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Friday, December 30, 2011
Costa Rica: Nature reserves awash with rare animals and birds
By Nicky Holford for the Daily Telegraph
If it weren't for the crocodiles, we might have seen the turtles hatch and take their first wobbly steps to the sea. But to get to their remote location at Buena Vista beach on the Nicoya Peninsula involved wading waist deep through a river, renowned at night as a croc hang-out.
Crocodiles, armadillos, jaguars, pumas, sloths, toucans and strawberry frogs are in plentiful supply in Costa Rica. Add to that a mix of rain and cloud forests, a great band of mountains, active volcanoes and stunning beaches on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, in a country the size of England, and it's hard to decide how best to spend your time.
To get to the turtle nests, we'd had to virtually circumnavigate the peninsula from Puntarenas, then wade across the river and walk a fair distance along an isolated beach. The only other footsteps that joined ours in the sand were those of a young boy galloping his horse, followed by another boy on a bicycle and a small dog panting behind.
The turtle project is one of several run by i-to-i for volunteers wanting to get a bit more out of their time off than lying on the beach. Sea turtles are an endangered species in Costa Rica, being prey to poachers for their eggs, meat and shells. The eggs are bought as an aphrodisiac, the meat for soup and the Hawksbill for their distinctive shells.
In the wild the potential survival rate of the turtle hatchlings is one in a thousand but at the carefully monitored turtle project the survival rate last year was 93 per cent. The volunteers and staff move the eggs from the original turtle nest to a secure site and monitor them throughout the night. "The 2am-4am shift is the worst," says Mia, a volunteer from the United States. "But I still ask to be woken if they start to hatch, whatever the time."
When they are not on turtle watch the volunteers can turn their hand to surfing. Trying our luck, under the careful guidance of Eric we set out into the rolling Pacific with our boards. Despite spending most of the time submerged, we did all manage to stand up – after a fashion.
As Costa Rica is sandwiched between Honduras to the west and Panama to the east, with Nicaragua to the north, it is hard to avoid the Pan-American Highway that cuts across the country. Huge juggernauts, known as "18- wheelers" thunder along the highway but short distances off it take you to another life, where horses graze in every field, cattle with floppy ears are plentiful and spectacular scenery is worth the drive over potholed roads.
Having worked up an appetite in the waves, we headed to Playa Samara, a horseshoe bay with a selection of open-air restaurants on its flanks. Forgoing the staple of gallo pinto (rice and beans) and plantain, we devoured huge tasty prawns and near perfect piña coladas.
Leaving the south we drove to the rainforest in the northern zone towards the Tenorio Volcano National Park. The four-hour journey took us through lush and varied country – pineapple farms, sweeping succulent banana plantations and rich cattle country where the cows looked fat and happy and horses, usually shared by families as a means of transport, were everywhere.
By the time we reached the small town of Bijagua in the Upala region, we had left all traces of tourism behind and turning left by a small supply shop and restaurant, we headed up a dirt track, climbing to the eco-lodge of Las Heliconias.
Fortunately our trusty driver knew the way as there are no street signs in Costa Rica, not even in the capital San José. Ask a local for his address and it's along the lines of "turn right at the bank and it's on the left, opposite Soda Lucy".
It was dark by the time we arrived, but within no time we were off on a canopy tour, crunching tentatively over soggy leaves and squealing at vast spiders.
The lodge is owned by local Costa Ricans who opened the centre to promote sustainable development and ecotourism. More than 300 species of birds, including five different toucans, 18 types of hummingbird and the ornate hawk eagle, inhabit this rainforest area.
We saw the beady eyes of a kinkajou, a brown furry creature at the top of a tree, and a translucent frog the size of a finger nail among a flurry of creepy crawlies on our night stroll. And contrary to expectation, we were not woken at 4am by the howler monkeys.
The next day we saddled up and rode on some Criollo horses (native to South America) to the national park, taking in the view of Nicaragua Lake, the border being only about 20 miles away. A guided walk took us to the spectacular Rio Celeste waterfall, which cascaded majestically down a cliff through light cloud and mist before exploding into a pool of turquoise water.
Away from the noise of the water, we saw two different toucans, a chunky chap with a red chest and another with a colourful beak. When it comes to flora and fauna it is hard not to take pleasure in the rich biodiversity of this small country.
