CELL Group Travels to Costa Rica

Our bus journey to Puerto Viejo from Selva Negra took us through Granada, Nicaragua, a tourist community founded in 1529 by the Spaniards and located on Lake Nicaragua next to the extinct volcano Mombacho.  We toured the volcano’s peak reaching it by land cruiser and then hiking for several hours around the summit viewing the beautiful vistas of the valley communities and lake blow. 

Granada offered a nice respite in a simple but pleasant hotel, a good restaurant and Internet connections.  The next morning we departed on a 7 am bus with a muffin and juice in hand for an 8 hour bus ride across the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border and up through the mountains to the capital city of Costa Rica, San Jose.  The difference between Nicaragua and Costa Rica’s development was evident in the first miles of our ride, noticing almost no litter along the roadways, the houses and farms more tidy and as we entered towns and cities the obvious more modern buildings, cars and businesses.  We stayed at a very nice hostel and stuffed ourselves at dinner, before leaving early the next morning for the bus station. 

The three-hour trip to our roadside drop off was uneventful except for a 20-minute bathroom-snack stop at a local restaurant in Limon.  In that short time, I met an old Costa Rican friend from Peace Corps days, Juan Coward, who worked as an Associate Peace Corps Director in Costa Rica for many years.  Juan greeted me, with bags of bananas and Mamon chino, a spiky, hard-covered fruit outside with a delicious, sweet core, both from his farm.  There was hardly any time to talk before the bus driver began to honk his horn for departure.  Given that we would be in the area for 2 weeks Juan might be able to visit me another time.

Pablo Camacho Varela, a young and leading ornithologist accompanied us on our bus trip to Puerto Viejo and he will be one of our tour guides and technical experts during our two-week stay.  When we got off the bus on the roadside, Pablo pointed us to a path into the jungle and said our destination was only 400 meters away.  We arrived 45 minutes later, tired, having walked a half mile uphill, rising in elevation about 1500 feet through muddy, slippery, paths. 

Once here, we’ve seen the wisdom often expressed in a football practice, “no pain, no gain” because we were delighted to find our accommodations in a huge tree house constructed by its owner, Sebastian, and his family who are members of the Bri Bri indigenous population. The lovely designed building was made all from local wood sawed with only a chain saw and carried by hand over the same terrain described above.  It took one year to accumulate the materials and eight months to build. 

Our first morning we hiked to the top of the hill and to the top of a viewing tower, also constructed by the locals.  They claim this location is the second best place in the world to view migration of North American Raptors, second only to the River of Raptors in Veracruz, Mexico.  This narrow flyway between the Serro Del Congo Mountains of Southeast Costa Rica and the Southern Caribbean provides the perfect thermals for raptors to rise high and then glide to the next thermals.  Yesterday from the tower we waited to no avail to see this phenomenon but today as we walked through the rain forest to go play at the beach for the afternoon, we were amazed at the hundreds, if not the thousands, of birds spiraling upwards in graceful circles and drifting onward.

We have had lectures about Costa Rica's people and economy and a talk about the Bri Bri indigenous people and how important and challenging this ecotourism project is to their livelihood. Our hosts are extremely bright, creative, industrious and generous.

Over the next four days we will take a leave from the tree house and visit a Sea Turtle Conservation Project and return on Friday for four more days here. Stay tuned for more CELL adventures...