Trip Report - Costa Rica

[Alaska]

I kept pretty detailed notes on my trip to Costa Rica in 1995, but since it was 10 years ago would it be still useful to people today?
A1

Of course A1. Give it up brother!

[Alaska]

I'll have to post this in installments, is there a way to keep my posts together so its cohesive?

Having just come off a 3 month long small boat survey in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, I was cold, wet, and exhausted. Back in Anchorage I saw a travel advertisement for a language school/homestay situation in San Jose. So I reserved a 2 week stay at the school with another 10 weeks free to just backpack around the country, from mid september to mid December. and off I went. One Long day of flying later, I arrived in San Jose sometime after midnight. I was beat, I remember very little about arriving, other than clearing customs took no time at all. Also, some tico in the seat next to me, a business type with excellent english, leaned over on final approach and told me, "Remember, my friend: the women here love to F**K." I was (and still am, alas) a pretty straightlaced guy and that rocked me back on my heels a bit. I remember thinking, 'well, thats an odd, out of the blue comment.' I had never travelled internationally before, let alone to Latin America; I was totally focused on learning about the areas natural history and picking up some spanish. I'd not thought there might be more to my education than just language.

I remember stepping out of the airport into an incredibly warm night, but I'm beat so I don't really notice much, except for the fragrant rattling of some kind of palm frond. I'm met by the language school rep and whisked off in some tiny car down an absolute bewildering maze to my host family: a single woman with a son of 12. She was a no nonsense matron of 45 or so, short and round, with rapidfire english and spanish, and for some reason she always called me Paul, which is not my name, I guess because its similar to my last name. A lot of the Costa Ricans did that, maybe it has something to do with how latin Americas naming convention works, I don't know. Anyways, she was also my language teacher at the institute. I think though I learned more ultimately from her son, he was one fun kid. always smiling and happy and wanting to play.

OK, I'll write more later.

[HonkyTonk]

"...is there a way to keep my posts together so its cohesive?"

I usually type it out either in an email I can save or MS Word, edit and finish, then simply copy/paste all at once. I wouldn't type something long on the Board. I've lost entire posts because it timed out, a wrong key got hit, or I got bumped offline. Maybe write some, save it, write some more etc.

There's no hurry to get it done. I like the details of someones view of the country, others like reading about the women only. If you cover a wide range of things, then there's something for everybody.

Now get to work! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Alaska]

Barra Honda, December
(I used the Lonely Planet Guide to Costa Rica, which is how I even knew about Barra Honda. Visit it during the dry season, as the caves are too dangerous during the rainy season.)

I’m on the lower flank of Cerro Barra Honda. After a long ride on a hot bus from San Jose I was dumped unceremoniously on the side of a dusty road. I picked a direction—up—and began hiking. After a couple miles I came to the village Nacaome, where I found a family who offered me a field to camp in and meals with them if I’d like. I quickly agreed. They are very cheerful and friendly, and the youngest son has adopted me as his soccer pal. We kicked a ball around for a couple hours after dinner this evening. I will turn in early though as tomorrow I am going caving.

Cerro Barra Honda is a rocky ridge draped in greenery with bony, honeycombed shoulders showing through. It is a massive up thrusting of limestone, once an ancient seabed, now a jagged escarpment reminiscent of a southwest US mesa. Tomorrow 3 local teenagers, guides of the park, will take me to visit some of its caverns. I use the word guide loosely, because when my adopted Barra Honda family learned I wanted to see some caves, they summoned Favio, a muscular youth with a quick smile. Between his broken English and my broken Spanish, I interviewed him as well as I could. It seems that he and his friends are apprentice rangers who take travelers into some of the minor caves, as well as patrolling the park to help prevent souvenir hunting and graffiti within the caves. As I had never been able to get hold of anyone at the Park proper, even when in San Jose, I decided to accept Favio’s help. I checked out the equipment issued to him by the National Park. It was simple but practical and well maintained. I’ve done some climbing so I decided to rely on my knowledge base as a backup if Favio, Jamil, and Ortir proved less than adept. I needn’t have worried, as it turned out; they proved to be excellent, enthusiastic companions, guides for real.