It is home to countless species of endangered birds, from macaws and humming- birds to woodpeckers and parrots. Its miles of coastline, mangroves and rain and cloud forest are so varied that even untrained spotters can enjoy the thrill of seeing rare breeds of bird and mammals, not to mention thousands of different plants and trees.
But you have to be on alert all the time. We would never have seen the sloth, so perfectly camouflaged among the higher branches of a tree were it not for the razor-sharp eyes of our guide.
The country is awash with national parks and private reserves, all providing well- signed hiking trails at ground level. Above the trees lies a network of suspension bridges and even zip wires through forest canopies and plunging waterfalls.
Costa Rica also has its fair share of mountains, with Mount Chirripo the highest at 12,530ft, and 121 volcanoes. The best known is Arenal, which is currently erupting in some style and at night can provide an open-ended firework display as red-hot molten lava explodes from the summit and tumbles down its flanks.
As a fitting finale we found a collection of cabins that looked directly onto the volcano. Had it been a clear night we could have sat out on our porch and watched as the volcano erupted. The area is also riddled with natural hot springs, the result of a chemical reaction between volcanic minerals such as sulphur and calcium carbonates. Our hotel had funnelled these springs into a series of pools of varied temperature, beginning with very hot and gradually cooling, with the final pool shaped around a bar.
But sadly it was not to be our night. As evening set in, so did the clouds, gravitating to the highest point of the volcano. They descended like a curtain, obliterating the star attraction that hung like a shadow, somewhere out in the darkness.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Exploring Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula
“Randal was supposed to be your guide into the rain forest today, but a tree fell on his house,” the woman behind the counter tells me. “He’s fine,” she goes on, seeing my concern, “but his house isn’t.” Later, I meet a woman who slipped during a heavy rain and was swept into a drainage pipe, sucked under a road, and flushed out the other side, unharmed. And then, a man tells me about the jeep he was driving that was carried away and out to sea while he was trying to ford a river.
It’s not so much that these stories are crazy—which they are—it’s the offhand acceptance with which they’re related that’s so alarming. “My best friend was hit by lightning,” recalls Juan Pinto, another Tico (as Costa Ricans refer to themselves). “Don’t worry, he’s fine now. Here, nature is totally in charge. The Osa is a wild place.” That wild side of Costa Rica is exactly what I’m here to experience.
Tiny Costa Rica, sitting at the heart of Central America, became an outdoor adventurer’s playground after emerging as an ecotourism poster child in the early 1990’s. Since then, tales of overdevelopment have been well documented. There’s a well-trodden circuit here: Hit the cloud forest of Monteverde, check out the Arenal volcano, and end up at the beach in Guanacaste. Ziplines, lava, and surf school. It’s a great vacation, but I was looking for the unscarred Costa Rica of years ago. Then I heard about the Osa Peninsula.
Jutting off Costa Rica’s southern Pacific coast, the Osa Peninsula is still a primitive paradise of rain forests, empty beaches, and backwater settlements. The rough-and-ready town of Puerto Jiménez, on the banks of the Golfo Dulce, is the area’s main hub. It’s an unglamorous burg of a few thousand where dogs wander free, scarlet macaws squawk from trees, and Ticos pedal bikes slowly up and down the unnamed main street.
“This place does me a lot of good,” John Podson, a sandy-haired transplant from Cape May, New Jersey, tells me. “And if you’re into nature.…” He spreads his arms wide. “Otherwise, there’s not a lot going on here.” That wasn’t always the case. In the mid 20th century, gold-rush fever ran deep in the Osa.
At Pulpería el Tucán, a wood-and-cement general store a few miles outside of town, I watch a young girl walk in, plunk down a pinky-nail-size chunk of gold that was mined from the nearby Río Tigre, and walk out with a chicken, a few potatoes, and some celery. Behind the counter, Sandra Campos pulls out her small digital scale and weighs the raw nugget. “To pay in gold, that’s just life here,” she says.
Outside, I come upon a sturdy man, known to me only as Edwin, who agrees to take me a short way up the Río Tigre to try my luck at gold panning. Knee-deep in the rushing water, Edwin pries large rocks free to create a small eddy and lays down a metal trough through which the water funnels. It begins to rain—hard. Edwin doesn’t seem to notice. Using a circular tin pan, he begins to sift the larger stones away. His thick hands work with delicate precision. It stops raining as quickly as it began, and eventually the grain of soil in the pan is fine. The sediment swirls. Edwin’s fingers dance over the tray. And suddenly, as if by magic, a dusting of gold settles at the bottom of the pan. My pockets a little heavier, I head back to town.
