GrossenYank

Jaco :: Costa Rica

Into the Norteamericano's playground.

Places: Monteverde, Montezuma & Jaco.

Coolest thing I did: Got hurled around in the canopy of a cloud forest on an array of zip lines and ropes and whatnot.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: This place is so American you can get USD out of the ATM. Why they bother with a local currency is beyond me...

Monteverde is not at all what I expected. I'd read about eco-tourism and being founded by Quakers and thought I was in for overdeveloped hippy nonsense. I expected any place where the national park was founded by a sect of Protestant draft dodgers from the US to just radiate dream catchers and crystals and be covered in blocks of units (sorry, condos) by now. It turns out that those wacky Quakers are also anti-development and have not allowed the roads to either be straightened or paved up into the mountains. What this means is Monteverde is still off the tour path for most package tourists and has been left to the backpackers to enjoy. It's tiny, it's still cheap and when you look out the window in the morning you're looking down on the clouds. That's pretty hard to beat.

I'm not sure what the hell eco-tourism actually means, but it seems to have something to do with cold showers, toilets that don't flush properly and walking around in the dark harassing animals. Oh, and in Costa Rica for some reason it means ziplines, or flying foxes in some parts of the world.

I spent a morning dressed like I was going to chop down trees (helmet, climbing harness, etc) being attached to long lengths of steel cable and being pushed out over vast drops through the forest canopy. I assume this is so if you're really quick you can see the blur as birds scatter at the sound of your approach. It's got nothing to do with wildlife, but it is lots of fun. It's the first out of character thing I did this week because I'm a bit of a wus when it comes to being out in the open at height (though I seem to be better on chairlifts than I used to be). The best part of the day was the tarzan swing, which involves you being tied to a long rope and then pushed off a platform to drop 5 meters, swing out over a gap in the forest and then down to be caught in a contraption made of tire inner-tubes on a platform below. I went second and couldn't see what was going on so all I saw was the bloke in front of me drop off the edge and everyone below me would could see whoop and laugh (Americans love to whoop for some reason). When I saw what I was in for I did hesitate but the Costa Rican blokes just pushed me off the edge, and I despite breaking into full tourettes I did end up with a silly grin on my face after it was over.

The night time was all about looking for wildlife in the dark. When the guy spent the first hour pointing out bugs I did think we were in trouble, but we did manage to find a two toed sloth waking up from it's 18 hour sleep to scratch it's arse quite throughly (10 mins later it was still going) and to just catch a glimpse of a couple of tarantulas as they scuttled away into their nests. We also saw this hybrid monkey/cat animal whose name I'm informed is a kinkajou, but you'll have to take their word for it because I don't know what the hell it was.

After spending the first two thirds of my short time in Costa Rica in remote spots looking for animals (and plants I suppose, but who gives a damn about flowers when there's sloths!) I have decamped to the beach for the rest of the trip. I spent a couple of nights in Montezuma, which is a relatively sheltered black sand beach on the Pacific coast. They still have dirt roads and the jungle comes right up to the hotel porches so it does feel like Costa Rica is supposed to. There are a few too man y shops with the words "vibe" or "organic" in their names, and the requisite hippies selling trinkets by the roadside but besides that nonsense it's a very relaxed place to spent a couple of days.

You can hike a short distance out of town into the jungle to a series of waterfalls (well in some cases you rock climb to them, I really shouldn't have decided shoes weren't necessary) which are all fresh water and a nice change. Being waterfalls there's this unnatural need for the backpackers to jump off the things and the second one might have been as high as 9m going down into a pool 15m deep. I had no intention of jumping off it but the couple from New Jersey who I climbed up with both jumped off and if a girl did it then there's no way in hell I couldn't (even if she was an Italian girl from Sopranos country...still would make me gay if I didn't jump off too). I wasn't very graceful. The Joisey bloke was telling me to try and point my toes and keep my arms to my side so of course I ended up landing arse first and was in enormous pain for quite some time after I broke the surface tension of the water with my bollocks. I also learned you can fit a whole load of expletives in the second between leaving the rock and hitting the water (swearing underwater, on the other hand just creates bubbles). That was the second out of character thing I've done this week, but hey, that's what this travel malarkey is all about, isn't it?

I'm not spending my last night in the once remote surfing Mecca of Jaco, which is now erecting the concrete skeletons that will soon make it look like South Beach or the Gold Coast. It's another nice stretch of black volcanic sand with jungle coming right up to the water, only now that jungle has tower blocks sticking out of it. It also suffers from the classic smell of over-development: open sewer. It's good that the surf is still pristine and I even hired a surf board for the first time in about 10 years and had a shot out there. After an hour and a half of being smacked around by the waves I managed to catch one wave and call it a day. I'm already aching so it's a good thing I've got nothing to do but sit on a bus back to San Jose tomorrow. I think with more time and fitness I could get back into surfing a bit, but today was a little demoralising. New experiences you're crap at are ok, but if you used to be better at them then it's not so much fun.

Right, so Costa Rica is pretty much at an end now. It's Friday night now and by Sunday I'll be in Havana. Probably won't hear from me until I come out the other side.

There will be mud

Cariari :: Costa Rica

THAT´S why they call it a rain forest.

Places: Lago de Atitlan (San Pedro), Guatemala City, San Jose & Tortuguero.

Coolest thing I did: Saw a 1.5 Green Turtle nesting on the beach. Sorry, la playa.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The name of the national beer of Guatamala, Gallo, means "cock". It´s not 100% so calling someone a Gallo is going to confuse them rather than offend them.

