A Trip to Costa Rica

These are notes from our trip to Costa Rica in February, 2006, and a few of our pictures. It was our first trip to the country and it turned out great.

This is Wednesday night, at Playa Junquillal in Guanacaste Province, northern Costa Rica. No internet access, but I'll keep some notes in case we go by a hot spot somewhere.. We arrived Monday, with the only excitement being the rush to make the connection at Atlanta after a delay out of Boston Logan. After we fell breathlessly through the boarding door and got our seats, they announced a 30-minute wait "for connecting passengers". At least that gave our luggage time to make the flight to Costa Rica.

Although the airport at Liberia is newly expanded to allow international flights to come in, it has the flavor of long ago, when flying was a little more romantic. The main arrivals/departures building may have been converted from a hangar – big high tin roof, no walls, a central fan up above with about a 20 foot diameter to keep the air moving on the rare days when the wind isn’t blowing. It did have a modern baggage carousel, but it hadn’t been lubricated this century and complained with banshee squeals while it ran. But our luggage did make the connection in Atlanta and showed up.

We rented a car (and a cell phone for a security blanket) near the airport and headed for the coast. I had upgraded my first reservation to get something with 4-wheel drive and that turned out to be fortuitous. The roads deteriorated steadily with the distance to the airport. The last 20 kilometers is the worst road I've ever seen called a road. Route 160 is like someone's driveway, if driveways were made out of packed clay and watermelon-sized granite rocks. I've seen many parts of the Appalachian Trail that were better than this road. But when you get to the beach, it's very nice. Villa Serena is owned by John Murphy from Orleans on the Cape, who also owns the Land-Ho restaurant there. His eldest son now manages that place, and John spends much of the year down here, bringing what had been a badly deteriorated property back to life. He and his wife, Olive, are part way done, which makes for some quirks. Beds, linens, restaurant, bar, pool are all new or restored to 4-star status, but in the bathroom, the only hot water is in the shower. But it's a great location right on the black sand beach. It's a popular location for the surfing crowd -- it was one of the places in the surfing movie "Endless Summer" years ago. Some of the other guests are families (it's school holiday week in Massachusetts) from the Cape, with fathers who were surfers back when and who still get out there with the California dudes hanging around.

Tuesday we went kayaking on an estuary down the beach that leads back into a mangrove swamp. Aside from falling in and losing my shades when I was starting out, it was a great outing. Temperature here is 80 to 90 every day, with constant off-shore wind at this time of the year, so being wet isn't a problem. We saw lots of birds, including a great blue heron that might summer on Cape Cod. In the afternoon we joined a group in the ocean, where the surf was just right for body surfing. Contrary to guide book warnings, the Pacific here is quite warm.

Wednesday we had a tour of Palo Verde National Park. A driver picked us up at the hotel and took us about an hour-and-a-half over to the park, on uniformly execrable roads. On the way, we picked up our tour guide, who took us out on a longish river boat set up with rows of tourist seats. At first it was just the two of us, but there were other docks along the river, and some other guides would shout out for us to take some of their overflow. We soon had a boat load. The group right behind us was Swiss, with a German-speaking guide. We saw crocodiles, iguanas, monkeys, bats, and lots of birds. We have some fine pictures of monkeys, since they come right down to the boats looking for handouts, and more distant pictures of crocodiles, which ran up to 12 feet or so. On the way back we stopped for lunch at a local restaurant, where the typical meal was beans & rice (without which it cannot be a meal here), chicken, a beef stew, corn tortillas, and a big salad. Then they took us on to a little town where everyone makes pottery in the traditional Indian style and then back home in time for a dip in the pool.

