The bus gave a high-pitched whine as it slowed. The sleeping passengers stirred and the quiet darkness was suddenly humming with soft mumbles of confusion. We weren't in Tamarindo yet but I could smell the salt of the Pacific. The air was thick and warm and, curiously, smelled of molasses.
The driver exited the bus to talk to a few men outside. Apparently there was some problem with the power lines - they were hanging low over the road ahead and we could not pass. The driver spoke to us in Spanish and everyone began to collect their things. Villaréal would be the last stop tonight.
Taxis appeared around our stranded bus but no other roads led to Tamarindo, or so the bus driver insisted. Two American girls asked if we wanted to share their taxi since their driver said he knew a short cut. We obliged half-heartedly, unsure as to how this man planned on getting there since the bus no doubt would have taken an alternate route were it available. The present town offered few accommodations and so we climbed into the cab hoping for the best.
We drove a few hundred meters back the way we had come before suddenly swerving onto a stone-studded dirt road. We immediately reached a creek that our mini-bus could not maneuver so we turned around and took another dirt road. It became clear to me why the bus driver didn't take this road. We bumped and jolted along the deeply rutted "short-cut" making small talk with our new tourist-friends. One girl was a student from San Francisco, the other was actually from Germany, not the States. They seemed nervous as we rattled along. They were making me nervous as well.
We splashed through the shallow rivers that cut across our path, and heaved up the sloping banks. It was incredibly dark and difficult to see where we were. I turned to look behind us and saw headlights. I couldn't help but think it might be a car full of road-pirates waiting to take our money and passports. Cypress told me to calm down, that they were probably other tourists taking the same road to Tamarindo. I relaxed a little but kept stealing glances.
The deep darkness soon gave way to street lights that illuminated a few small houses. We were on the outskirts of Tamarindo. A large Best Western hotel was the first of many to greet us. Shops and bars appeared and people darted across the road. Our taxi pulled off to the side and we climbed out onto the street. The curious smell of molasses had grown stronger and now I knew why. The dirt road was covered in a thick, sticky substance. We surmised it was meant to keep the dust from rising.
The driver asked for fifteen thousand colones but Cypress bargained with him as best he could. It was still an expensive detour but at least we had arrived. We said goodbye to the girls and began looking for a phone. We hauled our enormous backpacks across the street to the town square.
The large plaza had several shops, a small movie theater, and a youth hostel with its name advertised on a blue, surfing shark. I stood outside with the bags while Cypress made a call to Barb, the woman we would be staying with. I sat on my bag and watched as many tourists milled about, most of them young and white, all of them drunk and excited.
Cypress joined me on the sidewalk and before long, an older woman and a young Nicaraguan man strolled our way. Barb greeted us warmly and introduced us to her friend Calixto. He said he was el Changador,
the porter, and offered to help us with our bags. Barb informed us that the condo was only a few minutes up the road and the walk was short.
Cypress knew Barb through a friend and she had been more than willing to put us up for a few days. She lived in small gated community that housed a number of retired Americans wanting to escape the chill of the winter months.
We entered the complex through a tall security gate. Barb assured us that crime rates were low enough but precautions were necessary. The metal door clanged behind us and we walked down a palm tree-dotted alley. Barb's apartment was second to last on the left. Our hostess showed us around before taking us to our room. She urged us to make ourselves at home.
It was still early in the night and we hadn't eaten anything substantial since breakfast so Barb offered to take us to El Pescador,
the fisherman, for some plato tipico (genuine Costa Rican food). We freshened up and headed back into town. The restaurant was a small open air type with more tables outside than in and overlooked a glistening moonlit Pacific.
A jovial man greeted us and we chose a spot at the edge of the patio. The table was a box top with a glass cover. Inside were coins, and paper money from all over the world, ropes tied in different kinds of knots, seashells and sand. The waiter came back and he and Barb chatted like old friends. He said their catch of the day was Mahi Mahi. Cypress and I got some cassava frites to go along with our freshly caught fish.
We ate to our heart's content. I was beginning to enjoy black beans and now relished fried plantains. I wondered how I had gone through life without ever having tried one. We left with full bellies and headed back to Barb's to turn in for the night.
The next morning the warm air was swirling with the sounds of exotic birds and the distant roar of a neighboring ocean. I opened my eyes and was confronted by a painted beach mural on the opposite wall complete with mountains and palm trees. It was the next best thing to waking up with the actual ocean. Barb was a talented artist and we would find many examples of her artwork, in addition to the beach mural, around the house.
