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| Costa Rica Honeymoon, Fall 2000: Alajuela, Day 2
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Tuesday, October 24, 2000: Butterflies and hummingbirds and waterfalls, oh my!
We woke up bright and early today to meet Oscar for a guided tour up into the hills of Alajuela and a place called La Paz Waterfall Gardens. It's a relatively new attraction that features the largest butterfly observatory in the world, along with a hummingbird garden and extensive trails that lead you past three waterfalls of varying size and intensity.
We also stopped briefly at a small coffee shop run by the Doka company, which owns a majority of the coffee fields in the area. Surprise: they've figured out the Starbucks scheme: charge outrageous prices for coffee and call it a "mocha latte" or whatever. Here in the heart of coffee country, where coffee should be, if not free, ridiculously cheap...a plain small coffee was $1.25 U.S. I think not. (However, we did get suckered into buying a Lonely Planet guide to Costa Rica -- we'd forgotten our previously purchased Lonely Planet guide at home -- for $29.)
After passing through a few more ecology microsystems (including, somewhat suprisingly, a forest of pale birch trees and a pine grove), we finally arrived at the Peace Garden. Open to the public for just three months now, it's fronted by a very new-looking, peach-stucco lodge, which houses a cafeteria-style restaurant, an information desk, and a small souvenirs room. (Dave was very taken by the sinks in the men's room: the hot and cold water handles were actually rocks that you had to turn.)
We hiked back up (and up...and up...oh, my aching knees!) and had a buffet lunch at the lodge. As they say in Spanish, muy delicioso! We had rice, black beans, fried plantains, spicy ground beef, chicken...all excellent (and well-earned after our long hike). We chatted with Oscar, practiced some new Spanish, and then clambered back into the van for the trip home. An hour later, we were back at Xandari, where we enjoyed a low-key afternoon. That evening, we were picked up by David's father's friends, Kirsten and Mario Visona, and ferried (in their Mercedes) into the outskirts of San Jose, where we ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant located in a big conference hotel. The food was excellent (of course, we had sushi), but it was a bit of a challenge for the Visonas, who are vegetarians...they finally ordered some sort of stir-fried tofu and edamame.
Back to Xandari, and to bed! We're still feeling under the weather. On the agenda tomorrow: white-water rafting! Eek. Sudafed, don't fail me now. |
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It took us about an hour to drive there, in our lovely little minibus that boasted a placard proclaiming "Tourist Service" to all passers-by. We wound through several small towns before rising up in the hills, which were covered with coffee plantations. Oscar told us that harvest time was great fun, and often entire families picked the beans together...a large basket for men, a medium one for women, and even a tiny one for children. They're paid $1 per basket (which looks about the size of a bushel -- not small!), and Oscar said some pickers can make $50 a day -- which is a fortune here. All the beans must be harvested by hand, because they're on very steep slopes that just couldn't be handled by machines. It made me think twice about how easily (and thoughtlessly) we can spend the same $50 it takes a day of backbreaking labor to earn here.
We stopped briefly at a roadside food and fruit stand, of which we'd already seen many. They sold fresh fruit, juices, water, fresh cheese, and a variety of other small snack foods; I take it their main source of business is from the tourists who drive by (I suspect Oscar has some sort of a deal with these folks). The woman running the stand offered us fresh strawberries (which we surreptitiously returned to the bin -- read enough warnings about not eating fruit you can't peel, to avoid tourist diarrhea, and you'd avoid 'em, too!) and something called a Chinese plum. It looked horrific on the outside -- a spiny, urchin-like round thing about the size of a chestnut -- but the inside was incredibly sweet and juicy. We bought a few of those and some water, because we felt it'd be bad form for us to just leave without buying anything. She tried to convince us to buy some cheese, too, but it had the approximate consistency (and appearance) of Play-Doh, so -- even with my cheese-aholic tendencies -- we passed.
