Costa Rica Diary, Part 3, Dec 16 2006

Three cheers for AC! I write to you now from a café in luscious downtown Quepos; that is, the dusty bit of street between the market and the bank. I now have a fully-functioning keyboard, even better.

So: back to Monteverde. It means Green Mountain, and that´s altogether apt. Monteverde is quite bustling these days, but sixty years ago it was just a green mountain among many in the cordillera of Guanacaste province. Then a couple of things happened: first, Costa Rica abolished its military, in 1948. Then, the US got involved in the Korean War and promptly established a draft. A couple of prominent American Quakers to refuse to serve and were sent off to jail, because that´s what liberty´s all about, man. In protest, 44 of their friends and family, Quakers all, left the States bound for somewhere they could worship, graze cows, make cheese and not have to get shot up in foreign countries. They wound up on the Green Mountain (somehow!) and after spending a few months in the tiny hamlet of Santa Elena, they trotted three kms over the hill and founded the village of Monteverde . They established roads, a school, a cheese factory, a farm economy, several nature preserves, and eventually, a big old tourist machine. Having lived up there quite peaceably and fruitfully for 50 years, the village they founded is now overrun with hotels, hikers, construction, dirt bikes, the works. Indeed, you´re more likely to wake up to the sound of chainsaws than roosters.

James and I spent a couple days there and I can´t tell you how beautiful it is. No matter where you walk, there is a gorgeous view (assuming it´s not a giant about-to-be-concrete-filled hole). We saw all sorts of birds and critters. But the most beautiful thing, strangely, is the weather. Monteverde and Santa Elena, although all of three kicls apart, sit in two totally separate weather systems. Down from the Pacific coast comes dryer, hot air, from the cordillera come cooler mountain breezes, and finally, sticky Caribbean air from the southeast. All of this converges on Monteverde to create the cloud forest – el bosque nuboso – where you have cloud all around: tiny floating motes that are in fact drops of moisture in the air, even when it´s sunny. It´s quite strange and lovely. And of course, it rains every three minutes. The roads are ridiculously muddy and pitted, and if the Quakers have their way, they will never be paved. (The Quaker community has actively resisted the paving of roads as one sure way to slow down tourism and construction. Yet somehow, the backhoes find their way up, up, up.)

In addition to visiting the ecological sanctuary, we took a tour of the community-owned cheese factory (they also make killer ice cream), and a really great tour of a family-run finca (farm estate) where they grow and process mainly sugar cane but also bananas, plantain, coffee and a few subsistence crops. Our guide was one of the family sons, maybe 23 years old, and it was really gratifying to see how much he cherished his life in the hills, with an obviously very close and loving family. Plus, this guy knows everything about everything, like how to find a tarantula, if you happen to want to see one, just like that. At the end of the tour, we made some Costa Rican fudge: you merely harvest the cane, haul it to the trapiche (the mill), yoke up the oxen, feed the cane in to be crushed and juiced, boil down the juice until you have thick gooey molasses, then plop it onto a board and stir the bejesus out of it until it starts to cool, when you can add nuts, coconut, fresh mint, or whatever you like. It was great. And the coffee was awesome too.

We left Monteverde on Sunday and took a private tourist minibus here to Quepos. We were the only folks on the bus, so it was quite a deluxe drive – even though the road down from Monteverde is as perilous as can be. It took us two hours of creeping down the mountains to get to a scrap of paving, a.k.a. the TransAmerican Highway. From there it was smooth sailing past the towns of Puntarenas and Jaco, and finally to Quepos. As mentioned yesterday, we have very nice accommodations here. We are in a condo/villa type hotel about 1 km outside Quepos proper, and perhaps 5 kms from Manuel Antonio National Park. We have been down into the park a few times. The beaches are fabulous, the trails well-marked, and the trees are filled with animals of all kinds. It´s worth paying 7 dollars to get in, just to avoid the hawkers and surfers on the public beaches. Marching around Manuel Antonio, we´ve seen spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and howler monkeys, sloths sleeping way up in the trees, cayman crocodiles, wee little agoutis that look like earless rabbits, snuffly, friendly coatis, and birds galore.

The other day we went on a canopy zipline tour in the hills around Tarrazu, which is also protected land. (Much of Costa Rica is: that´s something their government is really getting right.) So the drill is, you strap on all this gear (if you´re male, I gather it´s a bit hard on your "buddies", as the guides called them), and a helmet, and you climb up a platform at the top of a tree, where some youngster straps you to a zipline and gives you a shove. Off you go into the void, shrieking merrily and frightening the birds out of the trees, over a hundred feet or more of forest canopy, until you reach the next platform where some other youngster ropes you in and unhooks you. I´ll tell you, I got all sweaty and worked up on the bus going up into the hills and thought I might not be able to do it. But honestly, after the initial bloodcurdling terror, it was a total gas. We did 9 ziplines, 2 rappels (one was about 150 feet up!) and a Tarzan swing from one tree to the next. It was a hoot. Then we were fed a huge, delicious lunch which I ate as if I´d never seen food before.

Yesterday was largely do-nothing day, but today James and I really lucked out on a tour through a mangrove swamp. We got hooked up with an expat Canadian (from Scarborough), named Paul and Paulo, a naturalist who´s been running tours here for 16 years. There were just 5 of us out in the swamp: Paulo, his junior guy Jose, the boat driver Milo, and us. It was great: I almost ran out of ink writing down the names of all the bird species, never mind the crabs, bats, caymans, lizards, and anteaters. We spotted not one but two extremely rare silky anteaters, little golden furry guys who sleep way up in the treetops in the daytime. They look like tennis balls curled up around a branch. I got kudos for spotting another kind of anteater, also asleep in a tree. In fact, we´d seen one of these rooting around over the wall behind our villa the first night we arrived: a tamandua, also fairly rare.

We had a great time with Paul and Jose, so on Monday we are meeting them again, this time to visit a plantation where they grow vanilla, cinnamon, pepper, cacao and coffee, and go birding at dusk.

I have turned into the world´s biggest bird nerd, by the way. Birkenstocks with socks may well be in my future. And really large-framed glasses, and a shawl.

Love to all,

AO & JK, who has foresworn computers while on vacation. He´s STILL in the hammock!