Faced with the multitudinous life choices that confront a child growing up in New York City, my son on turning 13 settled on his. He wanted to be a surfer.
My wife and I found ourselves living in the only apartment on our mid-Manhattan block where the wave heights at Pipeline and Waikiki were tracked (800 numbers to Honolulu surf shops) and where the morning greeting was "barrel and tube," the mantra of surfers describing the dreamed-of shape of a breaker. The challenge was how to accommodate this obsession of my son's along with my hope of devoting the family summer vacation to rain-forest exploration. We found a harmonious solution on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.The country has some of the largest untouched primary forests in the world and a government and population with a commitment to protecting them unequaled in Latin America.
We decided on two spots, one at the tip of the remote Osa Peninsula in the south and the other on the busier coast of Guanacaste Province in the north.
Fought over in the 19th century by Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Guanacaste has been a conflicted part of the country in recent times. It served as a staging area for the Sandinista rebels in the 1970s, and in the 1980s it became the site of secret airstrips and supply centers for the contras who sought to oust the victorious Sandinistas from Managua.
Osa, on the other hand, had always been cut off from the world and even from the rest of Costa Rica. A dirt road linking the peninsula to the mainland was completed only in 1986.
Our group was my wife, Olivia; my son, Nicholas, the soi-disant surfer; his schoolmate Wyndham Boylan-Garnett; Wyndham's mother, Nuala Boylan, and myself. We flew to San Jose in August, where we overnighted at the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, a raffish downtown hotel with an open colonnaded restaurant looking out on the city's busiest square, where we reporters had put up in 1979.
Bordered by the Teatro Nacional, a tropical knockoff of the Paris Opera House, the square is called the Plaza de la Cultura. But not all of its denizens are opera buffs. One of them that Saturday night stole a bag with all of my family's passports, travel vouchers and credit cards.
After some hurried phone calls to start the process of getting passports replaced, credit cards canceled and copies of travel documents faxed, we set out the next day on a five-hour drive to Tamarindo, a beach community in Guanacaste famous for its waves. Our car was a rented Hyundai Galloper Exceed V6 Wagon, the kind of sturdy, four-wheel-drive vehicle recommended for the unmarked, muddy and often deeply rutted roads along the coast. The radio brought in hearty salsa, good traveling music.
If you need writing paper in Tamarindo, all you'll find is a notepad of sheets made from banana-leaf fibers. The shampoo on sale is biodegradable and carries a label, itself made of recycled paper, that assures that no animals were mistreated in the manufacture of the contents. The shorefront Hotel Las Tortugas was built with no ocean views to the south because light can distract giant leatherback turtles that use the beach there to lay their eggs.
The same hotel is headquarters to surfers who consider the beach there, Playa Grande, the finest venue in the area and many of whom also share the concern for nature. It was there that I had to abandon my East Coast notion of surfers as sun-addled, tattooed, monosyllabic layabouts. We had almost as much fun learning about their customs as we did finding out about the habits of rain-forest creatures.
Surfers are up early in the morning, and from some source somewhere the word goes out that a particular shore site is "going off" or "firing." It may be a "right" or a "left," a beach break, a point break or a reef break, the ideal time can be high tide or low tide or some point in between, the waves can be shoulder-high, head-high, overhead, double-overhead or Hawaiian-sized, the wind may be off-shore ("epic") or on-shore ("bummer") - regardless, it's where the Jeeps with boards on their roofs and men and women in bathing suits at the wheel head as they rattle expectantly out of town, kicking up clouds of dust.
Once there, the surfers gather on the sand in motionless groups of statuary composition, silently studying the swell, the winds and the sets of large waves that come rolling in every five minutes or so. Another unuttered signal goes out, and the surfers grab their boards and plunge in.
We adults, used to East Coast beaches, found the surf to be challenging but manageable.
Every time we wandered off into those forests, we got a lesson in the abundance of life that inhabits tropical shorelines. The microscopic organisms that the ocean washes over its reefs, rock and beaches feed a voluminous array of tiny creatures that in concert with plants support a vast community of crabs, snails, shrimps, iguanas, squirrels, egrets, herons and other creatures.
We were particularly intrigued by hermit crabs and the delicate orange-legged, purple-shelled crabs who make the land itself seem animate as they skitter by the thousands into their forest burrows at the approach of an intruder. Each April, these crabs make spectacular migrations to the sea to breed, with each female releasing tens of thousands of eggs, which become larvae drifting in the waves until six weeks later, when they all march inland and begin the cycle again.
We stayed in the Tamarindo Diria, an unassuming beachfront hotel with carefully tended grounds and bungalow rooms looking out onto the Pacific. In the evening, we dined at the seaside restaurants and bars in the village, eating coriander-laced ceviche and grilled lobsters, grouper, snapper, sea bass and mahi-mahi, accompanied by rice and beans and washed down with local beer or Concha y Toro, the old reliable Chilean white. The boys drank banana con leche and rumless pina coladas. The owner of La Fiesta del Mar delighted us one night by rushing back to our table after we had ordered fish to say that a fresh supply of shrimp had just been delivered. They arrived at our table still kicking.
At week's end we drove back to San Jose, gave up our vehicle and caught our flight to Puerto Jimenez, the only town on the Osa Peninsula. Waiting for us by the gravel airstrip was Jonathan Seidman, a 27-year-old forestry and conservation graduate of Kent State University who has worked there as guide for five years, with whom we had made arrangements five months earlier.