Thursday we checked out and headed south. It takes an hour on the rutted gravel road to get back to Vera Cruz on a highway, which is asphalt with occasional potholes one or two feet deep, and now and then a section where the surface has entirely disappeared into the dust and rocks (or mud, at other times of the year). We headed south along the coast. The roads improved a bit as we got on the main corridor between Liberia and San Jose, the capital. We crossed the estuary of the Tempisque River on a big new bridge, with a fine road surface; so good that the local cops pulled us out of the line of traffic (they can spot a rental car at half a mile) to show us a radar gun reading of 81 kph in a 60 kph zone. The cop asked for my passport and license, which he held while he explained, in a mix of Spanish and English, how he was going to have to give me a very large ticket and I would have to go to court, etc., etc. Fortunately the Hertz guy had counseled us when we rented the car that if we did get a ticket, it could be paid at the rental agency when we brought the car back, and that if we slipped the cop $20, which is what he was looking for, he would probably write the ticket anyway after we went on our way. So I just sat there and told the cop to do what he had to do and acted resigned. After about 30 seconds of nobody saying anything, he just handed my papers back and said don’t do it again. We later met some Americans who were bragging that they had avoided a ticket by giving a cop $50. I didn’t tell him that the worst fine for speeding is about $40. In general, traffic wasn’t bad. There were places where the bad road conditions or steep inclines could lead to back-ups, but slow trucks usually went out of their way to let you get around – the double yellow line is universally ignored.

At times we drove for long periods in palm plantations -- big palms in regular rows as far as you could see. The palm nuts are used for palm oil, we have learned. By mid-afternoon we reached Manuel Antonio National Park, a seashore and adjacent forest area. There is a raucous tourist town and beach right at the entrance, and the crowd reminded us of Provincetown in the summer. We found a room in the Del Mar Hotel, which turned out to belong to guy from Cleveland. It had an electric thingie on the shower head (with bare wires, yet), which was supposed to provide hot water. It functioned about as well as the heater in our old Alfa Romeo, where all the heat came from the little indicator light. But it was close enough to town to let us walk down the steep hill to the beach, and supper at a cafe with tables out at the edge of the sand. I had dorado,which we’d call mahi-mahi, I think, a big slab of fried fish accompanied by rice and beans and mashed potatoes.

Friday morning we went down to the national park to do some walking. We were intercepted before we even got to the park office by a guide (they are licensed by the government) who solicited our business through the car window. He had us park in a lot where someone would “watch” our car (he said), and gathered a few other customers. But he had excellent English and turned out to be a great guide. He had a 50-power spotting scope on a tripod, which he could zero in on a sloth or a bird in just a few seconds, to give us all a turn at looking through for a close-up. At right is a snap of a Yellow-Crowned Night Heron, and the same bird captured with my digital camera through the guide’s spotting scope. We saw lots of capuchin monkeys, exotic birds, agoutis, coatis, and both 2- and 3-toed sloths.

Here’s the deal on sloths. Like monkeys, they live in the trees. Unlike monkeys, they come down to the ground every week or so to dig a hole, poop in it, and cover it up. Monkeys just rain down from the trees. So why the difference, especially when it represents such a large expenditure of energy for an animal with the molasses metabolism of a sloth? Biologists used to think the sloth was “fertilizing” the trees that it lived on, but it turned out the trees where the fertilizer was going were not the trees that it ate. Now they think it’s a defense mechanism. Sloths move so slowly that if they pooped from up in the tree, any predator noticing fresh dung would know the sloth could only be a few feet away and would go up after it.

After our walk, we continued our journey south. We had a one-hour wait to get out of town, since the only bridge was closed for “crucial” repairs. It was an old truss bridge, probably put up around WW I. The deck had car-sized holes, so it had been patched by welding old railroad tracks in rows across the holes. An ambulance came by the row of cars waiting, and I saw them help somebody out the back. He apparently had a broken ankle or something. He was wearing an inflatable cast like they use for football players. They gave him some crutches, and he had to make his way on one foot across all the holes on the bridge. I presume another ambulance picked him up on the other side. By the end of our trip, we were used to bridges in all states of disrepair. Some had places where you had to align the tires with the lengthwise struts, or you’d risk having your wheel fall through. Others had been closed entirely and there were tracks down to fords across the streams. February is the dry season, so this wasn’t really a problem. We probably didn’t get in any water deeper than 18”, but it’s exciting because you can’t tell until you try it. I was thankful we’d switch to a 4-wheel drive.

Unfortunately, we missed a turn that would have let us continue close to the coast on a little gravel road that would connect to a good highway south in about 70 kilometers. Instead, we ended up on bigger roads, but much farther from the coast and forced to drive right through the capital city of Costa Rica, San Jose. There were a few sections of expressway, but most of it was stop and go city driving from one traffic light to the next, with lots of turns to try to stay on the route. We made it out of town, but it cost us at least a couple hours.

