Our dash through Central America brought us to Costa Rica in time to spend ten days with Jordan’s mother, Sue. Sue was visiting from the rainy winter weather of Seattle, so we made the beach our first stop. From Liberia airport, we made the quick drive to the seaside town of Playa del Coco.
I’m adding Playa del Coco to the list of “Places I’m the Last Gringo to Hear About”. Loud american accents boomed across the streets of Playa del Coco. Bars offered happy hour specials in English. Hippie clothing and accoutrements paraded down sidewalks on human hangers.
The playa (beach) of Playa del Coco is a strip of golden sand bordering the calm waters of a sheltered bay. While the local economy relies heavily on tourism, fishing appears to be another mainstay of local life. The ruins of fishing boats lurked in the roadside vines, while their better-maintained counterparts lined the sand of the beach or bobbed in the glittering waters of the bay. One prominent sailboat, the Lemuria, reclined like a lazy shipwreck on the humid shore, languidly posing for our photos.
Playa del Coco was just the prologue in our Costa Rican adventure. The following day, we set a course for La Fortuna, the town at the base of Costa Rica’s iconic Arenal Volcano.
The land rose without opening into the furrowed interior mountains. We stopped for a hearty lunch at a BBQ joint cut from rough-hewn wood that would have looked just as at home in Texas or Alaska as it did in Costa Rica. Our view over the Laguna de Arenal provided peaceful accompaniment to marinated chicken and cold drinks.
The road to hugged the jagged coast of the Laguna and we zig-zagged at its mercy until we were through La Fortuna and comfortably settled into la Princesa de la Luna Ecolodge, our home for the next five days.
On its website, la Princesa de la Luna offers a stunning view of Volcán Arenal, which I was looking forward to hiking, despite past volcano experiences. I can’t vouch for this view, however, as it began raining when we arrived and didn’t stop for the next three weeks, only pausing briefly, every now and again. I still have not so much as glimpsed Volcán Arenal.
Despite the rain, which Sue had hoped to leave behind in Seattle, we made the most of things. Costa Rica is one of Earth’s most biodiverse places and this fact is evident to even the most casual glance. The family that ran la Princesa placed bananas out to rot near the patio and their sickly sweet scent attracted red squirrels, toucans and a small, brightly colored bird with an uncanny skill at avoiding the camera.
A small system of trails branched out from la Princesa’s main building, meandering through deep green and purple foliage and vibrant red bird-of-paradise flowers, down to a cold and rocky creek. The path terminated at a waterfall that cascaded through a keyhole opening in a narrow column of cool rock.
We returned to la Princesa, feeling that we had barely even scratched the surface of Costa Rica’s lush jungle world. If it’s not raining tomorrow, I’ll go hiking up Arenal, I said.
The next morning, clouds touched the treetops and distributed fat raindrops over the land. The rain wasn’t particularly hard, but I decided to call off hiking that day, anyway. This turned out to be one my better decisions. Before long, the rain was locked into a state of total war with the earth, each kamikaze drop, hurling itself at the enemy ground and anything else in its way. Each impact transformed a single drop into a radial shower of wet shrapnel. To save my laptop from the carnage, I retreated several feet away from the railing of the common area.
Jordan and Sue found their own respite from the rain elsewhere. One of the benefits of volcanos, when not spewing lava, is the likelihood of finding hot springs. The mother-daughter duo followed some local directions to a “hot river” that issued from an uphill hot spring. Much like being in a hot tub during a snowfall back home, they lounged and played in the hot river while the cool rain fell and raised mist from the water’s surface.
After five rainy days and the foot of Arenal, we were ready to move on. We had made the most of the few weather windows we were given, but despite waterfalls, hot rivers and toucans, we were ready for a change in scenery.
The three of of us loaded ourselves into a rather snug Taiga and swept along the serpentine highway towards Punta Arenas and then on to the seaside getaway of Santa Teresa.
