Salon Wanderlust | Seduced and sated in Costa Rica, page 2

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__SEDUCED AND SATED IN COSTA RICA .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

That image returns unbidden to my mind in the evening following our visit to Corcovado. I'm seated at a rather out-of-the-way table on the open-air lounge deck of our ship, re-reading Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," hoping that this tale of unrequited passion will put me in the proper languorous mood to appreciate Costa Rica. And from the corner of my eye, I can periodically observe my fellow passengers as they teem -- just like those crabs -- about the buffet dinner tables, picking over the fresh fruits and fragrant seafoods that are so much a part of any Central American adventure, all the tables a conflict of colors, their reds and yellows and greens mixed together, the seep and ooze of juices everywhere. Pigments compete, too, in the attire of dinner guests. Men sport big-flowered yahoo wear that they'd never be caught dead donning back in Seattle or Boston or Berlin. Women sashay about in bright skirts short enough to show off newly tanned thighs, a light sweat rivering between their breasts.
"Is anyone sitting here?"
Retreating from my reverie, I find Mario the guide at my shoulder, barely balancing an overloaded plate of food in one hand, a drink in the other.
In his early 30s, glib, with a flashing grin in a clean-shaven face, Mario is a native Costa Rican -- or Tico, as they're known. Educated in biology at New Orleans' Tulane University, he shares with this ship's other naturalists an intense concern for his country's environmental riches. But he also claims fluency in 120 different bird calls, and it's amazing to follow him through a forest as he imitates whistles, beckoning birds with what can only be described as the avian equivalent of come-hither lines, waiting for shrill answering notes, eventually coaxing the love-struck critters into the open. Such an affinity does Mario have with Earth's winged tribes, you'd swear he wears polo shirts only to cover up his feathers.
After some small talk about this day's adventures, I ask Mario how Costa Rica has managed to maintain such varied ecosystems, particularly its tropical rain forests.
"Well, we haven't always been so lucky," he begins, speaking around bites of chicken, guava and passion fruit. Mario tells me that 400 years ago, most of Costa Rica was lush with ancient tropical forests. But that was before Spanish interlopers, and later farmers and ranchers, started torching vast wooded tracts. Once cleared, the land made fine cattle pasture, and beginning in the 19th century, its volcanic soil nurtured domesticated crops of bananas and coffee beans.
Even that far back in time, Mario says, some folks mourned the disappearance of Costa Rica's primitive habitats, but they were powerless to stop it. Even botanists often turned a blind eye. In 1861, a British naturalist named Osbert Salvin, enchanted by tales of iridescently plumed quetzals, determined to resolve whether those green-and-red birds were flesh or folklore. When he finally found one, he immediately shot it, hauled it back to Europe and created a fashion craze for quetzal feathers that helped decimate the bird's population in Central America.
However, Mario explains, since the 1970s Costa Rica has come to protect a larger proportion of its virgin lands than any other country. Although about 318 square miles of tropical forest continue to vanish annually here, 27 percent of the land remains wooded. This preservation campaign began for ecological reasons, but it has since earned business backing. Travelers, anxious to jump aboard today's eco-touring bandwagon and increasingly in search of unfettered destinations, have quadrupled Costa Rican visits over the last decade, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the nation's coffers annually and making tourism the new dominant industry.
"The problem now is that tourists may be loving Costa Rica to death," Mario says. "They're a physical and financial strain on the national parks, and they attract hotel developers. Those developers don't understand that people come here primarily for environmental reasons. If they wanted to lie on a beach and get a tan, they could go to Mexico. We don't want Costa Rica to become another Acapulco."
That was nearly the fate of Caño Island, to which we sail on the final full day of our coastal reconnaissance.
Now a 120-acre biological preserve, located 10.5 miles west of Corcovado, Caño was planned in the early 1970s as the site for an international megaresort, a project that was scrapped only under pressure from biologists and college activists. Builders had hoped to delight guests with this isle's white-sand beaches and coral reefs, rife with tuna, groupers and manta rays -- ideal for scuba divers or snorkelers. They weren't so sensitive to commercialization's potential toll on local boa constrictors, turtles and hummingbirds. The project would have meant clearing away much of Caño's rain forest, including its strangler figs, those bizarre trees that actually grow on and around older trees, eventually choking the host until it perishes and rots away, leaving the fig behind with a hollow core.
Development on Caño might also have destroyed some of the burial grounds here, along with the artifacts that give this spot its mysterious reputation.
