Day 2: February 17, 2008

Breakfast was at the hotel – they do a grand spread. Here was our first chance to have beans and rice for breakfast, but also delicious fresh bread and lots of wonderful fresh fruit. After breakfast, we gathered with our fellow travelers for Alex to give us a briefing on the whole trip. There are fourteen people in our group – 5 from New York, 2 from Michigan, 1 from Minnesota, 2 from Oregon, 2 from Mississippi, and 2 from South Carolina.

So, by 8:00 AM we were on our way – heading northwest on the Pan American Highway, with a running commentary by Alex. He told us about the strong European influence on Costa Rican architecture; the historical importance of the coffee crop; the current big three crops of coffee, bananas, and sugar cane; government efforts to support non-traditional agriculture; and the incredible geography/geology of the country.

In the town of Alajuela (capital of the province of Alajuela), there is a statue of Costa Rica’s national hero: Juan Santa Maria. He was a 17-year old drummer boy in the Costa Rican army. He got himself killed and became a national symbol – the San Juan airport is named after him.






We headed on into the community of Poasito, near the Poas Volcano, to the Doka Estate, a working coffee plantation. All Costa Rican coffee is Arabica coffee, which is sweeter, has less caffeine, and grows on smaller more productive plants than other kinds of coffee. The beans don’t all ripen at the same time, so each area must be picked several times – a very labor-intensive process. One plant yields about one pound of roasted beans per year; it takes about 10 beans for a cup of coffee.

Here we had our first close encounter with banana and plantain trees. They seem to grow everywhere – even at the coffee plantation.










Our guide for the morning was a delightful young woman named Maricruza, who started our tour with a look at coffee seedlings – grown from coffee beans that are too ripe for making coffee.

In this area, the coffee harvest is all but done. Still we were able to see a few coffee blossoms and even a stray bean on the tree. Equally interesting was the carpet of impatiens growing all over the place – one of our favorite flowers is a weed here!

Most of the coffee crop in Costa Rica is harvested by migrant workers from Nicaragua. According to Alex, this is a byproduct of the free and mandatory education system in Costa Rica – Costa Ricans are much better educated than their neighbors in Nicaragua and aren’t much interested in hard labor in agricultural jobs. This plantation has pretty decent housing for the workers.




Here Maricruza shows us the traditional tools for harvesting coffee beans – baskets that are filled with beans, and then emptied into oxcarts to be carried from the fields. Today’s equipment is only a little more modern.






The coffee beans are spread out to dry in the sun, with regular raking to keep them turned. If it rains, the beans are raked into a pile and covered with a tarp until the shower passes.


















At the Doka Estate, most of the dry beans are then bagged for shipment to buyers. Most of the coffee grown here goes to Starbucks, which prefers to do its own roasting.












Doka does have some capacity for roasting beans. Here Maricruza explains how different types of roasting produce different varieties of coffee.






After an obligatory stop at the gift shop, we had lunch at the restaurant on-site. We were served a traditional meal in the traditional manner – beans and rice, chicken, salad, plantains, potatoes, tortillas, and coconut fudge. We had my favorite drink, guanabana juice.




Leaving the coffee plantation, we learned more about Costa Rica from Alex. He told us that the population was 96% white, 2% black, 1% Chinese, and 1% Indian. The Indian population was nearly wiped out by an assortment of diseases brought from Europe. He also told us about the abolition of the Costa Rican army in 1949 – today about 22% of the country’s spending goes to education and 30% to health care.

We traveled through some interesting little towns. The town of Grecia is known for its church – it was built in 1892, made entirely of tin – the pieces were brought in from Belgium.









Saarchi is the home of the country’s only remaining oxcart factory.







Alex was good at finding rest stops with a bit of local color.








And then things started to get really interesting. At a signal from Alex, our driver (Minor) stopped the bus and we all piled out to look up – Alex had spotted a Keel-Billed Toucan. A little further along, we found a tree with four of these beautiful birds flitting around and posing for pictures.








We drove a little more and screeched to a halt – this time for a Three-Toed Sloth – way up in a tree top, almost impossible to see. Here we got our first taste of taking pictures through Alex’s spotting telescope – pretty amazing. And the sloth was not pretty at all – the greenish color is due to algae growing on its fur – now THAT is a sedentary lifestyle.










Now we met another species of toucan, this one is the Chestnut-Mandible Toucan – the largest toucan in Costa Rica. We saw four of these in one tree.