By late afternoon we were up in the mountains on the Pan-American Highway. It’s just two lanes, with tight places where you have to take turns, and most of it hacked out of the mountain side with precipitous drop-offs. When you get stuck behind a truck going only 10 or 15 kph, you just have to swallow hard, cross the double yellow line, and hope nothing appears around the next corner. By 5pm we were still at very high altitude, surrounded by what is called the cloud forest. It lived up to its name with a heavy fog and showers, reducing visibility severely. We just watched for someplace to get off the road for the night, but there’s not much up there – a few truck stops is about all. I have since learned that this area is known as Cerro de La Muerte, or the Ridge of Death. The altitude is about 11,500 feet. We finally spotted a place that had a sign that said B&B. There was a guy sitting in a darkened restaurant, watching TV, and he said they did indeed have a room. It turned out to be a cabin-like deal, but clean. We got the luggage in and went back to a truck stop for something to eat – ended up with fried rice and mystery chicken parts, washed down with some nice melon juice. We were almost out of colones (local money), so couldn’t be too choosy. When we got back to the cabin, it was only 7pm, but we were so cold we put on all the extra blankets and went to bed.

We got up at 5am and got back on the road, so we have no idea whether the “B&B” really had any breakfast – I don’t think so. But the mist had cleared, although there was frost on the grass. Much better driving and little traffic, and after a couple of hours we had come down off the crest of the mountains and turned west towards the coast. Another hour brought us to a resort area, with the finest road we’ve seen in the country. You could just cruise along and not worry about holes or washouts. That lasted until we turned off the main road to head out on the Osa Peninsula. Back to gravel and humps and holes. Most drivers hang two wheels off on the shoulder on one side or the other – whichever is smoothest, no matter which way you’re going. The road therefore tends to get wider and wider as the shoulder get pushed out. It tends to be smoother out there, but you have to watch for the culverts. Driving is not relaxing, even with 4-wheel drive.

We got into Puerto Jiménez, the only town on the peninsula, about lunch time. I finally got my rented cell phone to work and called the hotel to let them know we were on our way. They couldn’t find my reservation and suggested I stop at the office there in town. By the time we found the office, they had discovered our reservation, but our dates were off by one day. They had us arriving on Sunday for three nights, while I had us arriving on Saturday. This had all been done by e-mail, so I can’t check if it was their error or mine until I get back home. But they were very nice and had an open place for us on Saturday, although we would have to move on Sunday. OK.

We headed out the last 20 kilometers from Puerto Jimenez to the hotel. It takes about an hour. It starts out as a normal terrible gravel road and gets much worse. After a few rickety one-lane bridges, it just starts going right through the streams. This is the dry season, so nothing was much more than a foot deep. The ravines are extremely steep going down to and up from the stream crossings – feels like straight up when you’re driving, and you still have all the humps and ruts to contend with. But our stout little Daihatsu was up to the task and we finally saw the sign for Bosque del Cabo. Coming down the driveway, I had to slow down when a couple peccaries (wild pigs) crossed in front of us. Then all of a sudden we came on the hotel, which is an improbably luxurious place in the middle of the forest.

Bosque del Cabo (Forest of the Cape) is on three or four hundred acres right at the tip of the peninsula. The buildings are set on a bluff 500 feet above the Pacific. The main building is a huge thatched-roof affair without walls. The offices are there and it has a big open area where all the meals are served. There’s an upper level with a sitting room and library. A little way up the hill is a pool and the bar.

The open place they found for us turned out to be one of the plush cabins right at the edge of the Pacific cliffs. Nicely appointed bed & bath, but the unique feature was the outdoor shower overlooking the ocean. After a day in the car, it took us about 5 minutes to get under the hot shower, admire the views, listen to the parrots arguing, and watch the spider monkeys fooling around in the tops the trees. Then we unpacked enough to find our bathing suits and enjoy the pool for a while. Right from the deck of the pool one of the other guests spotted a toucan polishing up his big bill in a tree, then a coati came wandering by. That’s me working at birdspotting.

Most guests (only 30 or so, maximum) gather at the bar between 6 and 7pm, before dinner. There were several families with kids here, since it’s President’s Day school break in most of New England. Dinner is served buffet style at long tables, so you meet other people and go through the “where are you from?” ritual. Most of the folks we’ve met have been Americans and most flew down here from San Jose. They’re impressed that we are driving ourselves around.

