Andrea Blumberg

33. Equatorial Excursion (Oct '10)

Hello Friends,

On my recent travels I came up with this simile: a bus full of tourists is like a mobile beehive. It travels around the country, stopping at places that are colorful and rich (in history, nature, adventure, etc), and when it stops, a stream of buzzing bodies swarms out and flits about the area, briefly sampling each tidbit. They take with them the nectar of photos or interesting experiences, and they disperse the pollen of cash that helps the region to flourish. And, also like bees, the desirability of them for the continuing fertility of the region is about equally matched by the nuisance of them descending, en masse, on a previously peaceful town or beach.

In that way it's much better to be the bee. Which I luckily was - with the rest of my family plus about 10 strangers - on a recent trip to Costa Rica. We did our pollination tour throughout most of the country, from the far south (down near Panama) to the north (where we crossed the border briefly into Nicaragua) and from the Pacific Ocean off the west coast to the Caribbean Sea off the east.

Costa Rica is a beautiful country, full of contrasts: warm sun and frequent rain; modern cities (unfortunately complete with American imports such as Subway and Radio Shack) and untamed jungles; industriousness and a laid-back "Pura Vida" philosophy.

Befitting this diversity, we did many things in our two and a half week tour, including:

-- seeing coffee and bananas being picked and processed. I learned that the banana trees (actually, they're not really trees, but "herbaceous flowering plants" and the fruit is technically a berry) only produce fruit once in their lifetime, and then they're cut down. Luckily they produce "daughter" shoots that grow up and mature alongside them so that there are always bananas ready to be harvested; year-round in Costa Rica's tropical climate. Running through the plantation were a series of banana monorails; cables on which the bunches were suspended and dragged back to the processing plant (which, technically, is not a "plant," since instead of photosynthetic leaves and a vertical stem it has a cubical metallic shell and conveyor belts loaded with bananas).

-- drinking freshly-squeezed sugar cane juice. At a roadside café, sitting out of doors under a small corrugated metal roof, was a device that looked a steam-punk espresso machine. At the center was a cast-iron mangler, a compact set of gears and crushing teeth about two feet wide/tall/deep, into which a six-foot length of raw sugar cane was fed. At the top of the mangler was a horizontal wooden beam, like a helicopter blade, only rounder and less likely to launch its payload into flight. It took two people to crank it around, and a whole crowd to shout "oh my god, duck!" to the person who was foolish enough to wander into the path and nearly get thwomped by the beam. The mangler chewed up the cane and a fibrous pulp came out the other side, while the juice poured into a pitcher in front. It was delicious, tasting like frothy, watery molasses; sweet and refreshing.

-- doing adventure-y things like whizzing through the forest canopy on zip lines (a high-speed version of what it feels like to be a bunch of bananas), bumbling down some very tame rapids in a rubber raft, and dipping ourselves into volcano-heated springs, thus learning the Spanglish phrase "hot enough to boil your huevos."

But by far the most interesting and rewarding thing for me was the amount of exotic wildlife there, and its direct accessibility to us. In a tree, just by the side of the road, was a flock of scarlet macaws, hanging out, squawking raucously, and showing off their flashy plumage under the pretense of jockeying for the best place on the branch. And elsewhere, in another roadside tree, was a troupe of lounging Howler monkeys, the alpha male hooting desultorily down at us from his prone position; as if he knew we weren't really up to storming his tree and assaulting his harem, but it would be against his name and nature not to at least grunt and growl a bit. Far less reticent were the Howler monkeys that were outside our hotel room at 4 in the morning. At that hour I fervently wished they were called something more like Obscene Hand Gesture monkeys.

Some of the animals were not only conveniently close to us, but downright approachable. These iguanas lived along a riverbank by a café, and would slouch up the bank regularly to sun themselves on the warm tiles and gnaw on whatever scraps of veggies the proprietors put out for them.

Continuing our animal-spotting adventure, we paid a visit to Manuel Antonio National Park, which was the highlight of the trip for me, for the sheer number and type of animals there, plus the delightfulness of jungle, beach, and ocean all in the same place. There we saw more iguanas and some basilisk lizards. These basilisks don't have the ability to turn you to stone with a single glance, but the small ones can scamper on their hind legs across the surface of water, earning them the nickname "Jesus Christ lizards." (though I'm pretty sure J.C. was never described as "scampering").

The most famous residents of the park are the mischievous and adorable white-faced monkeys. They're the kind of monkey I always wanted as a pet when I was growing up: cute, cuddly, keenly inquisitive, irrepressibly larcenous. We had to huddle up around our possessions like a circle of old time covered wagons to keep the little devils from running off with our lunches. Or our wallets. There are plenty of signs saying "don't feed the monkeys" but none saying "don't steal food from the humans." Just as well. They'd probably steal the signs, too. And then make you forgive them instantly with one innocent glance from their fuzzy faces.

My favorite rare animal spotting at the park, though, had to be the three-toed tree sloth (say that ten times fast; or not, if you're similarly slothful). These animals are supposed to be nocturnal, and so sluggish that they spend their whole day hanging out in the treetops, only crawling down the tree once a week, to void their wastes. But we must have happened upon a rare Type-A sloth. This unexpected dynamo was actually moving from branch to branch, reaching out to pull slender limbs towards her and nibbling on their leaves, scratching her belly with talons as long as the fingernails of supermarket cashiers. Perhaps some coffee leaves got mixed into her usual diet of Cecropia foliage and gave her the extra buzz, who knows. All I know is that since I am...how shall I say....sympathetic to the metabolic constraints of the average sloth, it was a highpoint of the trip to see my kindred spirit actively going about her day, in front of my very eyes. As I sat on the ground. Not moving.

The long list of amazing animal interactions continued: watching sea turtles lay their ping-pong ball eggs in the sand; seeing whales leap and wave their flippers, only meters from our boat; stroking the surprisingly fuzzy shell of a rhinoceros beetle as it clung to a stalk of sugar cane held by a shriveled-but-charming sidewalk coconut vendor; observing a vast trail of leaf-cutter ants at our jungle-lodge hotel as they carried their loads back to the nest; and then, after the regularly scheduled afternoon downpour, seeing just a line of soggy leaf-pieces on the ground and a few befuddled ants milling around in circles; and then the next morning seeing the industrious cavalcade restored. The only unpleasant wild animal experience was an all-too-familiar profusion of mosquitoes in the jungle and one scorpion in the bedsheets (luckily found when the bedspread was first pulled back, and summarily tossed out of doors).

And so Costa Rica made its impression on me: a warm, wet, wild, wonderous mix of remarkable animals, generous people, beautiful scenery and an overall sense of lushness; like the guavas we picked and ate from a roadside tree, the juice dripping down our chins. As the trip came to an end my fellow travelers and I buzzed sleepily back onto the bus, loaded down with our pollen-sacks of memories, and motored to the final hotel, our temporary hive-away-from-hive. We rested up for our return flight back to the States and the slow process of concentrating all that delicious nectar into honey.

Love,
Andrea

The cuddly rhinoceros beetles:

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