I’m told the man i’m looking for lives near the cemetery, beside the landing strip. And that’s just where I find John Lewis. A small man with thick glasses, he still looks very much like the insurance lawyer he was 25 years ago. Lewis and his then wife came here in the late 1980’s, looking to change their lives. They bought a thousand acres of remote rain forest about 12 miles south of Puerto Jiménez and built Lapa Rios, one of the first eco-lodges in the Osa Peninsula. “The only place people suggested wenotgo was here,” Lewis says. “It was full of jaguars, snakes, crocodiles, and no people. When we found that out, we came here as fast as we could.”
Lapa Rios has 16 cabins set high up on the hillside with views out over the canopy and down to the ocean, where surfers ride one of the longest breaks in the Pacific. The lodge is environmentally sensitive and discreetly run—a soft landing in a wild spot. A few feet outside the main entrance, I watch a 15-foot boa constrictor coil itself around a fig tree. Just off the deck outside my room, a toucan with a long rainbow beak lands on a branch, and spider monkeys scamper across the railing in front of me.
Down the hill from Lapa Rios, in a lushly forested area known as Matapalo, the expat crowd convenes each Friday evening in an open-air bar named Buena Esperanza, which everyone knows simply as Martina’s. Martina Hoffmann, a blond, heavily tattooed earth mother/surfer chick, came to the Osa from Düsseldorf, Germany, 18 years ago, “By pure luck,” she explains. “And I thought this place needed a bar.” Colored Chinese lamps hang beside a disco ball. Surfboards and Tibetan prayer flags adorn the area by the kitchen. “Everyone’s welcome here,” Hoffmann says. “Kids, grandmothers, Ticos, expats, tourists—although we don’t get too many of those. But they’re coming.” Hoffmann locks eyes with me, leans in close, and winks. “There’s magic in the Osa.”
It’s a sentiment I hear often, and one shared by Seattle native Kurt Kutay. Kutay runs Wildland Adventures, and he’s been leading tours down to the Osa Peninsula for 25 years. “There are very few places like it,” he says. “We’re way off the grid, in the middle of the rain forest, and I’m sipping a nice cold beer.” Kutay’s in the Osa now to do a little surfing and take stock of the changes. “It’s still very pristine here, the way it was when we first came.”
But all that may be changing. A proposed hydroelectric dam just across the Golfo Dulce from the Osa is in an advanced stage of development. The El Diquís project, backed by the national electrical utility, would provide power for more than a million households, with the potential to employ thousands. But it would also flood almost 17,500 acres of land, including parts of the Térraba and China Kichá indigenous reserves. An international airport is also being considered for the area. “Can the ecosystem take that?” longtime Osa resident Nichole DuPont asks from a bar in Drake Bay, on the Osa’s northern shore. She shrugs and answers her own question: “Check back in ten years.”
There’s strong local support here for keeping things wild. “There’s no resort tourism on the Osa,” says Mike Boston, who has lived in the region since 1996. “If anybody paves that road, there will be people out there at night digging it up.”
For now at least, the road remains pretty raw, and beyond Lapa Rios, it gets rougher. Years ago, patches of the rain forest along here were cleared for cattle; lean cows, hip bones protruding, nibble grass or lie in the shade. Acacia and palms line the road. It hasn’t rained in some time and the Río Oro is low. I ford it without managing to lose my jeep. Coming out of a bend in the unpaved road I see a barefoot man on horseback moving toward me. A two-foot machete hangs from his hip. I slow to a stop. The horse settles beside me, and a man with a black moustache and dark eyes stares down.
Read the full story on TravelandLeisure.com
Friday, August 27, 2010
Costa Rica tops the polls for Single Travellers
Travel and Leisure Magazine assessed a number of factors to prepare its listing of the 15 best destinations for solo travellers - safety, happiness of the people and many more.
Using a combination of the Global Peace Index (Costa Rica ranks 26th of 149 countries surveyed) which ranks countries for their peacefullness and the Happy Planet Index (Costa Rica ranks number 1 of 143 countries suveyed) which compares the happiness of a nation's population to its ecological footprint, the magazine prepared a listing of the 15 best destinations worldwide for solo travellers.
And number one on that list was Costa Rica.
To see the full article in Travel and Leisure Magzine click here
