Nature's way: Costa Rica is small, but it's teeming with forest life

E: The Environmental Magazine, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Jim Motavalli

At Costa Rica's Costa Flores, the world's largest tropical flower farm, giant elephant ears brush up against brightly colored Deep Throats and Big Wet Kisses, while hummingbirds and Jesus Christ lizards dart about. The farm specializes in heliconia plants, which help to give the rainforest its splashier hues. Costa Flores exports 400 boxes of such cut flowers a day, half to the U.S., but before they're airshipped the flowers are hand-washed in a big vat of pesticides, marked with a crude skull and crossbones.

In Costa Rica, nature at its most abundant rubs shoulders with environmental disaster. For every pristine rainforest (and such forests still cover 30 to 40 percent of the country). there's a city polluted by diesel exhaust or a great wash of environmentally sterile coffee plantations. Costa Rica is losing much of its great biological heritage even as, more than any other country in Central America, it protects its old growth and builds its reputation as an eco-tourism destination.

Vacationers looking for fun and sun will find both (and some of the most unspoiled Pacific beaches ever), but not packaged with a stay in a high-rise hotel. Wisely, Costa Rica has avoided large-scale commercial development in favor of small oceanside and mountaintop resorts that blend in with their natural surroundings. (When Barcelo Hotels built a typical 402-room beach resort, local tour operators - accustomed to getaways of 50 rooms or less - talked about organizing a boycott.) An ideal eco-destination is the 53-room Selva Verde Lodge in Sarapiqui. The lodge borders 600 acres of primary and secondary rainforest snaked with trails. Selva Verde's meals are taken cafeteria-style, and the rooms are simple by American standards, but the two-story wooden buildings are built right into the forest, giving a spectacular sense of place.

The tour's birdwatchers pointed out the flock of toucans cavorting in the trees, and the guide alerted us to bands of howler monkeys, orderly processions of leafcutter ants and tiny red poison dart frogs, whose muscle-relaxing venom is reportedly 1,500 times more powerful than cocaine. (The frogs are misnamed, though; it's another species that provides poison for Colombian blowguns.)

Costa Rica's newfound eco-consciousness has spawned a whole host of private entrepreneurial preserves, like the Quetzal Farm in mountainous rural Los Santos, where the brilliant red-breasted, green-bodied quetzal bird - considered by many to be the most beautiful in the world can be glimpsed through field glasses, calmly preening its feathers. "Awesome," said the birdwatchers, who also glimpsed ruddy woodcreepers, bush tanagers and black-billed nightingales.

Even more more impressive is the vast (24,700 acres) Carara Biological Reserve, west of Orotina and close to the Grande de Tarcoles River (where basking crocodiles, roseate spoonbills and a pair of scarlet macaws in formation were seen).

At Carara, the forest shoots up straight from the ground in distinct layers, each with its own specific bird and animal life, and topped with a teeming canopy. (Canopy life, by the way, can best be seen from the 2.6-mile aerial tram installed by American Donald Perry at the Bosque Lluvioso Reserve). Carara's forest paths offer the strongly pungent smell of elusive pig-like peccaries. We observed the slow progress of the strangler fig, which takes 50 to 60 years to choke the life out of its host tree, saw a laughing falcon in the canopy, watched a green parrot eating fruit in a tree, and thrilled to the sight of a horde of white-faced monkeys turning the leafy cover into their dinner salad.

There are a variety of gorgeous, unspoiled Pacific Ocean beaches near Carara, and one of the largest is Playa Jaco. A warning to travelers: Many hotels and lodges in Costa Pica have cold water only, and upgrading to hot water can be pricey.

Because of its biological abundance, Costa Rica is host to many academic visitors from foreign universities. We visited La Selva, a 3,500-acre research station founded in 1984 and run by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). La Selva offers cottage accommodations to visitors, and to students from the U.S., Holland, Germany, Argentina and Mexico who are studying the surrounding Selva Biological Reserve.

It is, of course, possible to visit Costa Rica and just lie in the abundant sun, but then the visitor would miss one of the most fascinating and concentrated collections of tropical flora and fauna on the planet.

PLACES TO STAY: Selva Verde Lodge, Chilamate, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica/(800)451-7111. Rooms are $55 to $63 per person, per night, double occupancy, including three meals. La Selva Research Station, Organization of Tropical Studies, San Jose, Costa Rica/(011)40-6783. A day and night's stay, including three meals, is around $75. Ecotour operators who visit Costa Pica: Explorations, 27655 Kent Road, Bonita Springs, FL 33923/(813)992-9660; International Ventures, 65 Old Ridgefield Road, Wilton, CT 06897/(203)762-7104; Rainbow Adventures, 5875 NW Kaiser Road, Portland, OR 97229/(503)690-7750; Wildland Adventures, 3516 NE 155th Street, Seattle, WA 98155/(206)383-0886.