Costa Rica

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And Andy makes it look easy Enlarge photo

I spend much of the morning stretching in anticipation of my 11:00 surfing lesson. As I pay my $65 fee, the salespeople at the hotel say it’s great for everybody. Then, at breakfast, a man who surfed all his childhood tells me he tried but couldn’t get up and was “humbled.” A ramshackle minibus meets us at the gate of our hotel. As Andy and I climb in, the beach boy greets us. It sounds like he says, “Are you ready to go suffering?” We pick up a few other gringo tourists and head for the beach. Someone predicts, “This’ll be good exercise.” I worry out loud, “Uh-huh, in humiliation.”

At the beach, we all put on tight stretch surfing shirts to protect our chests and bellies from chafing…all the ups and downs of learning to catch a wave. Then — looking like the Gilligan’s Islandcrew — we get in a line on the beach to “loosen up.” Our coach, Alberto, has us running, shuffling in a line to the right, running backwards, and shuffling to the left…perhaps just to entertain the locals hanging out at the beach.

Alberto then draws a line in the sand and says, “Lay on this.” He demonstrates the one critical motion for surfing: arch back — like a yoga-style mermaid stretch…hands below nipples…right leg stays back…quickly snap to your feet, bringing the left leg to the front as you stand. Repeat.

After a too-hasty intro on the beach, we’re issued our surfboards — not light, soft top, easy for my toes to grip, well-worn like something that’s weathered lots of turbulence. With runaway straps lashed to our ankles, we walk into the sea like a holiday chain gang.

The waves are just right for beginners. Several beach boys join Alberto and steady our boards facing the beach until just the right moment. Anticipating the cresting wave, they give us a shove (we are pre-paddlers relying on our coaches for propulsion) and yell, “Ready…go…up!” The kids in our group get up first time. They ride like daredevils on the ski slope. The older surfers in our gang struggle for the strength and overthink things.

Catching a wave, I get only “up” on my knees. Still, I sense the thrill of surfing. Even on my knees, I lean forward to go faster, lean back to slow down. As Alberto promised, the board — like a bike — is more stable when it’s moving. Perhaps the hard plastic fins are working.

The lunge muscle in my left leg is just not there, and my arms aren’t strong enough to throw my body up. Alberto says to not stop at the knees. Don’t think face-down. Pretend your head is going up first. Your head rockets up in one motion, springing the body off the board. Forget the right leg…it stays behind. I need to thrust up and plant my left foot directly under my body at a snowboarding angle for balance.

I fail and fail. Come close and tumble. The board spins disobediently away from me, dragging me like a small boy deserving a spanking toward the shore. I tame the board, face the waves, and fight through the surf back out. Hold the nose of the board high, cut it into the waves. You catch a wave going in. Catch a wave wrong struggling back out, and your board can smash you in the face.

My teacher says some old, out-of-shape guys just give up. He likes my determination. I flop onto the board like a rock cod that just jumped into a dinghy. My belly button lines up with the board’s mid-line. I’m facing the white Styrofoam surface, water sloshing and slapping, key left leg resting (knowing victory hinges on its ability to get me up), hands not gripping the edge (because then you lose altitude) but in the center, ribs pressing on my thumbs, coiled, poised, waiting for the gentle push by my teacher and the “Ready…go…up!” command. My nose is one inch from the board. My entire periphery is filled with the battered white of the board and warm Costa Rica sea slopping and sloshing before my eyes. People are gone. My soundtrack is just water.

Alberto promises to catch me a good wave. Suddenly the water is smooth and quiet. It’s the calm before the wave. My coach says this is it, and gives me a strong push. I pull my head back, see the entire front of the board as I arch up, then, in one motion, I push everything up. My left leg lands just right immediately under my body, and — like a weightlifter struggling for a personal best — it straightens up.

Suddenly I’m rushing before a foamy cauldron as the wave charges toward the shore…and I lead the way. I’m standing high above the noisy rush of the water, playing with my control, traversing as if to extend the ride. Then I crouch as if racing before an engulfing tunnel of a giant wave… even though I am on the baby slope in a harmless little three-footer. The ride seems longer than it is. And that 15 seconds of surfer exhilaration is worth all the surfering.