Monday morning we went back to the same place for breakfast. The young girl (they’re all local kids, learning English) brings a plate of fresh fruit to have while you ponder the menu. Local pineapples, mangos, bananas, melons, papayas – all taste nothing like what we buy at the super market. Main courses are like French toast with orange syrup or huevos rancheros or Gallo Pinto (“spotted rooster”), which is rice & beans with scrambled eggs and the standard breakfast of the country. After breakfast we went on a four-hour basic educational tour with the resident biologist. His name is Phillip, he’s been here six years, and he has a Geordie accent you can cut with a knife. His own specialties are butterflies and frogs, but he’s very knowledgeable about the whole ecosystem and how it works. It’s really a walking lecture, using the forest to illustrate his points, and interrupting whenever an animal or a bird pops up. We probably only walked a mile and a half over all that time. We were fascinated by the other family on the tour, a couple with a fair-haired daughter about 7. They carried a folding camp stool for her, and whenever we stopped, it was set up and she perched on it, with one or the other of the parents holding a hand over her forehead to shield the rare sunbeam that might penetrate the canopy of trees. She was also carried up any incline. We couldn’t detect that she was an invalid – just well-protected.

They get about 160 inches of rain per year here, which is enough to support a rain forest, but since the months of March and April are dry, this is technically a “tropical moist forest” to the biologists. But it’s pretty much the same, and this is part of big enough patch of both virgin and second-growth forest to support top-of-the-chain predators like ocelots and pumas. The forest canopy is 150 feet up, with the big trees and vines competing for the light and capable of growing a dozen feet per year. Part of this area is known as “matapalo,” which means tree-killer, referring to the creeping fig trees and their relatives. They germinate in bird poop high on a grown tree, then drop thin tendrils a hundred feet down to the ground. These turn into roots, which then grow and grow and finally envelope the original tree and strangle it, leaving the fig tree to take its place in the canopy.

In the afternoon we moved house, to Casa Teka, one of the older cabins. It actually has two bedrooms and a kitchen, much too big for us, but all that was available when I first made our reservations. The place is full up most of the time. This cabin is not on the Pacific, but on a cleared area known as the Tropical Garden, which has both native and exotic plants. I put up a little clothesline to a tree near the porch, and found a pineapple growing at the base of the tree. We see monkeys and toucans from the porch. We’re about a 10-minute walk from the main building and restaurant. Our path goes through the forest, down a little hill, and across a suspension bridge about 200 feet long. You can see the creek far below through the steel grill decking. You have to break step, of course, to avoid getting the whole thing bouncing up and down. Somebody told us that a nearby resort with a similar set-up had a tree fall on one end of the bridge, flipping three Japanese tourists up and off from the other end. Sounds like an urban legend to me, despite the distance from urbs. Anyway, it’s pretty exciting the first time you try it in the dark after dinner.

One of the things you see along our path is ants. The forest floor here is generally covered with leaf litter. Most of the leaves have toxins in them that make them unpalatable to bugs and bacteria (hence all the pharmaceuticals from the forest), so they just lie around and dry out. Right along our path for about a quarter mile there is a six-inch wide highway completely cleared out by the leaf-cutter ants. They use it to haul bits of certain types of leaves back to the central colony, where they are mulched up to grow the mold that the ants live on. These highways fan out in many directions from the colony, which may house several million ants. Every ant has a specialty – explorers, leaf cutters, leaf carriers, warriors, housekeepers, and the queen, of course. Their colony can extend many feet into the earth, with entrances hundreds of feet apart, and big piles of excavated earth and waster carried out by the housekeepers. The biologist here says there are few worms in this poor soil, so the leaf-cutters are vital to keep the soil broken up and arable.

There are other lines of ants, without the cleared trails. These are army ants, which eat anything they find in their path, including things as big as frogs and small mammals. I can testify, thanks to some inattention while studying them up close, that their bite is painful. We have seen only single lines of them, but sometimes when they need to move to new digs, they swarm and move in a front. One of the staff here said he once woke up to find a swarm moving through his cabin – assuming you can get out, this isn’t a bad thing. If you wait four hours, they’ll be gone, and your cabin is completely free of mice, scorpions, and other guests. Interestingly, the only things the army ants won’t attack are the leaf-cutter ants. Apparently it’s a question of numbers. The leaf-cutters can muster millions of ants to the site of a battle, and just overwhelm the smaller colonies of the army ants. When a column of army ants comes to leaf-cutter highway, the army ants lock together to form a bridge over it, and the rest of the column passes over. We also try to avoid stepping on the leaf-cutter highways, but it’s hard when it gets dark.