He drove us into town, a laid-back frontier outpost with a soccer field, a boat dock and the only block of paved road on the entire peninsula. We bought flashlights and simple knee-high rubber boots for the rain-forest treks, then drove out along the coast of the Golfo Dulce and up muddy roads to our lodge, Bosque del Cabo.
Bosque sits in a privileged location, 500 forested feet above the Pacific. Its seven thatched-roof bungalows have porches that look out over the ocean. The beds are covered in mosquito netting, but it's a largely decorative touch. At that height, the nights are breezy and bug-free. Once a cattle pasture, the land has been gracefully landscaped with profusions of brightly colored gingers and heliconias lining the pathways from the individual lodgings to the one communal space, a dining area open to the sides.
The only contact with the outside world is by radio phone, and there is electricity only in the kitchen. Night falls early in Costa Rica in the summer, usually about 6 p.m., and from that hour on, Bosque lives by candlelight. The hiking during the day is very physical. You are apt to feel total bone fatigue and find yourself nodding off by 8 p.m. I loved the idea of reading by the light of a flickering flame in the midst of a forest, but each night I was good for only a couple of pages.
Our purpose in going to Bosque was to live in, feel and try to understand some of the complexities of the tropical rain forest, and Jon wasted no time getting us on the trail. Many times it wasn't a trail at all, but a slurry of leaves and mud and rocks, and the inclines and descents were steep. Within minutes of leaving Bosque our first afternoon, Jon announced that we were in primary forest, undeveloped, undisturbed, its reproductive cycles intact and humming.
We found ourselves at the base of immense trees, some rising 180 feet above the forest floor, closing out all but about 10 percent of the light shining down on the canopy. The sight induced a feeling of wonder and reverence. The great cathedral-like space captured the forest's mists and held them in the shards of sunlight, like fine particles of dust that hang suspended in the streaks of light shining through stained-glass windows in great naves.
During our treks, giant frigate birds with their wingspans of more than six feet wheeled into view overhead. Lovely little immaculate antbirds called out to one another in sweet bell tones, laughing falcons guffawed and, in the forest counterpart to hoisting the cocktail flag, parrots, the most social of birds, gathered in flocks at day's end and raised a happy ruckus.
There are four kinds of monkeys in this part of the rain forest - squirrel, spider, white-faced capuchin and howler - and we saw them all. The howlers put up a sonorous groan, using their formidable sound equipment and then amplifying it with a bellows-like movement of their jowls. The spiders chatter excitedly and perform spectacular acrobatics in the trees. All of them get irritated at the presence of someone else. They shake their fist at you. They also shake tree limbs and have been known to throw things at people, ranging from fruit pits to their own feces.
One morning we were accompanied by a dazzling blue morpho butterfly that sashayed with the studied insouciance of a boulevardier showing off his chic. These were not the only popinjays out that day. Toucans and fiery-billed aracaris posed on three limbs proudly showing their golden-beaked profiles, and scarlet macaws flew by, shrieking and flashing their red plumage.
One afternoon Jon spotted a hugely feathered brown and black bird on a low tree limb. It was a giant curassow, a sight so rare that Jon demanded we take his picture with it so that his friends would believe he had really seen one.
Detached from the world, deep into the mysteries of nature in the raw, we grew to feel the kind of out-of-office sensation the best vacations deliver. But the real test of that phenomenon came when we were joined in the lodge by a Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer, whose film, "The Nutty Professor," had recently been released. He hiked and surfed and watched rosy sunsets behind thunderheads on the Pacific horizon from his porch hammock like the rest of us. Three days passed. But on the fourth day he sent someone to town to fax his studio and get the grosses. *****
Additional Information
If you go
Getting there
Our four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle from Avis had seven seats and cost $780 a week, including mandatory insurance. Smaller vehicles, at $300 to $400 a week, do not have four-wheel-drive, which is worth considering if driving off main roads. In rainy months (September and October), roads to Tamarindo and Puerto Jimenez can be impassable. The drive to Tamarindo takes five hours, to Puerto Jimenez eight hours. Travelair has 45-minute flights to both towns from the Tobias Bolanos airport in the San Jose suburb of Pavas. The fare to each town is about $80 one way. The 45-minute trip from the Puerto Jimenez airport to Bosque del Cabo costs $25 in a taxi, usually a flatbed truck with benches.
Guides
Jon Seidman and Tom Boylan operate Escondido Trex in Puerto Jimenez, telephone and fax 735-5210. (The country code for Costa Rica is 506.) He charges $125 a day for groups up to four plus expenses.
Where to stay
In Tamarindo, the Tamarindo Diria, telephone (506) 290-4340, fax (506) 290-4367, has double rooms with beach view that range from $99 to $133, with breakfast.
At Bosque del Cabo, telephone and fax (506) 735-5206, there are four standard bungalows with two double beds, bathroom and outdoor cold shower for $100 single, $75 a person as a double, $65 a person as a triple and $60 a person as a quad. There are two deluxe cabins with a single king-size bed, tiled bath and more spacious balcony that cost $110 single, $85 a person double. Rates include all meals. There is also a house with solar power, refrigerator and stove that accommodates four, at $700 a week with no meals.