Newspaper article about Nosara

In Costa Rica Susan Marling discovers why many tourists
never leave. ---

From the UK Telegraph Group

There's always a good excuse to be late in Costa Rica.
Dancing with cowboys will do.

Step lightly: migratory ducks in Costa Rica ---

Rhythmic billows of trumpet and marimba, guitar and
yearning amplified Latino voices wafted through Nicoya's
still, sunny streets and drew us to a Saturday hoedown
for cow hands who had changed into fancy shirts and put
silver bridles on their horses.

Couples danced in the street, bottoms wiggling and heads
thrown back in sexy, salsa style. Even the police were
dancing. It would be a good long night.

We were 100 miles west of the capital, San José, en
route to the Pacific coast. As with all road journeys in
Costa Rica, the last 10 miles or so would be bumpy and
dusty, but would give a satisfying sense of being
intrepid and another lengthy opportunity to shout the
praises of our four-wheel-drive vehicle over the blaring
music on the radio.

Our destination was Lagarta Lodge, just past the coastal
town of Nosara. It's at the end of the road. Drive any
further and you're over the escarpment into the canopy
of dense mangrove, and on to the grand sweep of the
white beach below.

The moment we arrived, the sun went into a spectacularly
theatrical pink curtsy on the horizon and the sea turned
silver. The focal point of this small hotel is the open
loggia's vast dining table with a grandstand view. At
meal times, as we were to discover, the seascape robs
guests of the power of speech. They just point at the
beauty of it all, shrug and shake their heads.

The new owners of the lodge, Regina and Amadeo Amacker,
were once guests here themselves. They submitted to the
beauty, abandoned their coaching business in Switzerland
and opted for an Edenic life running this seven-bedroom
hotel and 125-acre private nature reserve. They smile a
great deal, as though dazed by their good fortune.

As soon as we caught our breath, Amadeo wanted our
attention - he really had to take us on a trip a few
miles up the coast to Ostional, for something
unmissable. We would have to ford a couple of rivers to
get there, but the protected beach at Ostional is the
world's principal nesting site for Olive Ridley turtles
and, Amadeo told us, this would be a "life moment".

For 40 years or more, during the laying season,
thousands of female turtles have struggled up the beach
at night to lay their eggs - in clutches of up to 150 -
like ping-pong balls on the sand.

It was dark as we bumped the wet car into the village
and hired a guide, Pablo, who led us out with an
infra-red tor ch to find scores of turtles labouring in
their private sandpits. The moonlight caught the curve
of hundreds of shells and picked out the tracks the
animals had made up from the sea - a silent, moving
invasion by an ancient armoured army.

"Locals are allowed to take the eggs for a couple of
days after the turtles arrive," Pablo said. "After that
it's strictly forbidden." He told us how the older,
weaker females sometimes take too long to make the
journey across the hot sand. By the time they lay them,
their eggs are poached.

Despite the rules, poaching of the other sort is a
problem. Costa Rica is one of nature's wealthiest banks.
Six per cent of all species live in this small Central
American country, one of the most biodiverse places on
Earth. The theft of turtle eggs (said to restore
potency), as well as rare birds, is often blamed on
raids by Nicaraguans, Costa Rica's poorer neighbours to
the north.

When we arrived in San José, I met Carlos Manuel
Rodriguez, the minister responsible for the parks and
reserves that cover 27 per cent of Costa Rica.

He told me with passion that his government's mission
was to balance ecology with the local economy - to make
the preservation of paradise pay people's wages, so that
they had no need to poach the creatures or spoil the
land.

Tourism, of the green sort, is the key to making that
happen, though the pressure to develop money-spinning
large resorts is almost irresistible. For now, though,
it is wonderful that tourists are unequivocally part of
the solution and not just the problem.

Next morning, we climbed down the 123 steps from the
lodge to the beach to join a trip through the canals of
the mangrove swamp guided by pig-tailed Toni - another
European escapee to Nosara. His boat was driven by a
small electric outboard, like a soup whisk, and he
hopped about, on the lookout for wildlife.

First up was an iguana, as big as a Labrador, with a
shock of orange spikes down its green back. Howler
monkeys swung about, and there were a crocodile, a
basilisk lizard that can walk on water and an exquisite
circus of birds.

