After 3 years, I haven’t made it back to Costa Rica yet. I wanted to go back the next year, then the next, and- well, I’m too curious. I wander too much and am easily distracted by new adventures.
But I can tell you why I really want to go back. It’s not the adventure travel activities and resorts, because my friend and I avoided those like the plague when we traveled to the Pacific coast in 2014. It’s the quiet lodges at refuges where the owners and communities are working to save what is left of the rich wildlife in the country.
This post is about the first leg of our trip, from Liberia to our lodging near the Cloud Forests of Monteverde and Santa Elena. Our trip started in Seattle, with clear skies as we flew over sleeping Mt. Rainier. Mt. St. Helens rises above the clouds in the background, a stubby reminder of what happens when our Cascade stratavolcanoes decide they are too symmetrical and lovely.
Our travel plans led us to the smart choice of flying into Liberia. Sure, we drove out past 40 kms of road construction leaving town, with men mixing and pouring concrete from wheelbarrows in 90F heat. But after we flew out of San Jose at the end, I would recommend Liberia instead. At the very least, Liberia wouldn’t be hosting the Costa Rica vs. Paraguay soccer game at the national stadium as San Jose was when we were passing through.
We had a stopover in Dallas both ways. Don’t do this. Or at least, if you must, give yourself about 4 hours to lay over in this airport. We almost missed our connection on the way back, making a Chariots of Fire dash in our socks out of security and reaching the gate within a minute of closing – and this after our flight landed 2.5 hours before.
I can’t remember the airline we flew, but it doesn’t matter: the leg room and service are minimal on all of them when you’re in economy class. The only weirdly wonderful, throwback service I’ve experienced is from Air North going to the Canadian Arctic. Expensive to fly, but they have real food, free wine and capuccino and hot, moist towels before and after meals. Oh, and leg room.
I flew with an awful respiratory infection. A doctor sent me with prescription nasal spray and Sudafed to avoid rupturing my full eardrums. It was brutal to clear my ears, and the second takeoff felt like a near disaster. My right ear has had a slight ringing ever since.
We landed in the early evening in Liberia, taxied to our nearby hotel, and sat on the veranda eating fruit and drinking juice in soothing warm air, listening to night creatures chirping. A gecko appeared on the wall, making an amazingly loud sound.
The next morning didn’t start out as a dream vacation. We gathered our rental 4WD, after finding the price skyrocketed over the quote with insurance coverage. Since an automatic was twice the price as a manual transmission, we got the manual. This meant I was doing all the driving because Kim doesn’t drive a stick and that’s all I’ve ever owned.
The Korean SUV was a true Rent-A-Wreck; the suspension was shot by a thousand tourist yahoos and the air conditioning died within 10 minutes. We kept the windows shut to keep out dust from the 40 km of aforementioned road construction. That pretty much cooked us.
Then we took a couple wrong turns. The first wasn’t too bad, but the second was a wrong turn out of Cañas onto 142, instead of continuing to 145. People complain about the road to Monteverde, but they’re talking about 145. The connector between was a steep, bone jarring, unsigned route. The scenery was gorgeous and it was the type of lonely I like. Kim- well, between no signs and bouncing around on lousy suspension in a crappy 4WD with no air conditioning, she was understandably losing patience.
Kim, taking a much needed break from the hot, suspensionless SUV on the road to Monteverde.
The upside of the drive was that we weren’t lost, and we saw one cause of decline of the resplendent quetzal, a charismatic bird everyone going to Monteverde Cloud Forest wants to see: a fragmented travel corridor between the mountains and the sea. Cattle ranches have denuded forest, leaving flying quetzals vulnerable to winged predators.
In the middle of nowhere appeared an “Info Center”- with no facilities or people to give information. Had to stop for the picture, anyway.
A sign! The speed limit is the funniest one- at that speed, our vehicle would disintegrate.
We finally made it to Cabinas Capulin. It was a little hard to find someone to check us in: the lodging operation is operated on a restored portion of a working dairy operation. They, like others, are adding ecotourism to their portfolio to weather the uncertainties of farming and to benefit from local tourism. They’re not as connected as some, so we had to set up our own guide reservations in the Cloud Forest Reserves, which require certified guides.
Our cabin was small and comfortable, with great deck and views. The wood in the cabins was from fallen trees that can no longer be harvested because they’re endangered. We learned on the trip that wood is poached along with exotic animals and birds from tropical forests.
The view from the deck was filled with lush, beautiful trees with birds fluttering everywhere. The family built trails as the jungle began to restore itself, but clearly, some trees had been there awhile.
We wandered the trails the first day, and I met my first strangler fig. These tropical plants earned their name by their survival tactic: they begin to grow in the canopy of a live tree, drop roots to the ground, slowly surrounding the host until they shut it down and become a tree of their own.
The Capulin strangler fig was on one trail, and on another, enormous ant mound that would be dwarfed by the underground complex and satellite mounds we couldn’t see. A parade of leaf cutter ants marched along the trail, bounty on their backs. The leaf pieces are not for their dinner table, but to feed the fungus they farm underneath the dirt. Awesome video of these ants is at Deep Look on YouTube.
Thus my first view into the complex, interconnected world of the rainforest: an environment where any creature that plows the soil and recycles organic important is absolutely critical. Even a soldierly group of ants with a labyrinthine underground world.
Emerald Toucanet
We saw other birds here, including an emerald toucanet and pale-billed woodpecker, and came upon the other ubiquitous feature of Costa Rican tourist areas: the zipline. Cabinas Capulin has a small one, which we did not avail ourselves, but up the road is apparently the Big Daddy of ziplines, and an aerial tram. We passed.
Cabinas Capulin was really our jumping off point to Monteverde and Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserves, which I’ll cover in the next post. Suffice to say, it is an inexpensive place to stay, and a coworker recommended it when we couldn’t get into the Ecolodge San Luis, a branch of University of Georgia. And Cabinas was a secluded, relaxing place to be after our rather inauspicious start.
After visiting the windswept cemetery with its oblivious gophers heaving the hallowed earth into mounds, I drove to Lower Red Rocks Lake campground. The gates and the signage speak to the neighbors and their manners.
I wandered around the campground, took swan pictures rendered fuzzy by heat waves, and then escaped the wind in my car. I pulled out to the entry road to eat lunch from the shelter of my vehicle, taking photos of the pronghorns. I thought I might hike Odell Creek trail on the way back, but it was closed for the logging operation, so I wandered back slowly to West Yellowstone, stopping while cowboys moved cattle to winter grounds.
Oregon has few wayside rests, so I was relieved to find Peter Skene Ogden Viewpoint. After hours of focused driving, I needed to stop looking at a road whipping past. I needed to walk. I immediately encountered the most disturbing warning sign I’ve seen yet, before the overlook that has killed “many dogs”, graceful retired bridge, and a historical kiosk. Looking over the cliff, I could almost hear the barking of ghost dogs.
When you live in the inner city of a massive city and your family is poor, the schoolroom is a place that will make or break your future. You have no more access to services and benefits of the developed world than a ranch kid living 100 miles from a town. You have no wealth, power or authority behind you. Your only hope for any kind of future is to get a good education and move upward and out. Like any ranch kid, you have to be able to gaze out the window and dream of a different place to keep studying. You have to learn to walk a gauntlet to school- maybe it’s prairie weather and rattlesnakes, or maybe social problems and crime that plague cities.
Silver Snag Studio 