The final wildlife spotting for the day was a coati mundi along the side of the road. This critter is kin to our raccoons and easily identified by its striped tail, which is usually held upright as he walks.








This volcano rivals Mt. Fuji in the symmetry of its cone, but it is definitely more active. Since 1968, Arenal has been spewing smoke, ash and lava – so that’s not a cloud around the top, but smoke and steam from the volcano itself. It’s often covered by clouds, but today we had a pretty good view.




And finally, this long drive reached our destination just outside the town of Nuevo Arenal – the Eco-Lodge. Our arrival was the occasion for rum/fruit cocktails provided by the hotel – a nice touch for weary travelers. We got settled in to our rooms – overlooking Lake Arenal, no TV, very quiet and isolated on a private reserve in the rainforest. We had dinner (our first fresh hearts of palm), and got a briefing from Alex about the next day’s activities. We walked back to our rooms (about ½ mile) after dinner – and the skies opened up – yep, it’s a rainforest, all right.

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Day 3: Monday, February 18

Everyone was up early this morning – thanks to the incredible sounds of male howler monkeys staking out their territory – just a bit too near our cabin! The whole group joined Alex for a bird-watching walk on the way to breakfast. We did see lots of birds that morning, but most of them were around the feeder at the lodge – each morning, the staff put out bananas, guanbana and other fruit to attract birds to entertain the guests.














Some of the birds we saw: Clay-Colored Robin (Costa Rica’s national bird), Variable Seedeater, Great Kiskidee Flycather, Red-Billed Pigeon, Yellow-Throated Euphonia, Black Cheeked Woodpecker, Buff-Throated Saltater, Blue-Gray Tanager, Scarlet-Rumped Tanager, Collared Aracari, and the Brown Jay.














Back near our cabin, we saw a pair of Red Lored Parrots and a Broad Wing Hawk.








Back on the bus, we headed down the mountain to Lake Arenal for a morning of kayaking and/or boating.























We saw all sorts of wildlife along the shore, including a White-Tail Deer and a River Otter. Birds were plentiful: we saw Mangrove Swallow, Great White Egret, Southern Rough-Winged Swallow, Green Kingfisher, Amazon Kingfisher, American Anhinga, Green –Backed Heron, Great Blue Heron, Ringed Kingfisher, Osprey, and a pretty Yellow Warbler. We heard, but didn’t see, a couple of troops of Howler Monkeys.





















The Amazon Kingfishers were fun to watch – one of them caught a fish and his fishing buddy wanted to share lunch – the successful fisherman finally got it down.










We stopped briefly in Nuevo Arenal to check out the local tourist traps and to walk around a bit.













Then back to Eco-Lodge for lunch and a siesta. The clouds lifted for a while and we had a pretty good view of Lake Arenal below.








In mid-afternoon, we went with Alex and the rest of our group for our first official walk in the rainforest. Before the day was done, we had ample evidence that we were in a rainforest – the raingear came in very handy! Not far into the forest, we saw a White-Nosed Coati Mundi. We had seen a couple of these the day before, but it was even better to see him in his natural environment.










We saw wood storks flying overhead, a litter toad hiding underfoot, and all sorts of interesting plants – Cecropia trees have distinctive rings on the trunk, with fire ants living in each ring; the strangler fig sprouts up high in a host tree and then drops roots to the ground, eventually killing the host; the Centropogon has red tubular flowers that a pollinated only by the long-tailed hermit hummingbird, which has a curved beak.













Alex showed us the “Panama Hat Palm” – the tree from which young leaves are picked to make Panama hats. The natives here also use it for making various clothing items.











He also introduced us to our first Leaf Cutter Ant (Atta sp.). This little fellow was marching along with a chunk of leaf, on his way back to the ant mound. We saw these ants on several more occasions.






We heard lots of birds in the forest, but they were pretty hard to spot. Today we saw the Wedge-Billed Wood Creeper and a pair of Swallow-Tail Kites.

The most exciting wildlife spotting was a troop of howler monkeys. Thankfully, they weren’t howling – just swinging around the trees.










The most amazing thing we” discovered” in the rainforest was a thatched hut that belonged to the native people, the Maleku. They greeted us with a hand-to-shoulder salute and the words “Capi Capi.” They told us a bit about their culture and the village where they lived, and then we had a chance to look at some of their handcrafts.

























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