Friday, January 27, 1995
It is ten miles
from Monteverde to the Arenal volcano as the crow flies; you can drive it in only
five hours if you are lucky. Romain, a 20-year veteran of the roads around
Monteverde, picked us up at 9 am in a Japanese minivan and we went bouncing over
the "back road" from Monteverde to Tilarán. We rose high up into mountains
once covered in cloud forest; now they are all pasture and coffee fields. Every
time we got out of the car we were nearly blown off our feet by the relentless
wind.
When we got to
Lake Arenal, the impoundment of a 1980 hydroelectric project that generates 40%
of the country's hydro power, we could see why the spot is famous for
windsurfing. None of the surfers were having any difficulty keeping pace with
motorists driving along the lakeshore.
The Mystica Resort sits high on a hillside overlooking the lake. They weren't
officially open for lunch yet, but they made us some delicious pizza anyway. The
owner is a charming young Italiana from Torino. She came here two years ago,
built the cabins and the pizzeria, and now runs the joint. Does she miss
Italy?
"Italy is a
wonderful country. I love it. But if you work in the city there, you never have
time to appreciate it. I got back for two months in the low season here, sometime
between June and November, and really look around. It's much better that
way."
The road got progressively worse as we
continued around Lake Arenal. Some sections were washed out and potholes the size
of compact cars frightened me. Muddy water filled the holes and made it
impossible to determine how deep they were. It was tough to believe that the
standard fare for this half-day trip was only $90. The absence of roadside hulks
was the only encouraging sign.
After fording a river and climbing up a hill next to the volcano, we arrived
at the gates of the Arenal Observatory Lodge, just 1.5 miles from the cone of the
Arenal Volcano, one of the most active in the world. Arenal is only 5300 feet
high and 4000 years old and still has a lot of growing to do. It has erupted
eight or nine times, with the last two in 1968 and 1525.
Before the 1968
eruption, there were ten hours of powerful localized earthquakes. Most of the
people in a lakeside town on the present site of the national park visitor's
center got scared and fled on foot to Santa Elena, where we had just come from.
The folks who stayed behind were unlucky. The west side of the volcano blew out
and emitted a cloud of gas at a temperature of 600 to 800 degrees C. This cloud
destroyed 12 square kilometers. Then the caprock on the top of the volcano blew
out and destroyed another 5 square kilometers. Between 60 and 80 people were
killed and are buried under ash.
People come to the volcano today because there are usually at least five
mini-eruptions every day, each one accompanied by loud booms and glowing hot lava
spilling down the sides of the cone. The show had attracted an Industrial Light
and Magic crew from the movie Congo.
"It was great here yesterday," said one
of the grips, "but we were just scouting then. When the weather is like this [he
pointed to the clouds sitting on the volcano cone], it compresses the volcano and
it doesn't erupt as much. Yesterday we saw a huge boulder thrown 500 feet into
the air and when it came down in the trees it started a little fire in the
jungle."
We left them to their waiting game and hiked down to a nearby waterfall. We
were walking through a forest that had only been growing since 1968, but it was
already about as thick as you could imagine.
Views from the observatory lodge balcony.
Saturday, January 28, 1995
Arenal Volcano
was tantalizingly visible in the morning with just a handful of clouds on top of
the crater. What's more, those clouds were moving fairly rapidly so it appeared
that we were minutes away from a full view of the volcano and a resumption of the
hourly eruptions, which we believed were correlated with the weather although a
local expert later ridiculed the notion. We waited on the terrace with the film
crew and watched birds or the Coatamundi that came out of the forest to eat the
bananas left out for it by the Lodge.
At 10:30 we sallied forth on horseback
with Luis, a smiling local kid who spoke no English at all. My horse, Melina, was
a fine example of the tourist horse breed and showed no inclination at all to
trot or run. She was perfectly content to follow Luis on his horse and we even
managed a stream crossing without incident. It would have been a hot day to hike
and it was great to be able to look around from the horse. We rode through a
pretty lush forest then abruptly came to the "New Lava Flow," which came down in
1992. The flow presents itself as a 40 foot-high wall of sharp black stone in the
middle of the jungle. We climbed up on top for a fine view of the volcano and
Lake Arenal. The lava is still quite hot a few inches below the surface and steam
comes out of little holes in the flow.
There are three
things that can make you glad to be on horseback: tropical heat, a steep climb
back up to the lodge, and a snake venomous enough to kill a man. The coral snake
was only about two feet long and moved in a rather spastic manner, but it still
sent a chill up my spine. Melina didn't seem to mind the snake at all, not even
when it slithered between her hooves over to the other side of the road.
The
Observatory Lodge dining room encourages conviviality. We shared a table with
David and Lois, who'd moved here from Atlanta to work for Coca Cola.
"Everything here is negotiable," Lois said. "It used to worry me that I'm not
strictly legal in the country, but not any more."
"You can drive on an American license for only thirty days," added David, "and
after that you're supposed to get a local Costa Rican license. Unfortunately, it
takes at least three months to get the Costa Rican license so you've got a
Catch-22 situation. Getting a car here is an experience all by itself. We were
about to buy an old car from a dealer for $15,000. The company lawyer told me to
wait until he checked it out. He came back to me and said `That car has a lien
against it for $10,000 so it would ultimately cost you $25,000 if you ever wanted
to register it.' After we finally bought our car, an 8-year-old Nissan Pathfinder
with 60,000 miles on the clock, which has no doubt been turned back quite a bit,
a guy offered us his car. It was registered to the fourth owner back because
nobody wanted to pay the transfer fees and taxes. It takes a year to transfer
registration if you don't want to pay $3500, which is what we did, and that comes
on top of $18,000 for the car."
