Paradise Found

“I have to get my Jesus lizard to the water,” my seven-year-old son, Cormac, tells me, carrying a lizard he has just caught. The Jesus Christ lizard, so named because it can run on the surface of the water, sank like a stone, a false prophet. (It was, it turned out, a ground anole.) The next day, Cormac grabbed a gecko, whose detachable tail – a defence mechanism – came off in his hand. The tail thrashed wildly and a bit creepily on its own, and the gecko retreated into the jungle to grow a new tail and contemplate the joys of ecotourism.

The rainforest has become shorthand for environmentalism (and its failures), and I wanted my children to see it first-hand, an antidote to all things civilized. Civilization, for a seven-year-old, means wandering World 6 of Super Mario Bros. on a Nintendo DS. For my 12-year-old daughter, Justine, civilization is watching So You Think You Can Dance. But the rainforest is inescapably tactile. Its humidity and lushness, that sense of power and indifference that Gabriel García Márquez described so vividly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, its giant grasshoppers and 20-centimetre flying cockroaches, its evidence of decay and renewal and the ephemeral nature of existence are everywhere. At least, that’s what I saw.

My children saw an enchanted playground amid seven-metre ferns, scarlet macaws and spider monkeys. They stepped off the boat that landed at the stunning Playa Nicuesa Rainforest Lodge to find a two-metre caiman half submerged in a lagoon near the beach, its prehistoric jaws working on a coconut.

“Can we get one?” my son asked. “As a pet?”

Justine took out her camera and moved closer to it. “Sweetheart, I don’t think…” I said to her.

“It’s okay, Papa,” she said, clicking away.

“It’s just that you don’t know what these things are going to…”

“If it eats Justine, can we keep it?” Cormac asked.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, we went fishing for red snapper. The sun was already warm on our faces, and pale tropical clouds were bunched along the horizon. My daughter’s rod suddenly doubled over, and she reeled in a Jack Caravelle. Minutes later, Cormac landed a Spanish mackerel. In an hour, we had five fish, none of them the coveted snapper, but they all found their way to the dinner table at Playa Nicuesa, which provides almost all of its own food.

In the afternoon, we visited a wildlife refuge farther along the coast. A pod of 100 spinner dolphins leapt rhythmically beside the boat. At the Santuario Silvestre wildlife sanctuary, a spider monkey walked upright, its listing bow-legged gait like an old cowboy’s. Spider and howler monkeys cavorted while the capuchins, omnivorous and devilishly intelligent, ricocheted inside their cage.

“They have to be caged; otherwise, they’ll eat the other monkeys,” explained Earl Crews, a former San Francisco commodities trader who came to Costa Rica 12 years ago and now runs the sanctuary with his wife, Carol. “They’re smart, the capuchins. I’ve heard reports of carjacking. One of them gets out in the road, car stops, driver thinks, Oh what a cute monkey, gets out, gives it something to eat. Meanwhile, three others climb into the open car, steal food, wallets, phones, keys, you name it.”

Two scarlet macaws flew overhead. “There used to be a million of these birds in Costa Rica,” Earl said. “There’s maybe a few thousand now.” Most of the depopulation is due to a roaring pet trade, though part of it may also be due to the loss of habitat as a result of deforestation – and exposure to DDT used by some of the fruit companies.