It’s impossible to return from Costa Rica without a new appreciation for nature
It may sound like a simplistic phrase, but the natural wonders of Costa Rica prove it’s anything but
The blue morpho butterfly’s iridescent colours glisten as it effortlessly swoops through the air, the howler monkeys chatter fills the high canopy of trees and the crocodile blends into the stream so well, you’d be forgiven for missing him.
This is Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park — one of the world’s most biodiverse regions — and as in much of the country, nestled between Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the south, the Caribbean to the east and the Pacific to the west, nature’s abundance is captivating and inescapable. Costa Rica means rich coast. And the nation of 50,000-square-feet boasts of an explosion of life. About 40 per cent of the land is protected (roughly 27 per cent by the government and 10 per cent privately), as are all of the animals, islands and rivers. The country, encompassing 12 climatic zones, is blessed with everything from mountains to mangroves.
Walking through the national park, Tony Jimenez Rogas, a guide with Aguila de Osa who’s been coming to the reserve on the Osa Peninsula in the country’s southwest for more than 40 years, points out brightly-coloured scarlet macaws, brown boobies and brown pelicans. There are about 300 types of birds, 36 kinds of bats and four species of cats — jaguars, ocelots and margays — in the undisturbed 424-square-kilometre park, which is the last remaining large and sustainable lowland tropical rainforest in Central America.
We hike from the San Pedrillo Ranger Station to the Casa Corcovado Jungle Lodge and back for a break with some mouth-wateringly good, fresh pineapple, papaya and watermelon. Then we set off in the other direction, wading through a stream and trudging through the rainforest to the beautiful San Pedrillo Waterfall.
It doesn’t take long for my group of seven to wade in, swim around and enjoy the refreshing pool. We take turns swinging like Tarzan from the Ficus vines, swim hard against the current to reach the falls, and once there clutch the rocks and then duck behind the chutes for the sheer exhilaration. The rush of water, the lush rainforest and the joy of seeing wildlife in a vast, natural habitat really casts a spell. And it stays with me. Like tuning into a certain frequency — the acute appreciation and respect for the natural world took centre stage and remained throughout my trip.
The next day, I’m in a small boat on the choppy Pacific Ocean looking at lightning bolts ahead of me and wondering if diving in this weather is really such a good idea. The dive-master Jean-Paul Arana, from Costa Rica Adventure Divers, assures me the storm is a ways off and that we’ ll be fine.
Thankfully, the storm stops before we back roll off the boat and go underwater by Cano Island, one of the best snorkelling and diving sites in the country. We are rewarded by seeing two huge turtles, a cluster of rock lobsters and many tropical fish. But the highlight is swimming with five white tip sharks who seem to be play fighting. I later learn from Arana that it was in fact four males trying to mate with a female — who was having none of it. When we surface, we see a humpback whale breaching a short distance in front of the boat.
Full disclosure: I think the underwater world is amazing and I’m happy to see monkeys, birds and the like, however I’ve never been much of a fan of insects and rodents. But a night hike, with Tracie Stice and Gianfranco Gomez, by Drake Bay on the peninsula changes all that. Seeing and learning more about the critters makes them much more interesting. And as most tropical insects and mammals are nocturnal.
Stice points out a golden orb spider — which NASA has shown can adapt to the weightless environment of outer space and weave webs there. Our group also sees a Spirostreptid millipede and Stice explains that some millipedes have toxins, which monkeys use as insect repellent. And on the mammal front, we see a woolly opossum that literally stops in its tracks when it hears Gomez trill out “ch-ch-ch,” capturing the little creature’s attention.
It all reinforces the idea that nature is indeed amazing, as Juvenal Acuna, my naturalist guide throughout my trip, often says. And in a country like Costa Rica, it’s difficult to disagree.
From the Osa Peninsula, we take a boat across part of the Pacific Ocean and through some mangroves to the town of Sierpe — where we stop to admire some of the mysterious stone spheres, thought to date back to 300 BC to 300 AD, at the UNESCO World Heritage Finca 6 archeological site. From there, we set off on a trip across the Terraba River, the biggest in the area, and over the Talamanca Mountain Range — where you can find the Cerro Chirripo Mountain, which at 3,900 metres above sea level is the highest in the country. Acuna points it out as we take the route up the Cero de la Muerte. The name is slightly disconcerting, but Acuna assures me it got the moniker many years ago when the Spanish came this way.
En route, we pass through rainforest, into the cloud forest and eventually into elfin forest. Acuna explains how different crops grow at the various heights, and he points out that trees become shorter the higher up we go. “Nature is amazing, it always finds a way to grow,” Acuna says, adding that the country’s lucky to have rich soil due to its 112 volcanoes. More than half are dormant, but two in the central valley are active.
Costa Rica’s top crops are Arabica coffee, bananas and pineapples. In terms of industry, agriculture ranks third for the country, after tourism and technology respectively. About 5-million people live in the democratic republic, which is known as a world leader in environmental conservation. Almost the entirety of the country’s energy is produced from nature and President Carlos Alvardo Quesada announced plans to become the first carbon-neutral nation in the world by 2021 — when the country celebrates the 200th anniversary of its independence.