Monday morning after breakfast we hiked to the beach on the Golfo Dulce (“Sweet Gulf”) side of the peninsula to try out the swimming. It’s not very far on the map – just a mile or so – but there’s a 500-meter drop in elevation, which wakes up the unused calf muscles you’ve forgotten you have. The trail dumps you on a beach access road supporting some cabins and surfer-campers. We found a completely deserted bay beach with gentle rolling surf. At one end there was a bluff that provided a little relief from the equatorial sun and we dumped our stuff there. The water temperature has to be almost 90 degrees (F). We swam, enjoyed our packed lunch from the resort, swam some more. We were eventually joined by four young local people, who shared our little spot of shade when they were out of the water. Then a long slog back up the hill. It only takes an hour, but it seems straight up, and we headed directly to the pool.

We did the same thing again the next day, but on a different trail on the other side of the point. They don’t recommend swimming on that side, since the big Pacific rollers steaming in from Asia create quite an undertow. About a mile down the beach from the trail head is a creek outlet. Following the creek inland for a few hundred meters leads to a nice high waterfall and pool. You can swim there, but we didn’t want to get out and into our hiking shoes just to try it. We waited until we were back on the beach, near a spot where a volcanic outflow creates a bunch of tidal pools. We sat around and let the waves wash in on us Jacuzzi-like. The pools are popular with herons, since the crabs can’t burrow to get away. And there are vast, stately armadas of pelicans, sometimes riding in V-formation on the wind above the bluff, sometimes descending to line up to skim the waves just where they are about to break. They must be skimming goodies from the water, but I can’t catch them at it.

That afternoon (Tuesday, I think, but we’re having trouble keeping track of the days), we signed up for a visit up into the forest canopy. We went with Philip, the biologist, and another couple. You go to the edge of a pretty deep ravine, where one of the staff gets you into a harness like a breeches buoy (?) – straps around your waist and both thighs, with an umbilical up the front from which you depend (in all senses of the word). You are hooked onto a little pulley hanger, like a cable car would have. You put your left hand at rest on top of the pulley housing and your right hand, with a thick leather glove, on the cable behind the pulley. Then they encourage you to trust everything and push off from the platform. You zoom down the cable for a couple hundred meters, although it seems like miles, with the pulleys making a rising whine as you pick up speed. About 20 meters from the end you start back up again, raise your legs, and squeeze the cable just hard enough to bring you to rest on the finishing platform. That was the idealized picture of landing. We tended to flail in and let the guide grab us in a motherly embrace. At this point you are on a platform about 140 feet up in a tree, still wearing your harness and hard hat, and with a safety line securely latched around the tree. You can see tree tops below you and others above, and you may see monkeys and birds on the same level. There’s room for four people and the guide on the little platform. Philip gave us a little talk about what we were looking at and we just chatted up there for an hour or so. What we were really doing is putting off asking about how we got down. We’re 140 feet up, the tree has no branches, and it’s straight down in all directions. What they do is hook you on a safety line, tended by Manuel, who has been having a siesta down below. He doesn’t actually lower you though. You take a second, stationary line, run it through a little figure-8 shaped braking device hooked to your harness, and lower yourself by tightening or loosening tension on the line into the brake. It’s really not hard, and you have great motivation to listen carefully and get it just right. Nevertheless, it is a huge leap of faith just to sit down in your harness and step off that platform. I suppose it is technically possible to lower yourself and breathe at the same time, but none of us experimented with that. They give you 10 minutes at the bottom to put bones back in your legs, then you have to hike out. That was our third steep climb in two days, so we’re into some serious thigh burn by now. Again, the trail leads straight back to the pool.

