Santa Elena, Costa Rica - A Breathing Volcano, and a Laidback Way of Life

The Arenal Volcano National Park closes at 8:00pm, but we spontaneously decided to stay the night to watch the sunset rise next to the active volcano the next morning. With no camping gear or heavy clothes, sleeping beneath the majestic volcano became harder as the night progressed. The wind picked up speed, and blew mercilessly all night. It started out as a fairly mild tropical breeze, but then the temperature dropped and the wind grew stronger. It was one of the most exhilarating nights that I’ve had in a long while. We weren’t in any real danger. After all, it IS the tropics, and the temperature only drops so far. And the rewards were well worth it. We had the park completely to ourselves, we heard birds singing throughout the night, and best of all, we were treated to some amazing sounds from the volcano. As the gases are released from the top, the volcano makes some very dramatic sounds. They vary from thud-like sounds, to loud rhythmic breathing .. in and out – as if the volcano were a living creature. And then there was the orange-red lava flowing in streams every now and then. All in all, a night to remember.

Life in Fortuna (the town at the foot of the Arenal Volcano) is slow-paced, even with the bustling tourism. We watched a carpenter very deliberately install a piece of 2x4 wood paneling on a storefront: measuring and re-measuring the piece, cutting it ever so slowly with a hand sow. Then, realizing that he doesn’t have quite enough nails, he hops on his bike, disappears for a good 15-minutes, then comes back cheerfully with the extra nails. We never witnessed the completion of the job, but the setup itself must’ve taken 45-minutes or so. But here’s the part that matters even more: he never stopped smiling, AND the owner of the store was right there, and SHE never stopped smiling either. Those happy faces were all that was needed to tell a story of a culture that, for better or worse, has not yet quite reached the pace of the Western work-life. Right now, I personally feel that is for better .. way better .. way more liberating and ALIVE.

We arrived at Santa Elena yesterday, the gateway to the Monteverde Cloud Forest. Santa Elena is a small touristy town, hilly, and consists of a handful of narrow streets that never saw pavement. This is especially made worse by the fact that it rains here a lot (hasn’t stopped since we arrived, and it’s not even the rainy season yet). Which makes for potholes the size of moon craters, and gravel that is actually more like a soup of varying textures of mud and stone.

People here also seem fairly laid back, though they have caught on to Western pricing more than people in Fortuna have. Accommodations are still cheap, but non-local food, and things like park entrance fees, approach US prices. Well worth it though: there’s lots here for the eco-tourist, from transparent butterflies, to the old-growth Rain Forest, with its exotic birds, waterfalls, and long suspended bridges. I’ve added my first set of pictures at http://hany.com/ca, so check them out.

There’s one conversation that I had today that made me feel good about the equalizing concept of eco-tourism. This American woman was volunteering to be a tour guide at the Butterfly and Insect Museum for 2 months, in exchange for room and board. Of course she is also learning a LOT about native species, and interacting with people from all over the world. What seemed equalizing about this in a global sense is realizing that, yes, people come up from Mexico to the US in search of better jobs because good jobs are hard to find in Mexico. On the other hand, there seems to be an increasing awareness that things like the rain forest, and what it has to teach us, are also of significant value. Enough value, in fact, to draw Westerners to places like Costa Rica to work for almost nothing for months at a time. It is good to observe that the notion of “rich countries” is starting to expand, from one that considered only the developed Western world to be “rich,” to one that considers something like eco-richness in an under-developed country to also be on par.