Eco-tourism gone wild: How Costa Rica is trying not to be a victim of its own success.
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Page: L2
Section: Travel
Byline: Alex Hutchinson
Source: The Ottawa Citizen

On my first day in Costa Rica, a woman in San Jose explained to me why bus rides in outlying areas can sometimes take four hours to cover 40 kilometres: "The geography is so hilly here that that the only way to build roads is to dynamite the hills. But now we are all doing eco-tourism" – she shrugged expressively – "so we're not allowed to dynamite the hills anymore."

It's a national sacrifice that has paid off: Costa Rica is the original eco-tourism success story, the home of innovations like zip-line tours through the rainforest canopy, and a world leader with 25 per cent of its land protected from development. About 1.7 million tourists visited the tiny country (population 4 million) in 2005, generating an estimated $1.6 billion U.S. in revenue – more than twice what exports of coffee and bananas bring to the country. 

These days, everything from eating lunch to screaming through the woods on an all-terrain vehicle is branded as an eco-experience. But the balance between success and sustainability is a delicate one, and some of the country's most popular attractions now risk being overrun by tourists tripping over each other in their search for solitude and unspoiled natural beauty.

"Costa Rica is known as being the father of eco-tourism, as far as countries go," says Brian Mullis, the president of Sustainable Travel International, a Colorado-based advocacy group. "But since that time, they've lost market share to neighbouring countries like Nicaragua, where there are far fewer tourists, and where it could be argued that the environment at some of the major sites is much more pristine."

My girlfriend and I went to Costa Rica for two weeks in early December, at the tail-end of the rainy season. Even though that's a bit before the tourist high season, which spans the dry months from mid-December to April, we found that some of the "must-see" destinations were disappointingly crowded, sometimes verging on tawdry.

But we also found plenty of places protected by remoteness, bad roads, or arduous hikes, where the wildlife and the landscape were every bit as stunning as at the big destinations. You don't have to veer too far off the beaten tourist track to recapture the original spirit of eco-tourism – and with a bit of extra planning, we learned, you can help ensure that your presence doesn't make things worse.

The signs posted at the entrance and along the trails of Manuel Antonio National Park are clear and multilingual: "Do Not Feed The Monkeys!" The problem is bad enough that authorities have even launched a program to publish in the local paper the names and photos of people caught breaking the rule.

So perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when, as we hiked along the park's main trail, an enterprising capuchin monkey jumped on my girlfriend's back and started tugging at the zipper of her backpack. Or when, a few minutes later, a coati (a raccoon-like animal) dashed out of the undergrowth and snatched a packet of cookies literally from my hands.

That was a low point: aside from the negative ecological impact, I was pretty hungry at the time.

Manuel Antonio is the most visited park in Costa Rica. Along with monkeys, there are sloths, iguanas, toucans and more than 350 other species of birds in the rainforest and along the rocky coastline. But the word we heard most often to describe it from travellers and locals in other parts of the country was "Disneyland." The narrow trails are so congested that regular traffic jams occur whenever someone stops to contemplate the sadly tame animals.

To its credit, the Costa Rican government is trying to save the park from the perils of its own success. It has capped the number of daily visitors at 600 (800 on weekends and holidays), and the park is entirely closed on Mondays to give the animals a breather. "My understanding is that the Costa Rican government is reevaluating their eco-tourism strategy, trying to address their limitations so that they can remain a leader in sustainable tourism," Mullis notes. But whatever the number of people in the park when we visited, it was too many.

In contrast, just 40 kilometres south along the coast from Manuel Antonio, we went to a wildlife refuge called Hacienda Baru where the monkeys actually seemed surprised to see us. The difference: a bone-jarring unpaved road that took over three hours by bus. (To be fair, the bus cost only $2 and, like most buses in the country, stopped every few hundred metres to pick up and drop off passengers.)

We spent about five hours at Hacienda Baru, which is just outside the laid-back surfer town of Dominical, hiking the trails and taking a guided zip-line tour through the rainforest canopy. The number of people we saw – just one group – was far smaller than the number of monkeys, toucans, and sloths we saw. And our guide showed us how to poke a stick into a termite nest to get a snack (termites have a nutty, almost peanut-butter taste if you crunch them with your teeth, we discovered), and how to use live leaf-cutter ants to suture a cut. It was everything we had hoped Manuel Antonio would be.