Jumping from my board as the wave runs out of steam, I pick up the board. Alberto back out at sea is giving a big two-thumbs-up. No more chain gang, I head back to catch another wave.

Photography is lots of fun in a place like Costa Rica. Here are a few photos that bring home some of the experiences and fun we had. (I’m still debating in my mind whether or not to share with you my surfing — which in Costa Rican dialect sounds a lot like “suffering” — experience…complete with photos.)

In a land where most traffic seems to be off-road and on foot, suspension bridges are a bouncy godsend. Enlarge photo	Long hikes are rewarded by idyllic waterfalls and swimming holes. Enlarge photo

Spacey Tracy hands out head lamps and brings light to the creepy crawly dark. Enlarge photo

Tracy the Bug Lady meets her nightly bug tour group in the open living room of our lodge deep in the rain forest of Costa Rica. A moth is slamming spastically at the lamp shade. Spacey Tracy, as if in a trance, gets eye contact with the six of us, silently pulls out her keychain, and shakes it like a tambourine. The moth dives to the floor and freezes. Tracy says, “I didn’t know if this kind of moth had ears. It does. When it heard the ultrasound from my keys, it thought I was a bat honing in on it…and dove for cover.”

Looking at our no-longer-reluctant kids, and realizing we were in for an unusual experience, we embarked on a two-hour tour. Donning our headlamps, we followed Tracy through the ferns into the dark. She stopped, shone her light 20 meters down the trail, turned to us saying, “Check this spider out,” and walked over to a fallen leaf. She turned it over to reveal a spider. I asked how she knew it was there from such a distance. She said, “Eye shine…crushed-emerald eye shine.” The bugs and frogs that surround us all have mirrors at the backs of their eyes, so that when you shine a light on them, they shine back. Moths are gold. Frogs are orange. Spiders shine emerald-green. Looking around again, I saw crushed emeralds sprinkled through the jungle.

This spider was a tarantula. Picking him up, she said, “Not the tarantula of your imagination, just a small burrowing guy…mildly venomous. Who wants to hold him?” After a stunned pause from the group, I offered, and she placed him — half the size of my thumb — on my palm.

Farther down the trail, Tracy stopped at a moss-covered bank of red clay. She played with a tuft of moss with her pointer, and whispered, “If you count yourself as a spider enthusiast, we have here perhaps one of the five best in the world — the trap door spider. Right now he’s holding his hatch down with his fangs…14 ounces pull-down strength.” Later she got the hatch open, revealing a slick, round passage (about half an inch in diameter) and a sneaky spider waiting for his dinner.

Next we looked closely at a nearby spider web as Tracy said, “In nature, it’s the very rare insect that dies of old age.” What looked like a stick fallen on the web was a carefully gathered line of body parts — bits of critters the spider caught but chose not to eat. Tracy hit the fake stick and revealed part of it was the actual spider — patiently waiting to make his stick of victim debris a little longer.

On another web, a spider looked like a dew drop. As Tracy began pulling out an almost microscopic line of silk, she said, “I’m harvesting spider silk from a dew drop spider’s butt. This stuff is stronger than Teflon. The US military is the biggest researcher of this stuff. From it, they could make the ultimate light-and-comfortable bulletproof vests…perhaps even superlight airplanes.”

A bug landed on Tracy and crawled into her safari shirt. She pulled it out and revealed a tiny ladybug with a black-and-white Lego-man face on its back. Getting closer to her little Lego man, she pointed out how the wings came together to make a straight line. That means it’s a beetle, not a roach. If you lined up all the species of animals on earth, every fifth one would be a beetle. There are over 500,000 types. Rove beetles were used in China 2,000 years ago to remove unwanted tattoos. She looked at me and said, “Got a loved one with tattoos? Remember the Rove beetle.”

I walked back to our lodge with a new appreciation of the generally unseen side of life in the tropics…through a treacherous wonderland of crushed emeralds.

Jackie is clipped on and ready to fly 400 meters through the jungle, 50 meters above the ravine, and a leather cable grip to slow her landing at the next platform. Enlarge photo

Keeping older kids happy on vacation is pretty easy in zippy Costa Rica. Here Andy enjoys a blitz tour of a plush jungle canopy. Enlarge photo

Walking through the tropical rainforest, I was mesmerized by vertical ropes thick and thin. It was a fecund free-for-all, with a humid scribble of plants and trees all reaching both high for the sun and low for the nutrients.

