic idea is pretty simple: you go up a tree (usually) or to the edge of a bottomless canyon (in our case), clip yourself onto a steel cable of dubious provenance, and leap screaming into the void. The most memorable of the 10 zip lines was 425m long with top speeds of 40 kph (for our readers in Liberia, Myanmar, or the United States: 1,400 feet and 25 mph). It’s less terrifying than you might think, although I declined the guides’ kind offer to send me down the wire upside-down.
We finished up with a rafting trip. The river in question turns out to be rather small, and consequently the “rafts” were actually inflatable kayaks. The trip was fun: the class II / III rapids were active enough to be fun without really being scary. There were a few minor incidents (kayaks getting stuck, one person ditching in the rapids, some water fights), but overall the trip was very smooth.
And now we’re done. We’re currently in Atlanta, waiting for our final flight. We touch down in Seattle at 12:22 AM, which is conveniently 8 hours before the kids are due back in school. Oops.
Costa Rica, part one
In which your correspondent speculates idly about the nature of travel, offers up some baseless cultural commentary, goes for a swim, is stung by jellyfish, and escapes a brazen attack by pirates. On the plus side, there are baby monkeys.
Just a couple of weeks after my month in Vietnam, Ellen and the kids and I are off to Costa Rica. A new country every month: that’s just how I roll, baby. Not really, but it’s been interesting having two very different trips back to back. More about this some other time, but it’s become clear to me that my travel habits have not kept pace with my ambitions. Maybe I should do something about that.
In any case, we’re in Costa Rica and it’s a lot of fun. Costa Rica is one of the few Latin American countries that I haven’t been to before, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. My impressions so far are very much in line with its reputation: it feels safe and mellow and comparatively prosperous. It doesn’t seem nearly as dynamic as Vietnam, but we haven’t seen any signs of the crushing poverty that’s readily evident in places like Honduras or Mexico. It’s pretty common to see private security guards packing ancient pistols, but everywhere we’ve been has felt very safe.
Because we’re only here for a week, we’ve decided to focus our attentions on the Northwest of the country. The first half of the week has us staying in the Hotel Conde Del Mar on Playa Panama, which is satisfactory but probably not somewhere I need to go back to. I’ve been struck by the fact that the great majority of the tourists we’ve seen are native Spanish speakers. I can’t tell whether they’re Ticos or from elsewhere, but I’m surprised by how little English we’ve heard. Easter week is a big deal in Costa Rica, so it’s possible that the mix would normally be different. In any case, between our more or less passable Spanish and the more or less passable English of many of the people we’ve met, we’ve done fine.
Costa Rica apparently hasn’t clued in to the fact that phở is what’s for breakfast, but they make up for it by having gallo pinto and fried plantains on the breakfast menu pretty much everywhere. Any meal that includes fried plantains is OK as far as I’m concerned.
As expected, everywhere teems with iguanas, geckos, and assorted intermediate lizardy things. Costa Rica is famous for bird watching, and while I’m not much of a stamp collector I’ve enjoyed watching the assorted vultures, parakeets, mot-mots, and other avian denizens. My favorites, of course, are the corvidae: there are several different species in evidence, one representative of which has apparently been assigned to restaurant duty at the hotel. He distinguished himself during our first meal by stealing a French fry from Marcus’ plate (to Marcus’ outrage and Alex’s delight, naturally).
Playa Panama is right next to the hotel, and is very pleasant. The water is full of life: I counted at least six different species of fish without using goggles. A popular sport around here involves the larger fish chasing schools of the smaller fish around the shallows, creating huge wakes as they careen back and forth along the beach. A number of pelicans perch on the nearby sailboats and act as impartial referees (I should point out that I never actually saw anyone get a red flag, although not for lack of effort on the part of the pelicans).
The ocean is calm and delightfully warm, so I took the opportunity to go for a couple of long swims. My first swim was livened up by a series of jellyfish stings, and the second one by a pirate attack. As I was splashing along the coast, I came across the Black Pearl, which was cruising in the opposite direction and firing its cannons at the beach. The crew were as inebriated as legend claims, although they were considerably less skeletal than I’d expected. Perhaps they were prosperous gringo pirates. In any case, Costa Rican coast guard regulations apparently forbid the use of actual cannonballs in pirate cannons, so I escaped the encounter unscathed.
In addition to our aquatic endeavors, we paid visits to a few local towns and beaches. The highlights were probably Playa Danta (thoroughly lovely and almost deserted, and sporting some excellent surf) and Los Cocos (bustling and touristy, but home to some good food). The roads have apparently recently been upgraded and are reasonably navigable, although we took a few roads that I wouldn’t dare try in the rainy season, even in our 4WD monster.
At a few points along the main road, we’d noticed mysterious mesh bridges crossing above the roadway, and had speculated about their purpose. It all became clear one evening, when we came across a troop of monkeys goofing off by the side of the road and scampering back and forth over the bridge. Evening is apparently when the adult monkeys get together to watch the traffic go by, and the juveniles pass the time by seeing how much trouble they can get into hanging upside down by their tails (quite a lot as it happens, although we didn’t see any of them actually fall off).
Next up: we head inland to the Rincon De La Vieja.
