Paradise Found

These foreign coffee and fruit companies arrived in the 19th century, producing European wealth and stratifying the indigenous society. In 1897, the Teatro Nacional was built in downtown San José, a lovely, slightly eclectic European building, and the first performance was, appropriately, of Gounod’s Faust. To trade one’s soul to the devil for immediate gratification (or simple survival) is a common theme among developing countries. Costa Rica is poised between two opposing forces – the small sustainable world that exists in the 25 percent of the country that is protected for conservation and the bulimic Western appetite that is colonizing the rest of the country. This delicate balance is evident throughout Costa Rica, where natural hierarchies and human intrusion compete to see which will triumph.

There was another form of natural hierarchy on the beach at the southern tip of the Península de Osa. Where the Pacific waves were highest at one end of the beach, we found a congregation of hard-core surfers: sullen, shaved, tattooed and territorial. As we walked along the beach, the waves became smaller and the surfers became kinder and gentler: less ink, more suburban-looking. My daughter and I held hands and jumped as the 1½-metre waves hit. At age 12, there are occasional glimpses of the graceful young woman she’ll become (and the sullen adolescent that lurks), but in the waves she shrieked with girlish joy.

The beach was alive with hermit crabs scurrying like cartoon characters, then suddenly stopping and withdrawing into their shells. My kids picked up six of them and staged hermit crab races on the sand. They cheered on their favourites, who beetled erratically toward their own private finish line. Above us flew the curiously named magnificent frigatebird, which has a 2¼-metre wingspan and the silhouette of a pterodactyl, adding to the sense we were in a lost world.

At the nearby Lapa Rios resort, our villa was 100 metres down the hill from the dramatic central lodge, and on the path we saw squirrel monkeys, a fluorescent green and black dart frog and a toucan. Walking back after dinner in the blackness, the scuttling of hundreds of purple and orange Halloween crabs was so loud, it sounded like rainfall. In the morning, crab shells littered the path.

“What happened to them?” my son asked.

“Someone’s dinner, I guess.”

“Sick.”