Eaten by Tapirs

Shower monkeys!

Even poor students need a little time away once in a while. With that indulgent bit of self-pity in mind, Rachel and I hitched a ride with an outbound classmate this Friday and wound up in Quepos, a largely unremarkable village on Costa Rica’s wondrous Southern Pacific Coast. Quepos is a tiny tourist hamlet replete with passable but extortionate restaurants, criminally mendacious hotel owners (argh), and more tour operators than residents. Yet it is affordable, and serves an indispensable purpose as the gateway to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, a minute collection of seashore, fertile estuary, and verdant rainforest that easily ranks as one of Costa Rica’s finest treasures.

Though truly tiny at a mere 1625 hectares, Manuel Antonio has one of the most vast and varied collections of wildlife in this extraordinarily diverse country. The trees teem with the fascinating white-faced capuchin, a preternaturally nimble and wonderfully expressive monkey with little interest in humans. We lurked gawking beneath a palm tree as one of the little beasties wrench palm fronds loose from the tree and dropped them dismissively, so to feast with obvious glee on the immense ants, spiders, and associated bugs previously sheltered within. Fresh from their banquet, the monkeys observed us, ignored us, and only interacted with the tourist world when they leapt onto the head-high pipes feeding the freshwater showers off the beach. Naturally, this brought endless amusement as swimmers wandered up to rinse off the sea salt only to find thirsty monkeys wrapped around the showerheads.
We also met some aloof and nearly invisible three-toed sloths, rare in much of their former habitat but plentiful in Costa Rica’s many parks. They weren’t particular responsive to our requests for closer photos, but possibly we were too impatient. The park was absolutely littered with geckos and iguanas ranging from baby-finger-size to larger than my arm. A volleyball-sized turtle hid impassively while I tried and failed to photograph him. I reluctantly left him in peace and wandered throughout the park’s countless picturesque beaches and sweeping lookout trails, only marginally impaired by the merciless heat and tropical sun. Birds hollered in every imaginable fashion, but were nearly invisible in the thick brush; besides, I would have been unable to put names to them even if I could spot them. Brilliant blue butterflies larger than my hand periodically flickered from the bushes, stopped us in our tracks and mystified our cameras, and vanished abruptly. It’s a magical place, diminished only by the omnipresence of some… other… wildlife.
Manuel Antonio National Park is also one of Costa Rica’s greatest refuges for a rather less rare but still amusing species: the Great-Bellied Gringo! I feel marginally guilty for noting this, but it’s astonishing to see the number and girth of the horde of American tourists who frequent the place. I am perpetually mortified whenever I glimpse the obvious poor health of most Americans… the dimensions (pun intended) of the national obesity epidemic there are immensely visible

Manuel Antonio is not the region’s only draw. The strip of luxury hotels and million-dollar condos that lines the road from Quepos to Manuel Antonio also hosts one of Costa Rica’s worst-kept secrets, a unique, erm… restaurant called El Avion. El Avion hosts Ollie’s Folly, a 50’s-era US military cargo plane built right into the middle level of a three-story open-air restaurant. The plane is (you guessed it) named for Colonel Oliver North, the charismatic thug who lent a veneer of deniability to Ronald Reagan’s attempt to finance an illegal gorilla war in Nicaragua by selling guns to Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. The plane was bound for the Nicaraguan Contras by way of Costa Rica when the US Congress got wind of the whole sordid affair in the mid-1980s and terminated the program. So El Avion simply lurked in a hangar in San Jose for fifteen years until some wily entrepreneurs bought her up, carted her piece by piece to the coast, and built a restaurant around the reassembled aircraft and a bar inside. I’m reasonably certain this is the only restaurant of its type anywhere. Food wasn’t bad, either; best fajitas I’ve had in the last six months.

That was Saturday… the very best was yet to come. The following morning, largely out of curiousity, I plunked down $60 dollars I really, really, really don’t have, and asked the helpful American at a tiny tour kiosk for the most “extreme” experience available in Quepos. Not long thereafter, a pleasant Tico showed up in a battered SUV and whisked Rachel and I about fifty kilometres out of town and up a mountain, where one of the most genuinely exhilarating and foolish experiences of my life awaited me.
In Nicaragua in October, I tried something called a “zip-line” tour, where helpful guides attached me to cables 15 metres above the ground and sent me gleefully gliding among the immense shade trees that dotted a hillside coffee plantation. Silly me; in my ignorance, I failed to see that my Nicaraguan experience wasn’t even worthy of the zip-line name. Now I know better.
Where once I zipped from tree to tree, Quepos’ Sky Mountain experience sent me careening literally from mountaintop to mountaintop, again and again, along half-kilometre steel cables anchored to enormous alpine platforms. Attached only by a waist harness, I clamped my hands onto a simple but sturdy pulley and zoomed, cheering and only occasionally terrified, through the trees and sometimes hundreds of metres over them. The kinetic view from the cable was indescribable; the glories of the Pacific coast, the distant green parks, the vast palm and pineapple plantations, and the impossibly lush rainforest mountains created a panorama like virtually nothing I’ve ever seen. Photos were impossible - survival was a rather more pressing concern. Before the tour, I whined about the $60 fee; now I think I’d go hungry for a month just to try it again with a camera in hand.

Now I’m back at school in Ciudad Colon, more’s the pity, but I’m cheerfully proselytizing the whole experience to everyone in sight. That includes everyone reading this… and if you’re not willing to bet your life on an implausibly thin piece of nylon, will you at least wire me the money to do it again myself?

Ok, hugs to all, to my readings and thesis I flee. Next up – photos on Thursday!!!

posted by Paul @ 10:41 PM