These were birds for people, like me, who don't really
do birds - fabulous wood storks that dive-bombed the
water, pink spoonbills, osprey, flocks of delicate heron
and egret, bright parrots and huge black hawks that
circled endlessly overhead.

Toni moored the boat by an inlet where we could watch
hundreds of them flying in from the morning's fishing
expedition. It was an exhilarating, swooping display of
aerobatics and a triumph of instinctive air traffic
control.

Toni has a house on the beach below the lodge. He also
has horses and is a bit of a "whisperer". Recently he
sold some sure-footed Andalusian greys to his
neighbours, incomers from Germany called Beate and HaWe
(short for Hans Werner). They use the horses to take
tourists on wonderful rides along the shore and up into
the hills.

This is Clint-like riding, Western style with a long
leather stirrup, a reassuringly bum-hugging saddle with
a pommel, and a rope rein held high and loose.

Out on the beach the miles of emptiness are punctuated
only by a few Ticos, as Costa Ricans are known, fishing
with rods, surfers bagging waves, children on bikes and
the occasional American hitting golf balls into the
dunes. (Although a kind of grass has been discovered
that can be watered with sea water, golf proper has not
yet invaded Costa Rica.)

Nosara is like a place from 20 or 30 years ago. It has a
hippy ish, home-made feel. There's Almost Paradise, a
restaurant on stilts overlooking the water, a Daliesque
hotel that's not quite finished, a bar on the beach
called Olga's, which has a dance-floor under the palms,
and small outfits run by men who have swapped suits for
shorts and offer guided walks and kayak adventures.

At the centre of town is the Café de Paris - a
boulangerie, internet café and small hotel rolled into
one, and housed in a chic, architect-designed building
made of local wood.

Nosara's small businesses are run by inspired amateurs,
often "blow-ins" who have fallen in love with Costa
Rica. There's not a chain hotel or a corporation in
sight. It's safe, and brilliant for children - a
tropical place with no hostility and no hassling. Not
surprisingly, international estate agents seem to be
doing rather well.

In common with most visitors, we kept on the move around
Costa Rica. There were plenty of "life moments" and
plenty of places where we would have felt happy to stay
for a week or two. Who would resist walking on
vertiginous suspension bridges 230 feet up, to view the
canopy of the cloud forest in Monteverde in the
mountainous interior of the country?

As we flogged the 4x4 up the final pot-holed track to
the town, we thought of the pacifist Quaker settlers who
had come here from Alabama in the early 1950s to avoid
imprisonment for refusing the draft for the Korean War.

A community of 40 Quakers was drawn to Costa Rica
because the country had abandoned its army in 1949. They
buried themselves in the jungle before emerging
gradually to raise cattle and start a cheese factory.

One of the settlers was the father-in-law of Tim Curtis,
who runs the Quaker school in Monteverde. "The cheese
production was a great success, and after that the
community gave some of its land as a biological
reserve," he said.

"Scientists came to investigate the marvellous cloud
forest, and they found species of plants and the famous
golden toad that exists nowhere else. Tourism quickly
followed in their wake."

Many of the Quakers are now involved with tourism. Tim's
wife makes items for the arts and crafts shop; his
brothers guide bird-watching trips and hikes into the
forest. The town actually looks like somewhere in the
American west, although quad bikes are taking over from
horses.

I was aware, wherever we went in Costa Rica (and we
covered only a small part of its thousands of square
miles of parks and reserves), that tourism had sprung
from a real desire to study or enjoy nature.

Whether we were taking a plunge in the hot thermal pools
and waterfalls of the spa at the foot of the Arenal
volcan o, having an exotic boat trip, visiting an
exciting ranch (Ensenada, overlooking the Gulf of
Nicoya) or staying in a comfortable eco-hotel (Finca
Rosa Blanca in San José), we found tourism was run by
individuals with respect for the land and its people.

I hope that direct flights from Europe resume, so that
holidays to the country do not have to begin and end, as
ours did, with a less than lovely transfer in Miami.
Costa Rica deserves and needs thoughtful tourists. It
will reward them with fun, hospitality and a nature show
that is second to none.

Susan Marling travelled with Sunvil Latin America
www.sunvil.co.uk --- Ten nights' b&b, including return
flight with British Airways from Heathrow, transfers and
4x4 car hire with CDW insurance, costs from £1,768 per
person sharing.