Only a small group of us come ashore, the hard-core explorers. Just off the beach, we enter a forest that grows progressively more dense, darker, like some Brothers Grimm vision of a woodland, rife with the skeletal scaffolding of strangler figs but with its underbrush thinly scattered. The whole place is inordinately quiet when compared to the other preserves through which we've trod on this trip. Hundreds of years ago, I recall from my reading, indigenous mainland tribes paddled out to Caño to deposit their dead. They believed that the clouds and lightning congregating over this island were somehow instrumental in transporting their loved ones to a higher plane of existence. Evidence of those natives' passage still remains in artifacts unearthed over the years by archaeologists -- bits of pottery, broken pestles, short-legged stone tables on which corn may once have been ground, all arranged in little cairns beside the main trail.
And then there are the stone spheres, or bolas.
Conventional wisdom has it that these balls, found in large numbers at several locations around Costa Rica, held religious significance for early nomadic tribes. But Erich von Däniken, who gained fleeting fame during the Nixon years with his books that posited alien visitations to Earth over the centuries, suggested in "Gods From Outer Space" that the bolas -- some of which are several feet in diameter -- "are directly linked with the visit of unknown intelligences, of intelligences who landed on our planet in a ball," inspiring indigenous peoples to create these stone tributes to their starships.
Far-fetched? Maybe. Probably. Almost surely.
Almost ...
Which all goes toward explaining why there are photos circulating of me seated atop one of those bolas, my eyes shut, my breathing slowed, my hands cupped upward as if waiting for divine intervention. I have never been a believer in tales of alien visitations or quick excursions to advanced stages of enlightenment. But after some of the remarkable things I've encountered on this trip, well, you just never know.
SALON | April 21, 1998
J. Kingston Pierce is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in Travel and Leisure, Historic Traveler and Seattle magazines. He's also the author of "San Francisco, You're History!" (Sasquatch Books) and "America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett" (KQED Books), the companion volume to the popular PBS-TV series.


T A B L E_T A L K New York stories: Share yours in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Running with the bulls By Andrew Taber Horny tradition: Dodging pissed-off bovines in southern France (04/20/98) Road Warrior By Brent Gregston Frankfurt: Where to eat, stay and play (04/17/98) Mondo Weirdo An unforgettable introduction to Beijing (04/16/98) On Guatemala's Gringo Circuit By Doug Fine Volcanoes, videos and voluptuous backpackers (04/15/98) The best little pizzerias in Naples By David Downie Where to savor Italy's best pizza (04/14/98) Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Feature archives		__SEDUCED AND SATED IN COSTA RICA .\|. PAGE 2 OF 2 That image returns unbidden to my mind in the evening following our visit to Corcovado. I'm seated at a rather out-of-the-way table on the open-air lounge deck of our ship, re-reading Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," hoping that this tale of unrequited passion will put me in the proper languorous mood to appreciate Costa Rica. And from the corner of my eye, I can periodically observe my fellow passengers as they teem -- just like those crabs -- about the buffet dinner tables, picking over the fresh fruits and fragrant seafoods that are so much a part of any Central American adventure, all the tables a conflict of colors, their reds and yellows and greens mixed together, the seep and ooze of juices everywhere. Pigments compete, too, in the attire of dinner guests. Men sport big-flowered yahoo wear that they'd never be caught dead donning back in Seattle or Boston or Berlin. Women sashay about in bright skirts short enough to show off newly tanned thighs, a light sweat rivering between their breasts. "Is anyone sitting here?" Retreating from my reverie, I find Mario the guide at my shoulder, barely balancing an overloaded plate of food in one hand, a drink in the other. In his early 30s, glib, with a flashing grin in a clean-shaven face, Mario is a native Costa Rican -- or Tico, as they're known. Educated in biology at New Orleans' Tulane University, he shares with this ship's other naturalists an intense concern for his country's environmental riches. But he also claims fluency in 120 different bird calls, and it's amazing to follow him through a forest as he imitates whistles, beckoning birds with what can only be described as the avian equivalent of come-hither lines, waiting for shrill answering notes, eventually coaxing the love-struck critters into the open. Such an affinity does Mario have with Earth's winged tribes, you'd swear he wears polo shirts only to cover up his feathers. After some small talk about this day's adventures, I ask Mario how Costa Rica has managed to maintain such varied ecosystems, particularly its tropical rain forests. "Well, we haven't always been so lucky," he begins, speaking around bites of chicken, guava and passion fruit. Mario tells me that 400 years ago, most of Costa Rica was lush with ancient