Costa Rica jams world's worth of spectacles into small space

By CHRIS WELSCH
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

last updated: April 06, 2008 02:39:20 AM

ARENAL NATIONAL PARK, Costa Rica -- A crown of streaming clouds flowed off the cone of Costa Rica's Arenal volcano.

A sound like thunder shook the air. Standing in a lava field about 2 miles from the mountain I watched boulders the size of Chevy Suburbans fly out of the clouds and tumble down the gray and black slope.

Oddly, the volcano's audience treated the spectacle with casual curiosity. A dozen Dutch and German tourists sat or leaned on black pumice boulders, chatting while they scoped the geological show with their binoculars.

"Doesn't this make you a little nervous?" I asked my guide, Alexander Araya. "A little. See that lake?" he pointed to a body of water a couple of miles behind us. "The old town of Arenal is under there. It was destroyed when the volcano blew up in 1968. This thing has been active every day since. It can throw a boulder 5 or 6 kilometers."

During a four-day excursion across Costa Rica's interior, I often had thefeeling that I was watching a special-effects-laden movie instead of experiencing reality.Maybe it was suddenly going from the gray world of Minnesota winter to the saturated colors of the equatorial tropics, but everything -- the exploding volcano, the cloud forest as viewed while flying down a steel cable, a flock of iridescent hummingbirds -- seemed too extravagant to be true.

Araya, 31, added to the sense of disassociation. Perpetually clad in wrap-around shades, he told outrageous stories with disarming nonchalance and an utter lack of irony.When we checked into a hotel near the volcano, he told me not to get too close to bushes or trees with my camera because of the abundance of poisonous snakes.

"The fer-de-lance is the only aggressive one. If he sees you coming, he'll come out toward you," Araya said. "My uncle got bit by one. Blood comes out your eyes and pores. He was in the hospital six months, but don't worry, he survived it."

Peaceful people, restless land

At the juncture between North and South America and between the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, Costa Rica compresses an intense amount of geography and wildlife into a very small country (about the size of West Virginia) a few hundred miles north of the equator.

The character of the people who live amid all these phenomena is interestingly relaxed. They are known to other Latinos (and to themselves) as Ticos, for the Costa Rican tendency to add the Spanish diminutive to nearly every noun. In Costa Rica, a coffee is un cafecito. With milk? Con lechita.

That tendency seems representative of an affectionate and nonviolent outlook on life. Araya proudly told me that the country hasn't had a standing army since 1948, and that the money is better spent on schools.

"Tourism is the No. 1 industry," Araya said, "but high-tech is No. 2. And that's because everyone here can get an education."

The people are nonviolent, but the landscape isn't. There are more than 100 volcanoes in Costa Rica and at least five are active. Arenal, reliably rumbly, has become a hub of geo- and eco-tourism. The volcano provides heat for a number of hot-spring spas, and a dramatic setting for a number of other attractions, such as a private park with hanging bridges suspended in the rain-forest canopy.

We spent the morning hiking in Arenal National Park, a rain-forest preserve at the base of the volcano. There, stark evidence of the Earth's potential for destruction was brightened by its powers of creation; orchids sprouted from crevices in lava, from trees, from the damp forest floor.

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