Pura Vida!
BAH does Costa Rica (Page 3 of 3)
From the Guanacaste Coast and the Golfo de Papagayo, we journeyed inland to stay at the Tabacon Resort at the foot of the Arenal Volcano. Arenal is an active volcano. The gray streaks you can see down the sides of the volcano in the picture above are lava tubes, each flowing with molten lava (you just can't see the glow in the daytime). At night, the volcano would grumble and burp, and brilliant orange-red lava would go spilling down the sides. Through my binoculars (Bushnell 10 x 50), I could watch molten boulders tumbling down the sides, fragmenting as they rolled, scattering in brilliant school bus-size sparks like the spray from an arc-welder. The patio off our hotel room had a phenomenal, unobstructed view of this spectacle every night, though the volcano was often obscured by evening clouds and rain showers. I got out of bed at 3 or 4 a.m. both nights we stayed there, just to watch the volcano after the skies had cleared.
Here's a shot of Arenal at night, which gives you some idea of the nightly spectacle. (I didn't take this photo -- I nabbed it from a Costa Rican website. My digital didn't have the zoom capability and even if it did, it's nearly impossible to get a digital to focus on something miles away in the dark.)
Tabacon is known for its hot springs, a terraced series of pools naturally heated by the Arenal volcano, secluded away in the most gorgeous tropical garden you've ever seen.. Here I am standing on a bridge over one of the pools. We didn't have nearly enough time to relax in these springs, basically only spending one evening there. (We would have had two evenings, but Betty wanted to go into town and shop the second night. Argh!) The pools varied by temperature, some much hotter than my hot tub at home, some specifically designed for cooling down. At the lowest level, there's a gorgeous pool containing a bar. Pina coladas were about $5.00 each, and it was cool to sit in the water at the bar and sip our drinks.
While at the Tabacon resort, we explored the rain forest canopy. Here's Betty getting harnessed up...
...and me on a zip line through the jungle. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Here's both of us with one of the guides.
And here's yours truly rappelling down from the canopy. This was a fairly short and overpriced canopy tour. If you decide to do one yourself, my advice would be to look for one other than the one located at Tabacon.
Everyone knows I'm a critter person. I had a mental list of Costa Rican critters I wanted to find while in country. While a number of them eluded me, I did manage to locate and get close to quite a few. Above is a howler monkey, part of a troop of about 20 monkeys that our bus driver spotted off the side of the road in a guanacaste tree.
Another one of the troop, just hanging out doing monkey things.
A toucan (think Fruit Loops). I actually got good at spotting these guys flying from tree top to tree top in the rain forest. Their silhouette is pretty distinctive, what with that big beak thrust out in front of them. This one was actually caged in a walk-in enclosure at one of the places we ate one day. I never got close enough to the wild ones to snap a photo. Also saw tons of black vultures and turkey vultures -- they would sit in great flocks, wings extended to dry them from the afternoon showers (vultures have no protective oil in their feathers) -- several species of herons, hummingbirds, a gorgeous masked falcon (the exact name of which escapes me at the moment), several species of kingfishers, and other birds. We also spotted a black panther, but again he was gone so fast that it was impossible to get a photo.
This gecko shared our room with us. His little suction toes would carry him across the ceiling so fast that it was impossible to catch him.
While white water rafting, we found this poison dart frog. Pop him in a blender with a milkshake for someone you're not too fond of and ... bye bye. They're okay to handle as long as you don't have any cuts on your hands and you don't stick your fingers in your eye or mouth afterward.
Also while rafting, we located two sloths in branches overhanging the river. I know he's hard to see, but he's there in the middle, hanging upside down by arms and legs. Look closely and you can make out his face. It took our river guides to spot these fellows -- there's absolutely no way I'd have ever seen them. Our guides say that the sloth only comes down from his tree once a week to go to the bathroom.
At this river, I spotted a small crocodile (which submerged as soon as he saw me and was never seen again) and a Basilisk Lizard, which leaped up and ran all the way across the river, moving so fast it damn near broke the sound barrier -- no way I could get a picture of it. They're commonly known as Jesus Christ lizards because of their water-walking ability. You can see the locals in the picture above doing their laundry on the river bank. Housing in the Costa Rican countryside ranged from what you see above, clapboard houses with tin roofs, to nicer homes like the one featured below.
The crime rate in Costa Rica is evidently very low. The front doors of most homes were standing wide open at all hours of the day. Many homes didn't even have front doors.
White water rafting the Sarapiqui River was a blast. Here's Betty and me. That's our river guide in the background. He was pretty cool, even if he did fall out of the boat at one point. Our trip downriver was filmed by guys in kayaks, so I'll eventually be getting a VHS tape of the whole wild ride. It's the most fun you'll ever have being bossed around by some guy you never met before.
After rafting, we took a cab into the town of La Fortuna (a ten mile ride for a mere $4) so that Betty could do some shopping before we had to leave for the airport in the morning. Later we reconnected with the rest of our group for dinner at an open-air steak place called El Novillo (the calf), where $10 bought one of the best fillet mignons I've ever eaten. We sat and ate while Arenal grumbled above us, spewing lava down her slopes. When the show became really spectacular, the restaurant owner would kill the lights so we could all see better. Sitting in the cooling mist of a tropical evening, watching Mother Nature put on her grand show, I knew the Costa Ricans had chosen their national slogan carefully. Pura vida. Pure life. To do anything less than get out and experience it is a pure crime.
The next morning, our bus took us up into the cloud forest (above the rain forest, where everything is permanently obscured in the heavy 100% humidity of the clouds) and down the other side of the Continental Divide into the Caribbean lowlands and back into the airport at San Jose. It was time to go home. That's it until my next big adventure. I can't recommend Costa Rica highly enough. The people were friendly, gracious, extremely hard-working, and always helpful. I was amazed at the national pride expressed by every native I talked to. They are genuinely proud of their country, of its 97% literacy rate, of the fact that they have no military, no income tax, and very little crime, and they are especially proud of their country's natural treasures, having more natural parks and protected lands than any other country in the world. Everyone I talked to knew so much more about their local flora and fauna than any American would ever know about the area in which he/she lived. Next life, I think I want to be born Costa Rican.
If you missed Page One of this photo journal, click here. For Page Two, click here. For additional photos shot by other Blue Water divers, click here.
