Monteverde to Malpais

Verdant Costa Rica, March 2018

By Jamie Martin

March 20^th, 2018

Head in the clouds

From San José, we head west on Hwy 1, then start our ascent north on the 606, up into the clouds on a narrow dirt road. Zipping up the corkscrew mountain pass, we suddenly slow down to avoid a car pulled onto the shoulder. Then another. Dozens of cars stopped on the side of the road, their passengers standing outside the vehicles. We stop to see what they're doing and realize we've just cut in line: road construction a mile ahead has stopped traffic in both directions for hours already. It's a daily reality we'd read about, and hoped to avoid. But we're lucky: the crews are finishing up, and we're moving again. Half an hour later, we pull into Santa Elena, the main town in Monteverde.

In the 1950s, Monteverde greeted 44 pilgrims seeking a better life: eleven Quaker families from Alabama, rejecting their country's militaristic path, purchased 3,500 acres of land and started farming. At that time in Costa Rica, if you cleared land, it became legally yours. Long before Conservationism was introduced, the Quakers cleared only a small portion for their crops, and worked for the next several decades to protect the rest of this lush and extraordinary ecosystem.

EPIC BIODIVERSITY

Costa Rica comprises only 0.03% of the earth's surface, but it's home to nearly 6% of the world's flora and fauna. The 26,000-acre Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve alone is home to over 400 species of birds, 100 species of mammals, 120 species of reptiles and amphibians, and thousands of species of insects.

We meet our guide for a morning hike and see more animals than a zoo: a rare Resplendent Quetzal, the brilliant-colored national bird of Guatemala that's high on birders' lists; friendly Coatis, roaming among the tourists, carefree as cats; hairy tarantulas lurking under each and every tree trunk; a troupe of white face monkeys, caring for a new addition; a hummingbird nest no bigger than a golf ball with a tiny beak sticking out.

After dark, we regroup for a second show and find an entirely different cast: leaf-cutter ants marching a great distance to supply a mound-home the size of a school bus; lizards and birds fast asleep on tree branches at eye-level; a wookie-like sloth, 60 feet above us, on a slow commute.

Night photography requires patience, and I keep falling behind the flash light leading our group. My wife emphatically beckons for me to catch up. I pick up the pace, but my face is still pressed against the camera viewfinder as I creep around a dead tree trunk in our path, not realizing I'm inches away from a bright yellow Palm Pitviper, perched shoulder-height on the branch ahead of me, poised in mid-air and ready to strike. Fortunately, it's not hunting me. I slink away nervously, having learned a valuable lesson about nocturnal jungle etiquette.

Over 2,500 plant species, including the world's smallest orchid, fill a space the size of a small city. Nowhere else on the planet are there so many species of orchids.

Malpais

LIFE IN A BLUE ZONE

In 2005, National Geographic's cover story, "Longevity: The Secrets of a Long Life," identified five places on Earth where people live much longer than average. These so-called "blue zones" include Okinawa, Sardinia, Icaria, Loma Linda, and Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. From Tamarindo to Malpais, the Nicoya stretches over 100 miles of Pacific coastline.

Bumping along a pock-marked dirt road, we arrive in Santa Teresa one dusty evening just after sunset. As we make our way to the rental office, the dry season is on full display: every car is covered in a quarter inch of khaki brown. Shirtless and shoeless twenty-something expats litter the dusty main drag, their faces wrapped in scarves. The sleepy surf town we'd seen online looked more like Tatooine than Shangri-La.

I wondered if we'd picked the wrong place...until morning came.

Our AirBnB was a mile south, in Malpais. High on a hill, a secluded three-bedroom villa with a pool overlooking the Pacific ocean was all ours for less than a hotel on St Pete beach. The nearest property—a few hundred yards south—is Mel Gibson's home; far below the hill are private bungalows that rent for $1,200/night.

We spend our days exploring the beaches of Santa Teresa and Montezuma, then retreating to the villa with a bottle of Flor de Cana to watch the sun sink into the sea. Each night, the bark of howler monkeys, distant at first, grows alarmingly loud as the males hidden in the dense jungle below us approach our unfenced property...and then become eerily silent.

Pura Vida

In Costa Rica, Pura Vida is as easy to grasp as hygge in Denmark. Ticos and tourists alike embrace the slow-paced, no-stress, do-what-you-like "Simple Life." What is harder to understand is how this place, surrounded by countries plagued by decades of poverty, violence and famine, has avoided those outcomes. Costa Rica abolished its military in the 1940s and has almost no visible police presence; and yet its borders seem to magically protect its Brigadoon-like existence.

Todo Fresco

From the cool climes of Santa Elena to the warm beaches of Santa Teresa, everything we ate was so fresh. Even in the tiny towns we lunched at along the way featured locally-raised, just-caught, and house-made. Farm to table isn't some new fad here, it's a way of life.

Do You KNow the Way to San José?

Our last day in Costa Rica started with a dead battery, discovered just as the car ferry to Punta Arenas arrived. Help from friendly commuters was abundant and we made it back to San José with time to enjoy our last night abroad, in a resort built in the mid-80s that felt just like Falcon Crest.