We tacked on one more little trek (last day there and all). Philip takes people out with flashlights for an hour before dinner to see what’s out there in the dark. Sun sets around 5:30pm, and there is no twilight here. It’s like turning off the lights. Earth is going almost twice as fast here as at home, after all – think about it. Within a few feet of the main lodge we were already seeing bats that hang out on the underside of the big palm fronds. Then he showed us how to hold our flashlights up beside our heads, right next to the eye. Suddenly the darkness lights up with thousands of little sparkles – it’s the reflections from the backs of all those night-seeing eyes out there. The little bright white ones like diamonds are mostly spiders. Tree frogs are orange. Snakes, cats, etc., all have their own colors. That’s why the biologists out at night often wear headlamps, like a miner’s lamp, to catch all the reflections. Under a bush we could see a pair of bright eyes, but they didn’t seem to belong to anything. But if you got very close with the flashlight and stared very hard, all of a sudden you could see there was a nesting bird there. It’s a kind of night jar, and the coloration is exactly like the leaves. It’s like an optical illusion that pops out.

At a little lily pond, we saw several frogs and a marine toad – these are big toads, up to five pounds. They’re a plague in Australia, where they were brought in to control the sugar cane beetles. That was a complete failure, since cane beetles feed and breed at the top of the stalks and five-pound toads don’t go up there. Also around the pond were a bunch of snakes, looking for frog eggs. We saw only a few snakes during our whole stay – they’re really well camouflaged. Just a few days before we got there, the people who had been staying in our cabin spotted a big boa constrictor sunning on a tree stump right along our path. We watched for him, but never got a glimpse. But Philip showed a hollow tree root where a poacher stuck his head in to look for peccary. Instead a fer-de-lance snake bit him in the neck and he was gone in five minutes. We didn’t look in.

The next morning was check-out time and heading back to civilization. We gave Philip a ride into town. It must have been as exciting for him to ride with me on the gravel track and through the rivers as it was for us to take the zip line out to the tree platform. I stopped at the bank for an hour to change some money – we later learned that the crowd at the bank was because the pension checks had come in over the weekend. Then we headed north.

The first couple hours is a gravel road around the Golfo Dulce, with some great views if you’re not watching the holes and wash-outs in the road. We stopped at a little open-air bar and restaurant, very rustic, but with one of the best views of the jungle opening onto the sea that we’ve ever seen.

There’s good highway then for another few hours north along the shore, with now and then a wash-out or a damaged bridge, but not requiring the constant vigilance of some of the other roads. One river crossing had a sign “Bridge in Bad Condition,” which turned out to mean it was completely missing and you drove around on a temporary dam. Another crossing had a turn-off from the impassable bridge to a ford, but with many tracks to choose from in heading across the river. My passenger did not choose to get out and check the depths, so we just took one at random and hoped the air intake for the stout little Daihatsu would stay above water. It was only a few feet deep, so no problemo.

There’s a break in the good road as you get near Manuel Antonio National Park. This is what we missed on the way down. Although the rental car guy had said it was “impassable” it was better than many of the roads we’ve been on. Bumpy rocks and gravel, but no deep ruts or washouts. Many of the bridges were modern reinforced concrete like you’d see in developed countries and never think about. I’m guessing that the infrastructure here had been supported or “influenced” by the huge palm plantation surrounding much of it. A lot of the “traffic” we saw were tractors and wagons hauling palm nuts to what appeared to be their refinery, and tankers going out with palm oil.

We ended up back on the paved road right near the Quepos bridge, where we’d had such a wait getting out on the way down. No particular back-up on this trip, and no sign of the welders patching railroad tracks into the decking. We continued north to get by some fairly ticky-tacky tourist towns with beach stores that would look at home in Eastham or Yarmouth. As it closed in on 4pm, we spotted a highway sign for Delfin Beach Resort, stating it was 4km off to the left. Seemed worth a look, so off to the beach. We passed several Potemkin resorts – huge signs with pictures of condo clusters, large gates suitable for Tintagel or somewhere, and in the back vast tracts of bare sand and red clay bulldozed flat for the sparse weeds. Maybe they sell the lots on the Internet.

The Delfin turned out to be a real hotel, right on the beach, very open architecture with views of the palm trees, wide beach, and surfers catching the last waves of the later afternoon. Right behind the lobby/bar was a huge pool, including a Jacuzzi cauldron. This looked about right after a day of driving, and yes they did have a room, and maybe if we paid cash, they’d knock off the state tax. A rangy Canadian kid checked us in. Room had a nice patio looking out on the view mentioned above, but we squirmed right into the bathing suits that had been “drying” on top of the luggage in the car and headed for the pool. The sun had heated the water to at least 90° F. Water jets on your back is exactly the right thing to counter hours of driving on gravel. Nice hot showers, clean shorts, and back to the bar to chat with the barkeep, who turned out to be from Panama. He gave us some dinner menus, and recommended the pasta carbonera. Turns out he was also the cook, so we took his advice and sat at a table to watch the sun bloop into the Pacific, which it did promptly. Our waitress was a young blond from Winnipeg. As the light failed with the sun, the surfers came in, rinsed off their boards and feet in the shower at the front gate, and hit the bar, where they stayed until 2am, as far as we know. We downed our pasta, which was very good, and went to bed. This place even had a TV in the room, with cable access for CNN in English, but after a couple weeks away nothing they had to say seemed very relevant, and we turned it off.