We had stumbled on an important fact of Costa Rican travel: the farther south you go, the more unspoiled the surroundings are. In the northern part of the country, heavily developed beach resorts dot both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. While most airline flights still head to San Jose, in the middle of the country, the airport in Liberia started accepting international flights in 2003, providing even more direct access to the northern resorts.

"People are saying, 'I can get my sand and my sun,' which is always interesting to Canadians this time of year," says Sean Shannon, managing director of the travel website Expedia.ca. "But part of the magic is that you can do both, because in addition they have some really interesting eco-tours and such."

Expedia has seen a significant increase of interest in Costa Rica in recent years, Shannon says – an observation borne out by figures from the Costa Rican tourist board, which recorded 87,000 tourist visits from Canadians in 2005. That's up more than 50 per cent from 2003, when flights to Liberia started.

We headed in the opposite direction. From Dominical, we took a day trip to Sierpe at the southern end of the country, where we took a two-hour boat ride through mangrove swamps and then across the open ocean to the volcanic island of Caño. The snorkelling off Caño wasn't exceptional – murky water and unhealthy-looking reefs – but we did see several manta rays and other colourful fish.

More remarkable was the miles and miles of unspoiled coastline we saw from the boat along the edge of Corcovado National Park: no hotels, no villas, no roads – nothing but rainforest. Corcovado has been dubbed "the most biologically intense place on earth" by National Geographic, and it's protected by its remoteness. Next trip, we agreed, that's our destination.

Instead of going south, you can also go up. We climbed Mount Chirripo, the highest point in the country at over 3,800 metres, spending the night in a refuge built into the rock two hours below the summit. At the top, on a clear day, you can see both the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east. Located about three hours southeast of San Jose, it's not too remote – but the hike to the refuge, advertised in guidebooks as about eight hours one-way (it took us considerably less), keeps the crowds down.

It's not that having other people around is, in itself, bad. In fact, we shared the mountain refuge with about 40 other hikers, mostly Costa Ricans and Germans. Perhaps because it was a self-selected group willing to tackle the long trail, we found them to be a very friendly group, appreciative of their surroundings and respectful of the trails: no garbage, and no tame wildlife. The camaraderie extended to one group offering us bowls of a delicious warm chicken stew, a welcome addition to the bread and peanut butter (no termites) we had brought for dinner.

The presence of tourists, paradoxically, is often crucial to preserving rain forest and other wilderness. Both Manuel Antonio, in 1972, and Corcovado, in 1975, were declared parks at the last possible moment, with bulldozers and loggers waiting at the threshold. With a little foresight, says Mullis of Sustainable Travel International, it's possible to use your tourist status as a force for good, helping ensure that more wilderness is preserved and that the economic benefits you bring are shared by the local community.

Mullis suggests calling ahead to potential lodgings to ask about their sustainability policies. For instance, the Inn at Coyote Mountain (see Hotel of the Week on page [BELOW]) uses wind energy, grows its own organic fruits and vegetables, and hires all its staff locally. Other important factors include recycling, composting, and managing water use and sewage, Mullis says.

The prices at upscale eco-lodges might make a sparkling clean conscience seem like a luxury. But many of the same steps are also being taken by less expensive two- or three-star lodges, Mullis says. And another option is to try community-based tourism: "You can stay with local people for a fraction of the cost of a four-star lodge," he says, "and you know that you're contributing to the local economy and keeping money in the country." That's an important factor in keeping poaching and illegal logging and mining to a minimum.

After two weeks there, my own advice can be distilled to two basic points. First: go, if you get the chance. It's beautiful. Second: take the small amount of extra effort necessary to visit some places off the usual tourist track. When it comes to seeing pristine wilderness, that may be the only way to keep the Cheetoh-starved monkey off your back.