I couldn’t stop thinking of the whole thing powered by leafy solar panels as the tip-top of just about everything living jockeyed for a place in the sun. While the canopy is a commotion of God’s solar panels, the ground level is a greedy scramble for nutrients, with lots of clever ways for plants and trees to catch and funnel detritus into their roots.

The strangler fig — an impressively patient killer — winds like some Boy Scout decoration in a perfect spiral up a huge tree. Someday the host tree will be gone and the dainty, innocuous-looking fig vine will be a fat tree itself — with a hollow interior. Here in the jungle, eventually everything eats everything.

I asked my friend Kurt Kutay, who runs Wildland Adventures (www.wildland.com), to set up the best possible eight days in Costa Rica for a variety of experiences. This was a rare chance for our entire family to be together, and this jungle experience seemed the perfect way for all of us to recreate.

We split our time between two fine hotels: Arenas del Mar in Manuel Antonio had a great restaurant, golf carts to zip guests to and from the beach, and low-key elegance at the gateway to the Manuel Antonio National Park. La Paloma lodge on Drake Bay was extremely remote — a Robinson-Crusoe-wins-the-lottery kind of place — on the Osa Peninsula near the Corcovado National Park. We spent two days with nature guides in the two different parks (and liked Manual Antonio best — more first growth and animal variety). Between all the boogie-boarding in the surf and fruit smoothies, we had lots of exercise. In fact, the week reminded me how fun it is to be physical.

We got to our remote La Paloma lodge on a land rover — fording rivers and jolloping through miles of mammoth potholes past pigs striking piggy poses in mud puddles and humble tin-roof farms. At the end of the road, a boat was waiting to motor us to our lodge. For three days of coming and going, we had a new term: “wet landing” or “dry landing” (almost always wet — hop off the boat and walk through the surf to wherever we were bound).

Half of Costa Rica lives less muggy in its central plain. But we were where it’s maximum muggy. Here on the west coast, things don’t even dry when hung in the sun. The temperature is the same all year. Buildings are constructed with no windows. La Paloma lodge was off the grid, powered by its own generator — no air-con, just fans. Kayaking up the lazy lagoon that creeps mysterious inland from Drake Bay, daydreaming through a plush garden of sticky pistil flowers, learning the art of hammock, munching fresh-baked cookies, openly enjoying a little PDA with tiny lizards, and refining an appreciation of pico de gallo salsa, even a workaholic could be thoroughly on vacation here.

Our kids hiked, flashlights in hand, over the suspension bridge and into the village to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the local gang, while Anne and I hung out in the polished-wood-and-rattan public area of our lodge with the other parents. One by one, each couple turned in. Then, well before midnight, we too succumbed to jungle time as a roar of tiny creatures in the darkness all seemed to sing it’s time for bed. At 2:30, Jackie gently guided Andy home, encouraging him to follow the little circle the flashlight made and digging his shoe out of the mud when stuck.

The adrenaline experience of the trip was doing the Zip Line Canopy Tour — a Costa Rican tourism favorite. A family with a huge plot of jungle strung up platforms high in trees laced together by 13 cables, each 100 to 400 meters apart, as high as 60 meters above the ravines. They now earn a good living giving modern-day Tarzans the thrill of their dreams. With guides clipping us from one cable to the next, we couldn’t have fallen to our deaths if we tried. There were no lessons in nature here…just the smell of burning leather as we’d pull down on the cable with our hand guard to slow each landing. Coursing through the trees, this was thunderclaps of fun.

My favorite day was the “Campesinos Reserve Day” — an all-day hike crossing a Man Who Would Be King-style fantasy suspension bridge (the longest in CR), swimming in pools at the base of tropical waterfalls, accompanied by a farmer on a horse who let me walk and whack with his machete. We dropped in on his extremely remote farmhouse, where his wife ground up sugarcane for a refreshing drink as our kids got to see a family living in perfect tropical mountain simplicity.