The next day we started early, hiking up one of the village’s roads before striking off onto a trail. The trail was dry and hard, and the air muggy with a promise of far more heat to come. None of us had gone far before we were sticky with sweat. The lower heights were uninteresting; aside from the heat and the loud buzzing of insects I might have been on one of my summertime rambles in the dry woods of the homestead. For a while the path followed a dry riverbe about 4 feet deep, with jagged limestone rocks, pockmarked like Swiss cheese. Their edges and points punched sharply at the soles of my boots. It was the first hint of the show to come. But the riverbed and the path soon diverged and the heat and the steepening climb I paid less and less attention to the limestone formations poking up through the dirt, pausing only to avoid stepping on a coral snake (sp.?) crossing the trail.

Gradually the trail changed. As we neared the top of the ridge and the slope lessened, small limestone features gave way to large, massive blocks, almost like dinosaur bones. The pockmarks certainly looked like ossicles, I could imagine them once being filled with marrow and churning out saurian blood.

At the edge of the ridge crown we stepped out onto a lookout promontory. The scrub around us was brown and unremarkable, but the view was fantastic: the Gulf of Nicoya, hazy and indistinct in the heat. We drank some water then resumed walking.

A short distance on we came to the cave entrance. In contrast to the light dappled slope the cave mouth was a pure black plug. Without eyes adjusted to the dark there was no way to gauge the depth. Favio said it was a drop of 20 meters. And so we rigged ropes and a small metal ladder with rungs only 6 inches wide, pitching their free ends down out of sight.

One at a time we descended. The way the ladder pinned against the lip as it first ran into the cave meant you could only get the barest toe grip and maybe 2 fingers of each hand in place. Then you were past the overhang and descending freely through the air. The ladder twisted each time a climber moved and because of the forces our weight offered our feet were always well forward of our shoulders and arms. We were belayed by a rope and bowline under our arms but without a harness, a fall would have been brutal if not dislocating. But I’d spent the previous spring as a deckhand on a tall ship so I was used to twisting footropes and odd drops. And of course not being able to see the bottom helped.

Once at the bottom, I stepped from the ladder and onto the floor of my first cave. Raised on a diet of National Geo and Jules Verne it was just as I’d hoped for. The floor was steep, jumbled with broken rock and wet mud. The walls and ceiling sloped and creased, gray and white, colored by massive water-stains, and the varying hues of stalactites and stalagmites, curtains and folds. Some looked like frosting, others like massive wax drips, there were even huge watermelon and squash shapes, Spanish sugar-like, hanging by one end. Everything sparkled! Save for the floors mud, which looked spilled fudge.

Next we descended to the second cavern. This was done by first approaching a 25 foot cliff with bad footing, then swinging out and down onto a 30 foot long extended aluminum ladder that bent with a climbers weight. There was no belay. At the bottom we squeezed through a small passageway into the second cavern, and then the third. They were very similar, with formations of daggers, low radius but high length cones, folded warpings of stone like cloth, and delicate kernel-like formations once formed by standing water long since drained away. The kernels looked like corn-ice caused by wind and ablation. These cavern chambers held miniatures of themselves in many forms, from shelves high on the walls that lacked only carven figures to be a nativity scene, to tiny cracks where a shown light revealed another cavern in duplicate, with tiny swords and curtains and flutings.

The final cavern we visited held the crowning glory: the Organ, a massive 20-foot high series of pipes and curtains, sparkling as if with confectionary. Many of the largest grains seemed to shiver like an oscillating star with the air currents. During an earthquake, it’s said that the organ plays like giant wind chime. I’m not sure a cave is where I want to be during an earthquake though, no matter how good the caverns harmonics.

[RXD]

It is one of the famous place for tourism. Active travelers can surf, hike, snorkel and spot wildlife for starters .All this and more await you in one of the world's last safe havens for wildlife. Nobody can bore there.