What was the fundamental difference between doing business here and in the
U.S.?
"It is very
difficult to make money in the U.S.," David said. "There is too much competition
and everything costs practically nothing there. Coke is cheaper in the U.S. than
anywhere else in the world because the costs are lower there. We make 80% of our
profit outside the U.S. The American who tried to sell us his car summed up the
fundamental difference in the way things worked by saying that `In the U.S., you
have to bribe a lawyer to do something illegal; In Costa Rica, you have to bribe
a lawyer to do something legal.'"
Didn't they want to invest in the country and make some money in the coming
boom years?
"I'd never invest here with all the red tape and the risk," David said. "Do
you want to know what our address is? It's Condominium 3, San Rafael, 400 meters
West from the JS store and 200 meters North."
Is that mailing or physical address?
"Mail?" David chuckled. "You couldn't possibly get mail delivered anywhere
except in downtown San Jose where the streets have names. We use a courier
service in Miami and then go to a shopping center here to pick it up."
"A typical Costa Rican address is `300 meters from where the big tree used to
be' or `200 meters east of where the dog lies'," added Lois, "which is OK until
the dog dies and then you just have to know."
Did people manage to find their house anyway?
"Of course not!" David responded. "The cable people couldn't find the house so
we didn't get it installed for another week. It is somewhat complicated by the
fact that our condo is Number 3 but it is actually only the second condo. There
were going to be five but they decided to build a swimming pool instead of the
first one."
Isn't there a big "3" on the front of the house?
Both of them laughed.
Sunday, January 29, 1995
A dreary rain quashed our hopes of ever seeing the volcano cone.
"I've been here seven times and have never seen the top," a Canadian woman
said.
We satisfied
ourselves with having heard quite a few booms and hitched a ride back to San Jose
with David and Lois, whose Pathfinder forded the stream with aplomb.
They
entertained us with their comparisons between the U.S. and Costa Rica.
"We have a European propane tank and a bunch of little camping items that run
off it," said David, "and we wanted to use it all in the U.S. where the fittings
are different. So we had a little adapter machined and brought the tank into a
U-Haul in Atlanta to have it filled. I had to talk to the guys there for 20
minutes and explain everything before they'd even think about filling it. After
we worked out the metric to English capacity conversion, they started to fill it,
watching a scale all the time to make sure that they weren't putting too much
in.
Before I brought the tank to Costa Rica, I had to empty it. So when we got
here we had to get it filled again. I went to a local place and just walking in
the whole place smelled like gas, there were guys slamming tanks around and into
the backs of trucks. They didn't give our strange tank even a second look before
filling it up. They didn't weigh it or anything and they waved aside all of my
attempts at explanations and worries about whether it was overfull.
When I went home, the first thing I did was put the tank on a scale and it
turned out that they'd put in about the right amount."
One difference that David and Lois didn't have to point out was road
construction standards. The road between Fortuna and San Ramon was so newly paved
that it was still shown as gravel on maps. Most of the surface was quite smooth,
but there were as many deep potholes as you'd find on the most decrepit street in
Boston. Our kidneys took a good pounding.
We never saw any roadsigns, except for Villablanca, the ex-president's hotel
in the middle of the Los Angeles Cloud Forest Reserve. As it was a Sunday, lots
of Ticos and Ticas were out in the street. There are no sidewalks, not everyone
has a car, and the off-road terrain is difficult even on foot. Hence, even on a
main road we had to keep constantly on the alert for pedestrians in the middle of
the road. Sunday is also the traditional day for Costa Rican drinking and more
than one pedestrian was weaving as much as the pothole-dodging cars.
The most bizarre sight of the trip has to be the crowd assembled outside the
international airport fence. There were literally hundreds of people assembled,
charter buses, and vendors, all to watch the 727s land and take off. It looked
like a special festival, but David and Lois said they'd seen it every Sunday.
By the time we got back to the Milvia, we were so worn out that we decided to
take the night off.
"What could be more relaxing than going to an American movie," Chantal
suggested. "Everything is in English here with Spanish subtitles so it will be
just like going in Boston."
Downtown San Jose is a world away from
the Milvia in spirit, but only ten minutes and $1.50 away by taxi. We wanted to
experience the local bus service, though, so we waited for five minutes, paid 30
cents for two, and hopped on. Most of the local buses are veterans of the North
American schoolbus trade. Costa Rican adults average about the same size as
American 9th graders so they generally leave the seats as they were.
People really use public transit in Costa Rica and virtually all the buses
we'd seen in the country had been nearly full. Ours was packed even on a Sunday
night and we had to stand. With the low windows on a schoolbus, this meant that
we couldn't see out most of the time. We asked a few riders if they knew where
the Cinema Magaly was and they took care of us.
The theater was a glittering modern palace with a huge screen and up-to-date
sound systems, not a bad deal for $3. Our first rude surprise was when the movie
"Stargate" opened and we found that they'd remixed the sound. The music was much
louder than the English dialogue so that it was tough to follow the action
without reading the Spanish subtitles. About 30 minutes into the movie, all of
the actors were transported to another planet where everyone spoke Ancient
Egyptian. We didn't pick up as fast on this language as the archaeologist-hero so
were forced to speed-read Spanish for the rest of the movie.
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