As we continued higher into the hills, the coffee fields gave way to plant farms -- acres of house plants grown for export, housed under long tarps that stretched seemingly for miles. I'm not sot sure what types of plants they were, but the homes we saw all had brightly colored foliage growing out front.
The back of the lodge leads to a wide deck, where you can take in an amazing view (dense jungle, with gardens in the forefront). Stairs lead down to the left and end in a lushly landscaped garden; at the far end, the butterfly observatory presides over the scene. Essentially, the observatory consists of a large area (almost the size of a football field, we estimated) covered with an arched, mesh screen that's about 40 feet high in the middle. A winding path takes you through the Japanese-influenced garden, where butterflies of all shapes, sizes, and colors rest on the plants, flowers, and mesh walls.
The butterflies were amazing! Bright oranges, flashy golds, striking reds and blacks, electric blues...gorgeous. To Dave's amusement, I shot a whole roll of film. He picked up a hitchhiker during our walk -- a large, grayish butterfly with wing marking like eyes. It stayed on his shoulder until we reached the exit, where we shooed him back inside. One of the most interesting things was seeing the cocoon section. Dozens of cocoons were hanging by pins in an enclosed box, row upon row of them...some plain gray or brown, others shocking blue or pinks. A couple even had gold rims on them, looking for all the world like high-fashion earrings.
A few of the caterpillar condos had recently sent forth brand-new butterflies, which were hanging on the cocoons drying their wings. (Interesting butterfly fact: I've been told that when caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies, they actually turn into a liquid inside the cocoon, in which their DNA is reshuffled and they then become a new solid -- the butterfly. Kind of amazing, when you think of it...a creature that goes from a solid, to a liquid, and back to a solid.)
Next up: the hummingbird garden! There were several brightly colored feeders hanging in the plants outside, and hummingbirds unconcernedly flew right past us as they went after the nectar (actually, sugar water). They were beautiful and eyecatching...iridescent feathers shining in the sun, each making a little "wroooom!" sound as they flew past us. Cool hummingbird facts: they have no sense of smell and cannot walk or hop -- they can only fly or perch.) I finished off my second roll of film on the hummingbirds.
After David pried me away from the tiny avians, we followed Oscar on the beginning of our hike. Down, down, down we went, into a deep canyon, passing along the way Disneyland-sized plants and shrubs. One plant had leaves so enormous (6 feet across!) that we felt like we were on a movie set (Land of the Lost?). Oscar told us that local workers call the plant "poor man's umbrella," because during the rainy season they cut the giant leaves and use them as protection against downpours. Wow.
We stopped at a smallish waterfall and took the requisite pictures, then continued our hike down, alongside a river. At one point, we passed a handyman who was working on a guardrail for the trail, and his puppy, which promptly decided we were more fun than her current guardian and decided to appoint herself our new "guide." (She was adorable. Those of you who know me can only imagine how many cooing noises came out of my mouth along the way.) She led us to another waterfall, bigger than the first...deep in the heart of the rain forest, with the giant plants and moss and vines all around, and the canopy overhead so thick you could hardly see the sky. The final waterfall, at the bottom of our hike, was a double-dip: two waterfalls, the first running into a pool and giving rise to the second, which dropped about 45 feet down.
We had a pleasant evening and learned a bit about Costa Rica. We were joined later on by the Visonas' daughter, Karen, who told us how American tourists in San Jose are often viewed with pity by local teens ("I look at the people with their backpacks and feel bad, because I know they'll get robbed") and how excited she is to attend college next year in Florida. The Visonas responded with conspicuous silence when we told them of our plans to fly to Tamarindo in two days' time...apparently, the in-country flights here aren't of the caliber we're used to. They told us a chilling story about a recent crash, where a small plane went off-course to get a bird's-eye view of a recent volcano eruption, and ended up caught in hot-air updrafts and plummeted onto the slope, killing eight or so people. Yikes. We are considering renting a car instead...