My last couple of days in Guatemala were spend in fairly relaxing fashion in a little town called San Pedro, which is on the shores of Lago de Atitlan. The lake itself is a domrnant (they hope) volcanic crater full of water and surrounded by the spires of more volcanos. It´s really not much of a surprise that Guatemala is always in the news for natural disasters when you look at just how unstable the ground a lot of the country is built on.

Anyway, the area itself, like most of the places I went in Guatemala is stunning. I was fending off the flu I´ve been carrying since Antigua so I didn´t go too crazy on the physical activity stuff this time. I could have rode horses, paddled canoes around or climbed volcanos but I decided instead to let the fresh air do me some good and spent the afternoons soaking in "Solar pools". I think they mean thermal pools, as it wouldn´t be very impressive if they meant the pools were heated by sunlight, but who knows. End result, they were warm and soothing and that.

I did read much later in the Lonely Planet that one of the other villages I could have visited is home to Maximon, the Catholic/Mayan diety who is dipicted as always smoking and drinking. He gets set up in a different house in the village each year and you can go and leave offerings of rum or cigarettes. That would have been cool to see. Like an every growing list, that´ll have to wait until next time.

The cross over to Costa Rica on the plane was far more painless than anticipated. Copa Airlines, it turns out, is a branch of Continental and all very together in their operations. They fly Brazilian made planes (I didn´t know there was such a thing) that are just beefed up corporate planes, so they´re ultra silent and only 4 people to a row. The view of Costa Rica coming in is something else, all green hills and beaches as far as the eye can see. Like most countries, the international airports of both Guatemala City and San Jose are the most modern things I saw in either.

I decided that as I was in Costa Rica early in the morning I´d attempt to get to the most remote place I was planning to visit on the first day, there by making the rest of my trip easier. I didn´t realise just how remote Tortuguero would be. Two buses and a boat through the jungle were required to get there (there´s no road and getting boats up the rough Caribbean coast isn´t real easy) but it does boast some very good wildlife.

The village itself is tiny, wedged between the Caribbean and the jungle and you can walk the whole thing in about 5 mins. Good thing you aren´t there for the nightlife but the food isn´t half bad. It´s mostly Caribbean stuff, currys, jerk chicken and all that stuff. That´s good because from what I´ve been told by others so far the food in the rest of the country isn´t much chop. In fact, it seems very hard to find culture that´s Costa Rican. There´s no real handicrafts, music or any imprint left by the indigenous people at all. After all the tradition in Mexico and Guatemala it´s a bit hard to belive it when Spanish comes out of people´s mouths here.

Onto the wildlife. I hired gum boots (it´s almost knee deep mud in places so you can´t even go in hiking boots really) and went walking on the only track you can do yourself in the national park. In that first couple of hours I saw spider monkeys, lizards that run on the water and a green snake eating a bird whole. That´s a pretty good start without a guide and I would have been fairly happy with that. There was more yet to come.

Even though I´d spoke to a couple who had spent 3 hours walking in the dark looking for nesting turtles without finding any I did think that it had to be worth a punt in any town where they have the Spanish word for "turtle" in their name. During the peak breeding season in June and July this is why most people come here but we´re most definitely early now. Turns out I picked the right night. I was having a siesta after dinner waiting for the 9.30pm start when the guide starts banging on my window at 8.30 and yelling to get out of bed. He´s talking mostly on his mobile phone but manages to cram me together with a few other people and hire us a boat to get to the beach where he´s been tipped off by the park rangers a 1.5m green turtle is making it´s way upshore and has started digging in the sand. A bit more fixing and we get permission to go and watch so after a speedy boat ride and a run along the beach in the dark, we almost trip over a scene from Jurassic Park.

I´ve seen turtles nest before, but the ones here are so much bigger than in Australia. The old girl uses here rather ill-suited flippers to dig a hole and then squirts in well over a 100 ping pong ball sized eggs. Then she spends a huge amount of time trying to flick sand back over the hole by moving around in 10 degree increments anfd flipping sand behind her. It´s funny when people have sat a little close and get it in the face. They are allowed to show you this under red lights, but not normal flash lights, so you can see but sometimes it´s hard. Still the guides seemed to follow the rules and not uncover any eggs or block the turtle´s escape back to the sea so it was quite a scene to watch. Well worth it.

My last morning was a 5.30am start so me and a big black bloke could paddle a canoe out into the jungle to go looking for wildlife. This again, didn´t disappoint and I think starting early and not using a motor allowed us to get all the more closer. There were lots of birds (I especially liked the hovering ones, like the kingfishers and honeyeaters) but it´s the megafauna that does it for most people. We saw iguanas hanging off the ends of branchs, saw both howler and spider monkeys (well, we heard the former long before we saw them) and saw small crocodiles hiding out every now and then under the branches, despite the very high tide. I was promised wildlife and man, was I getting it. We did turn back a half hour early though, and I´m glad we did. Just as we got in sight of the village the heavens opened and pretty soon he was rowing and I was bailing us out. I looked like I had been standing under a shower about 1 min after the rain started and it pretty much rained the rest of the morning. Perfect siesta weather. As a plus side this brought all the frogs right into the village that night, including some rather colourful poisonous ones, but all my pictures didn´t come out so I´ll just have to remember them. I´ve decided I´m utter crap at taking wildlife photos.

So now I´m waiting for a bus (I´ve already been on one and a boat this morning) to take me back to San Jose so I can try and seem more of the country in the very few days I have left. Still, a most auspicious start.