Hotel of the Week:

It wasn't until morning, when we were sipping glasses of starfruit juice and watching day break over the Pacific Ocean in the distance, that the spell finally broke. Until then, frankly, we'd felt a lot like the Scooby Doo gang must whenever they get lost in the remote mountains of Transylvania and end up spending the night in a spooky castle staffed by a small complement of the undead.

In fact, we were in the mountains of Costa Rica, about 70 kilometres north of San Jose. The Web booking we had made for our last two nights in the country said the Inn at Coyote Mountain was in the hills outside the town of San Ramon. That turned out to mean a 50-minute ride in a four-wheel-drive cab along some of the steepest, most winding and rock-strewn roads I've ever encountered. It was dark and misty – the area is in a "cloud forest" – and we quickly left behind all signs of civilization.

Our castle, when we finally arrived, was perched on a promontory in a small clearing in the forest. A luxurious villa built around a courtyard with a fountain, it had just four guest rooms. With 20-foot-high half-timbered ceilings, four-poster beds and enormous mosaic-tiled bathrooms, it felt hundreds of years old. And we were the only guests.

The Inn at Coyote Mountain is actually best known for its food. It's the sister property of the Trout Point Lodge in Nova Scotia, and both places offer regular three-day cooking schools taught by the three owner-chefs, Daniel Abel, Charles Leary, and Vaughn Perret, who specialize in Cajun and Creole cuisine. The magnificent building, despite its medieval Castilian feel, was completed only in 2004, and the lodge's sustainability policy includes wind-generated electricity, its own organic fruit and vegetable plantings, and staff hired entirely from within a two-kilometre radius.

In other words, it's a luxury retreat – but one whose seclusion and small-yet-grandiose scale made it unlike anywhere I've stayed before, even once the sun rose and the mists cleared.

The dinner choices were very simple: "When would you like to eat?" our host asked us. "How about 7:30?" we suggested. "It will be served in the dining hall," he said. And that was that.

In the stately dining hall – where, had there been other guests, we would have shared the long table – we were served a four-course meal: a velvety eggplant soup with an undertone of smoked pepper, a salad, then a main course of marlin with a citrus, honey and tarragon glaze accompanied by sautéed cauliflower and carrots. Dessert was banana-chocolate bread baked in individual custard pots.

It was exceptional.

The cost – though such vulgarities were not mentioned at the time – was $35 (all figures U.S.) per person, and well worth it. The three-course breakfast the next morning was a less-palatable $20 each, worthwhile mainly for the indescribable lightness of the starfruit juice.

It's possible to make day trips from the inn to major tourist destinations like the Monteverde Cloud Forest and, farther afield, the famous Arenal volcano. But after 10 days of travel, we were eager for a break from the ravening tourist hordes, so we decided to make our day's entertainment the quest for a less expensive lunch than the inn would have offered. Armed with a complete ignorance of the area's geography, we headed for the surrounding valleys.

After a 90-minute hike through farmers' fields and past occasional houses, we came to the village of Piedades Sur, where we found a small restaurant with two tables and no menus. With sign-language and smiles, we signalled our willingness to eat whatever they offered us, and enjoyed an ample lunch of rice, beans, vegetables and pork for a little less than $3. When we left, the proprietors came to the door and shook our hands heartily.

Back at the inn, time passed pleasantly: we hiked around the inn's 30-hectare private nature preserve, watched Austin Powers with Spanish subtitles (Si, niña!) on satellite TV in the lounge, and sampled the inn's eclectic library – a P.D. James for me, a guide to Sri Lankan cuisine for my girlfriend.

Coyote Mountain isn't the place to try the standard Costa Rican tourist activities like canopy tours and zip lines. But its isolation from the usual tourist routes gave us our best opportunities to interact with ordinary Costa Ricans, and its sedate pace allowed us the rare pleasure of finishing our vacation more rested and relaxed than we started it. It's luxurious – rooms start at $153 a night, or $219 for the third-floor tower room with 360-degree views – but we got one of the regularly available online specials for just $79 a night.

And it's not as inaccessible as we first thought: with daylight to help navigate the rocky roads, the $12 cab ride back to San Ramon took less than half an hour. And it was a lot less spooky.