In the morning, we woke early and had time to kill until breakfast, so we jumped in the pool. The security guard, who apparently spends the night in the lobby, came running out. Turns out he wasn’t chasing us out, but he grabbed the skimmer net and fished a few crabs out of the pool. That must be part of his morning rounds. He also turned on the Jacuzzi, which is a good way to warm up for shaving and showering. Our breakfast waiter was one of the surfer dudes. He was California, judging from his accent, but it was like talking to someone without a good grasp of English. He really wasn’t awake, so you couldn’t go off script – you had to stick to ordering your food. But he and I finished a pot of the excellent coffee and he was starting to function by the time we finished.

When we checked out, we finally met someone who appeared to be the owner or manager. He said he staffs mostly with the surfer dudes – free rooms in exchange for the work. Seems like it works for everybody, and it provided one of the best overnight stops we’ve ever had on the road. We had an easy drive back up to Guanacaste. The Pan-American Highway is really the only road we saw on the whole trip that has significant traffic. When we crossed the big bridge over the xxx, we could see crocodiles the size of the car basking in the morning sun. The bridge replaced the old ferry a few years ago, or we could have gotten a closer look at the crocs.

We were into Santa Cruz by lunch time and stopped before the last 90 minutes of gravel road back to Villa Serena at Playa Junquillal. We spotted a sign for the hotel in town, and had lunch there. I had a great little bowl of ceviche (various fish bits marinated in lime juice, which “cooks” it), accompanied by what looked like potato chips but were actually banana chips. Then back out to Villa Serena, which seemed like coming home. Plenty of time for a swim after moving the luggage into our new digs right next to the pool. And for the first time in the country, this cabin has all of the following: hot water in the sink, a light, and a mirror, making the best shave since I got here. Other places have had one or two things, but not all three.

We quickly settled back into the routine here – over to the lodge at 6 for a drink or iced latte, then dinner on the balcony overlooking the beach. They have a fairly varied menu, but cook everything to order, so it can take a while. But what’s the rush. The owner likes to come around and chat and he has lots of interesting stories. He started out in art school in Boston a long time ago, and took a job at Anthony’s Pier Four to make a little money. He’s been in the restaurant business ever since. One of his sons now manages the Land Ho! restaurant in Orleans on the Cape. Two more sons are down here working. Interestingly, a few years ago John Murphy (the owner) got talked into getting out his brushes and paints again by an artist visiting the Cape. He got back into it and eventually signed up for a few months of art school in Paris. While they were there, a gallery owner happened to see some of his work, which led to having a showing at the gallery. So now he has a studio a mile down the beach from the hotel here and paints every day. His work is shown both on the Cape and in Paris.

Friday morning we got in a walk on the beach, some pool time, and a little surf romping in the Pacific. In the afternoon, we asked about craft shops or the like – there really isn’t anything around here. Olive, the owner’s wife, suggested a place north of here called Monkey Park – it’s really an animal rescue outfit, but it has a tourist shop to raise money. She said we didn’t have to go all the way back out to the main road; there was a back way up following the coast. This turned out to use a labyrinth of little dirt tracks heading generally north. By now we’re used to fording the streams and driving around the boulders, but it was hard at times to tell the road from someone’s driveway. We shared the road with some of the local brahma cattle. We stopped for directions or confirmation a few times, but made it there without really going out of our way. We brake for iguanas. There was indeed a gift shop, with a mix of souvenir trinkets and some local handicrafts. One thing we did buy is a framed blue morpho butterfly, since we had seen so many down in the rain forest. It’s framed with glass on both sides, so you can see the stark contrast between the mottled brown camouflage on the outside of the wings and the startling iridescent blue on the inside. The return trip turned out to be a slightly different route – somewhere we missed a turn, but we ended up about halfway up the gravel road from Santa Cruz to Playa Junquillal, so we knew where we were and zipped back in plenty of time for supper.