tropical forests. But that was before Spanish interlopers, and later farmers and ranchers, started torching vast wooded tracts. Once cleared, the land made fine cattle pasture, and beginning in the 19th century, its volcanic soil nurtured domesticated crops of bananas and coffee beans. Even that far back in time, Mario says, some folks mourned the disappearance of Costa Rica's primitive habitats, but they were powerless to stop it. Even botanists often turned a blind eye. In 1861, a British naturalist named Osbert Salvin, enchanted by tales of iridescently plumed quetzals, determined to resolve whether those green-and-red birds were flesh or folklore. When he finally found one, he immediately shot it, hauled it back to Europe and created a fashion craze for quetzal feathers that helped decimate the bird's population in Central America. However, Mario explains, since the 1970s Costa Rica has come to protect a larger proportion of its virgin lands than any other country. Although about 318 square miles of tropical forest continue to vanish annually here, 27 percent of the land remains wooded. This preservation campaign began for ecological reasons, but it has since earned business backing. Travelers, anxious to jump aboard today's eco-touring bandwagon and increasingly in search of unfettered destinations, have quadrupled Costa Rican visits over the last decade, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the nation's coffers annually and making tourism the new dominant industry. "The problem now is that tourists may be loving Costa Rica to death," Mario says. "They're a physical and financial strain on the national parks, and they attract hotel developers. Those developers don't understand that people come here primarily for environmental reasons. If they wanted to lie on a beach and get a tan, they could go to Mexico. We don't want Costa Rica to become another Acapulco." That was nearly the fate of Caño Island, to which we sail on the final full day of our coastal reconnaissance. Now a 120-acre biological preserve, located 10.5 miles west of Corcovado, Caño was planned in the early 1970s as the site for an international megaresort, a project that was scrapped only under pressure from biologists and college activists. Builders had hoped to delight guests with this isle's white-sand beaches and coral reefs, rife with tuna, groupers and manta rays -- ideal for scuba divers or snorkelers. They weren't so sensitive to commercialization's potential toll on local boa constrictors, turtles and hummingbirds. The project would have meant clearing away much of Caño's rain forest, including its strangler figs, those bizarre trees that actually grow on and around older trees, eventually choking the host until it perishes and rots away, leaving the fig behind with a hollow core. Development on Caño might also have destroyed some of the burial grounds here, along with the artifacts that give this spot its mysterious reputation. Only a small group of us come ashore, the hard-core explorers. Just off the beach, we enter a forest that grows progressively more dense, darker, like some Brothers Grimm vision of a woodland, rife with the skeletal scaffolding of strangler figs but with its underbrush thinly scattered. The whole place is inordinately quiet when compared to the other preserves through which we've trod on this trip. Hundreds of years ago, I recall from my reading, indigenous mainland tribes paddled out to Caño to deposit their dead. They believed that the clouds and lightning congregating over this island were somehow instrumental in transporting their loved ones to a higher plane of existence. Evidence of those natives' passage still remains in artifacts unearthed over the years by archaeologists -- bits of pottery, broken pestles, short-legged stone tables on which corn may once have been ground, all arranged in little cairns beside the main trail. And then there are the stone spheres, or bolas. Conventional wisdom has it that these balls, found in large numbers at several locations around Costa Rica, held religious significance for early nomadic tribes. But Erich von Däniken, who gained fleeting fame during the Nixon years with his books that posited alien visitations to Earth over the centuries, suggested in "Gods From Outer Space" that the bolas -- some of which are several feet in diameter -- "are directly linked with the visit of unknown intelligences, of intelligences who landed on our planet in a ball," inspiring indigenous peoples to create these stone tributes to their starships. Far-fetched? Maybe. Probably. Almost surely. Almost ... Which all goes toward explaining why there are photos circulating of me seated atop one of those bolas, my eyes shut, my breathing slowed, my hands cupped upward as if waiting for divine intervention. I have never been a believer in tales of alien visitations or quick excursions to advanced stages of enlightenment. But after some of the remarkable things I've encountered on this trip, well, you just never know. SALON \| April 21, 1998 J. Kingston Pierce is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared in Travel and Leisure, Historic Traveler and Seattle magazines. He's also the author of "San Francisco, You're History!" (Sasquatch Books) and "America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett" (KQED Books), the companion volume to the popular PBS-TV series.