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Travel Costa Rica

Killing time in Costa Rica

Volcanoes, cloud forest, jungle rivers and great coffee

One of the challenges faced by thrift-conscious travellers is finding creative ways to fill those inevitable blocks of time between the arrival of one red-eye special and the departure of the next.

After an all night flight to San Jose, and faced with an unscheduled three day lay-over, we checked into the Cacts Hotel, selected a local tour at random from brochures in the lobby, and crashed for the night. Our room, facing an interior courtyard, was cool and quiet and by the time our minivan arrived at 6 o'clock the next morning the previous days jet-lag was just a bad memory.

Ad hoc tours are always a gamble but later, standing on a tiny platform 80 feet above the ground and preparing to launch myself along a cable descending into the forest canopy, I had pause to wonder just how big a gamble this was.

We headed off to breakfast at a coffee plantation on the flanks of Poas Volcano, where neat rows of coffee plants thrive in the rich volcanic soil of the Meseta Central. The coffee "cherries" are beginning to ripen and the rolling terraced fields are dotted with pickers of all ages. It is hot, monotonous piece-work, paid by the basket, and only the first of many tedious steps between the pickers’ basketful of red cherries and my cup of morning brew.

After breakfast we continued up to the crater of Poas Volcano which, after 60 years of dormancy, came to life with a roar in the 1950s and has been sputtering ever since. During our visit the barren, brightly coloured crater was occupied by a steaming lake where jets from active fumaroles filled the air with pungent sulfurous gas.

Leaving Poas we drove north, across the continental divide, to a coffee break at a Hummingbird Gallery near San Fernando waterfall. After admiring the iridescent green birds, and luring huge heat-seeking tarantulas onto our bare arms, we continued down into the rainforest of the Caribbean lowlands and boarded a small motorboat for a two hour trip down the Rio Sarapique. The deep, slow moving river is flanked by dense jungle and overhung by a shimmering green canopy of leaves and vines that filter and soften the harsh tropical sun.

A couple six-foot American crocodiles lie as motionless as logs on the bank of a muddy backwater. Their smaller cousins, the caiman, are more numerous but all we see are their eyes and nostrils protruding above the dark water. A group of white-nosed coatis, long tails pointed skyward, drop onto the sandbar beside us. A startled green lizard races toward the water’s edge and keeps right on running to the other side. Known locally as "Jesus Christ lizards" these two-foot-long, mini©dinosaurs can run fast enough on the webbed feet of their long hind legs to pull off the biblical trick whenever they feel threatened.

The boat operator cuts the engine and we drift silently in the sluggish current. He has spotted a three-toed sloth hanging on a branch not 20 feet away, yet so perfectly camouflaged that it is nearly invisible. Reaching with a long arm it pulls a leafy branch to its mouth. The movement is agonizingly slow, but not without a certain rhythmic grace – like a slow-motion replay of tai chi.

Almost helpless on the ground, sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down and feeding on leaves in the forest canopy. Relying entirely on camouflage for protection and with food never more than a few inches away, the animal has sunk into an existence just short of complete torpor. Their fur is host to green algae and hoards of beetles, mites, moths, and caterpillars that graze on their moldy hair. They sleep at least 18 hours a day and with a metabolic rate about half that of other mammals sloths are barely able to maintain body temperature. Their diet of virtually indigestible leaves requires a huge, ruminant-like stomach and long intestinal tract where food remains for up to a week. To compensate for the weight of this oversized digestive system, and still remain light enough for their arboreal lifestyle, sloths have sacrificed muscle, becoming little more than living compost sacs, with just enough strength and mobility to move from one leaf to the next.

In contrast to the glacially slow process of eating, a sloth's ritual of elimination, surely a pivotal event in its life, is more akin to a volcanic eruption. But what goes in must come out so about once a week the animal descends laboriously to the base of its tree, pokes a hole in the forest litter with its stubby tail and voids the week’s supply of undigested feces into the hole. After watering down the mess with urine and using its hind limbs to bury it, the much relieved animal returns to the all-providing sanctuary of the forest canopy.

A couple kilometres farther down river the boat operator announces that we are within rifle range of Nicaragua – time to turn around!

Today it's just a joke but in the 1980s when the Sandinistas and Contras were squaring off with the help of Oliver North and his CIA buddies, it would not have been prudent to enter this close to the border.

We spent that night in one of the spacious cabanas at the Arenal Country Inn near the foot of Arenal Volcano, one of Costa Rica's seven active volcanoes. After a long dormancy the mountain awoke in 1968 with a devastating eruption and has been almost continuously active ever since – sometimes violently. From our cabana we watched clouds of ash and vapour puffing from the summit and, after dark, saw blocks of incandescent lava roll down the slope and break up in spectacular showers of sparks.

Our second night, at the Hotel de Montana in the heart of Monteverde, set us up for a full day of exploring the cloud forest. Following a system of trails linking six suspension bridges slung up to 130 feet above the ground gave us a new perspective on life in the dripping, mist shrouded jungle canopy. Every branch supports a profusion of mosses, pineapple-like bromalids, vines, and orchids all struggling for a place in the sun. Below us a noisy group of white faced monkeys is feeding in the very top branches of an inga tree.

After completing the "skywalk" we followed a narrow trail to the next part of our tree-top adventure. The forest is surprising open. The plants that grow under the dense canopy of the cloud forest giants have given up in the competition for sunlight and adapted to life in the cool, shadowy world of the jungle floor. Arriving at the base of a huge strangler fig tree we are fitted with climbing harnesses, pulleys and heavy leather gloves. We duck through a cleft in its buttressed trunk and look up through the hollow interior to a circular patch of light high up in the forest canopy. The inner walls are criss-crossed with intertwined air roots that provide good hand- and foot-holds for the climb to a tiny platform slung from a branch at the top of the hollow trunk. Standing there, 80 feet above the forest floor, we are still well below the leafy canopy.

The tree we have just climbed is not unique but rather a very successful, though brutal, adaptation for gaining a place in the sun. In fact, the strangler fig has carried the aggressive competition for light to its ultimate extreme – murder. Instead of starting at the bottom and trying to outgrow its neighbours it starts at the top of its doomed host. A fig seed, dropped by a bird or bat, germinates on the branch of a mature tree and starts its life as a small epophyte in the canopy. The plant sends out cable-like aerial roots that descend to the forest floor, absorb nutrients and water, and allow the expanding crown of the strangler fig to shade out the support tree. The thin aerial roots become thicker and more numerous and like botanical boa constrictors wrap around and strangle the host tree. Eventually the intertwined roots fuse together, forming a massive woody straitjacket within which the host tree dies and rots away, leaving a hollow trunk like the one we just climbed through.

In all honesty the life cycle of the fig tree was not foremost on my mind as I snapped my pulley onto the zip line and peered down the cable to the next platform 200 metres away. The trick, I was told, is to keep your speed up. Otherwise you get stuck half way along the cable and have to haul your way along by hand. There are 2 km of cable slung through the forest canopy and, to top it off, an 80 foot free rappel back down to earth. The ride is fast and fun but more of an adrenalin rush than an educational experience.

What started as a resigned ploy to kill time turned into a memorable, fast-paced experience with a clear message – three days is only enough to whet one’s appetite for more of Costa Rica.