Hopping a fast boat, we sped with the flying fish (stopping only for a little whale watching) to the distant Cano Island — a bushy green button in the middle of the Pacific famous for its fine snorkeling. Poking into a swirling school of big-eye fish, analyzing the churning patterns of sunlit bubbles as the surf crashed over the rocks, and marveling at the ability of huge stingrays to disappear into a muddy bottom, we enjoyed another world. During lunch at the island’s ranger station, we spied a crocodile perched still as a rock on a rock, waiting to knock a pelican silly, while six or eight children frolicked nearby in the surf.

The last morning finally arrived. I spent the hour before our departure time mostly face-down on a La Paloma massage table. With the soothing roar of the distant surf rather than New Age music setting the mood, I reviewed a wonderful week in my mind.

Then, wistfully, I strapped my wristwatch back on, and we headed for the airstrip. I mentioned there was no rush, as this was the first time in our lives the plane would wait for us. Jackie said she wanted to take flying lessons. Andy marveled at how he hadn’t held a cell phone in his hand for a week. Anne tidied up her list of 30 or so different birds spotted. And all of us began the day-long return: Drake’s Bay to San José to Houston to Seattle, where I’ll redirect my mind to a land where the flora and fauna is more…European.

Coming up: Our evening with spacey Tracy the bug lady and my attempt at surfing.

I like fancy culture: music, art, and history. For me (while I love being in and enjoying nature) learning about flora and fauna ranks near the bottom, just above geology and genealogy. But for 48 hours, I’ve been steep on the learning curve in the best classroom I can imagine for getting turned on to plants and critters: a remote national park on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Charming, knowledgeable guides — like Pablo, who led us on a four-hour hike today — make exploring vivid and experiential.

Walking under a jungle canopy, I hear rustling and look up. A troop of white-faced Cappuccino monkeys swing by like a class of grade-school Tarzans out on a field trip, their tails gripping branches as dexterously as their arms. Suddenly, the “alpha male” breaks off a branch and throws it down as if to remind us, “No one has sex with any of these monkeys but me. Bop juh wah wah wah.”

Later, Pablo explains how termites contribute to the finely tuned ecosystem, eating only dead wood. (The bad news: houses are made out of dead wood — that’s a reason why you won’t find many old houses around here.) The termites’ smell keeps other insects away, so monkeys smear them on their fur — giving “bug juice” a whole new spin. Then, popping one into his mouth, Pablo reminds us that termites are also full of nutrition…if bitter.

Dark, furry balls hang like stuck basketballs high in the canopy. They are sloths, which literally sleep away most of their lives. They hang upside-down so well that they are even found dead just hanging from their favorite branch. Then Costa Rica’s second biggest rodent, the agouti, romps clumsily by. This is a “planter”: it steals fruits and nuts, digs a hole, and buries them. As they generally forget to come back to eat their stash, they spend their lives unknowingly planting lots of trees. That makes them everyone’s favorite rodent.

Nature here is great at deception and camouflage. A butterfly wing attracts a mate with a stunning, iridescent blue on one side, and scares away predators by looking like a snake’s head on the other. A plant called a rattlesnake tail is tastier than it looks. And lizards sit still as a knothole, looking like the bark of trees they hang out on. Many plants are nicknamed for what they look like: machete flowers, the bullhorn plant, parrots’ beak flowers, and even fruit that comes in pairs called the horse’s balls.

Here, in this narrow isthmus, in what locals call the healthiest ecosystem in Central America, this hemisphere’s vast variety of life is funneled and therefore condensed into a narrow stretch of land. The leading industry is tourists coming down here to enjoy the nature. Eco-friendly is wisely a big theme for tourism here. After jetting down with so many big-spending gringos, I think that eco-friendly is nice — but we’re not completely off the environmental hook.

After a great day out, we’re back at the lodge. I feel as if I’m living in a teak treehouse. Sitting on the deck, I enjoy the slightly burning reminder that I got a lot of sun today as I stretch tight muscles after lots of walking. The jungle tumbles to a green horizon — everything seems to reach for the sun. I think “plush” and feel thankful to be so alive. I look up and see a V-shaped line of birds. They’re in formation with Blue Angels-like precision, as if to remind human visitors — especially urbanites like me — that there is a powerful, all-knowing, and respect-deserving order in nature.