Saturday was just a “relax” day, with a little beach walking and alternating between the ocean and the pool. For a change for dinner, we walked a couple hundred meters down the road to the Puesta del Sol restaurant. It’s run by an Italian couple who have set up three tables on the veranda of their home. You have to make reservations in advance. Actually they have a wide variety of menu selections, all with homemade pasta, all with cheeses shipped from Italy, and every one “my grandmother’s recipe” when you ask about it. But the food was excellent – I had a spaghetti with fish sauce and Marcia a ravioli verde. We both had fresh tomato salad with great olive oil and basil, and shared a piece of “cake”, which seemed to be three different chocolate layers held together with whipped cream. And a little espresso, of course. It was a great meal. One of the cats roaming around was named “Ambrosia”; I didn’t catch the name of the other one. The owner/cook was a stereotypical Roman. Although he didn’t break out into an aria, you knew he could, if necessary. No sign of Lady & the Tramp.

Sunday morning we headed to the beach for a little walking and shell-gathering right after breakfast. But as we stepped off the pathway from the hotel, we were greeted by big Ridley’s turtle crawling up the sand out of the surf. Apparently she hadn’t read the book where it says she only comes out with the high tide under a full moon. We have a quarter-moon, tide was almost out, and it was bright daylight. But she felt the urge and crawled a hundred meters up to the soft sand just above the high tide line. We watched while she scooped out a big hollow and squatted in it. We couldn’t actually see the eggs being laid, and she covered them up with sand as soon as she finished. Then she hiked back down to the water. John the hotel owner said they sometimes carry the turtles back down to the water if they seem too tired to make it, and if they’re not too big. They also obliterate the tracks, so that no one carries off the eggs for the pan or the market. This turtle was probably a 50- or 75-pounder, but they can grow ten times that size. We should have some good pictures. The eggs will take 30 to 50 days to incubate under the sun-warmed sand (too hot to walk on here). Then the little silver-dollar sized babies will make a dash for the water through a gauntlet of raccoons, dogs, gulls, coyotes, and other turtle savoring varmints. Perhaps one percent survives the first few weeks. The beach bar a few steps down has some babies already hatched (the big season is in November-December). They collect them in buckets, then give them a free ride down to the surf, avoiding at least the land-based predators. The more turtles that think of Playa Junquillal as home means more tourists in the beach bar to see them.

Monday morning we took a last walk on the beach. We watched a man fishing off the rocks out in the surf, casting a line by hand without a pole. He pulled in a fish, and proceeded to clean it in the tidal pools. A couple of mangy beach dogs did not deign to eat the offal, but some black vultures in the trees along the shore were not so picky and were soon cleaning up. The man had a net bag stuffed with fish, and headed back home now that the incoming tide was submerging his perch out on the rocks. We took a last dip in the pool, then got busy stuffing the suitcases. We checked out by 10:30am, since we had an hour-and-a-half ride back to the airport in Liberia, and had been warned to arrive about 3 hours before flight time.

After turning in our little four-by-four, we stood in various lines to pay our departure tax, have our papers stamped (before check-in), have our papers stamped again (after check-in), go through security, and find the area of the terminal where prospective Delta fliers might congregate. With no walls, you don’t really have “gates”. I was also selected at random to have my big bag searched. A nice young girl very carefully took out everything that I had just put in that morning. Remarkable things we discovered were lots of sand that apparently dumped out of one of my hiking shoes all over everything else, an ant, and our thick “Costa Rican Wildlife” guide. She was very interested in all the pictures of birds and animals and wanted to know which ones we had seen. I suppose it must boring just looking at dirty laundry all day.

We had to trek across the tarmac in a hot wind so strong we had to lean into it. That’s typical at this time of year, and keeps the dry season livable. Then up the stairs into the plane. It takes off to the north, and if you know where to look, you can pick out the field that used to be Ollie North’s little airport for supplying the Contras in Nicaragua, built after the government in Costa Rica had refused the US permission to use their country for such purposes. All seems forgiven now. The Ticos are universally friendly and helpful to tourists, both dollars and the local currency are used interchangeably, and radio stations play both local music and pop and jazz from the North. Lots more to see here, I’m sure we’ll be back.