Cypress and I jumped out of bed like two kids on Christmas morning. The birds of Costa Rica proved as tantalizing as shiny new presents under a lit-up fir tree. We threw on our bathing suits, shorts and t-shirts and flip-flopped out of our room and down the stairs. Barb was up making coffee in the kitchen and greeted us with a big smile. She chattered and flitted about the kitchen asking us many questions about the trip, our travels, and what
exactly did it mean to "work with birds".
When the coffee was ready we took our mugs and binoculars outside and sat around the turquoise salt-water pool. We prattled on for about an hour sipping our fair-trade Costa Rican blends, all the while pointing our binoculars at the forest rising behind the large stone wall at the back of the compound.
The trees were absolutely dripping with birds. Sparrows, woodpeckers, wrens, hummingbirds, parrots, parakeets, motmots, puffbirds, warblers, flycatchers, vireos, gnatcatchers, tanagers, blackbirds, and anis were all visible from our pool-side observatory. This was indeed a treat to the North American birder. We couldn't imagine what else we would find once we explored the rest of the town.
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| Cypress does some pool-side birding |
We had eight days before having to be in the Tilaran mountains for work and we made the most of our little vacation. Barb was an excellent host and proved very resourceful, having made a living as a tour-guide back in the United States. She took us to the best restaurants and the liveliest bars. She was friends with many of the locals and scored deals on snorkeling trips and surf lessons.
The infamous beach upon which Tamarindo is founded was always within sight, or to the very least, sound and smell. We spent our first day here.
Expensive hotels monopolized the northern end of the beach while the eastern side was hugged by restaurants and private condos. We stuck to the east side since it was largely unpopulated compared to the hotel district where scores of people learned how to ride surfboards and aggregations of pale American and European tourists competed for prime UV spotlights.
The Pacific rushed forth, forever roiling against an extensive sugary beach. White sand is somewhat rare in Costa Rica and much sought after by tourists, and, I imagined explained the extensive development up and down the coast. We dipped our toes into the water and lifted our binoculars to the sky. To our surprise and disappointment there were few gulls and not much in the way of seabirds. However, we delighted in watching as dozens of brown pelicans and magnificent frigatebirds crowded around fishing boats in the hopes of scoring an easy meal.
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| Tamarindo Beach |
We did a lot of exploring inland as well. On our second day we wandered south down the dusty road connecting Tamarindo and Playa Langosta (Lobster Beach). The Las Baulas National Park hugged the east side of the undeveloped highway creating an impenetrable green wall to our left. There was little traffic and, consequently, copious amounts of wildlife.
Inca doves cooed upon the powerlines as cinnamon hummingbirds and green-breasted mangos buzzed like bumblebees around roadside flowers. We craned our necks trying to catch glimpses of reclusive tanagers and orioles. Boat-billed flycatchers and great kiskadees proved to be a challenge, looking virtually identical save for the golden crown and white supercilliaries that meet at the back of the neck of the latter species.
We ambled on slowly for hours, stopping and flipping through the pages of our field guide, and gulping back inordinate amounts of water. The birds were growing quiet as the sun soared ever higher into an unblemished blue sky but the odd toucan and tanager occasionally awarded our efforts with fleeting flashes of vibrant feathers. Soon the wind carried no sounds of singing birds and we quickened our pace only to stop short as a family of howler monkeys cautiously crossed the road ahead of us, one by one. The last, a baby, created a swirling cloud of dust as he caught up with the others.
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| A baby Howler catches up with his family |
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| Cypress enjoying Las Baulas |
As the next town grew closer the trees thinned out and the forest yielded to new housing developments. SUVs waited obtrusively on the side of the road, gated homes sat perched atop freshly plowed plots of forest that couldn't afford protection from the boundaries of Las Baulas. But there were still birds.
A statuesque black-headed trogon, the first trogon I had ever seen, peeked out at us from the edge of a postage-stamp sized plot of tropical scrub forest. A squirrel cuckoo skittered, true to its name, through a tangle of vines like a familiar, fluffy-tailed rodent. Stripe-headed sparrows sang along concrete fence rows and groove-billed anis, a type of small black cuckoo, were ever present making playful clucking noises and chasing one another through the grass.
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| Squirrel Cuckoo |
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| Stripe-headed Sparrows |
Back in Tamarindo we met Barb for dinner at Nogui's, a charming restaurant at the end of a cul-de-sac that specialized in American-style hamburgers. Barb waved to us from a round table with a wide open view of the ocean. We ordered a few beers and chatted lazily in the shade of a large tamarind tree, the same tree after which the town had taken its name.
Cypress and I asked about the new development we had encountered in Playa Langosta and Barb was quick to clarify that when she first arrived to this surfer's paradise ten years ago none of the shops, restaurants, bars, or hotels existed. Playa Langosta was a forest, and Tamarindo didn't even have a bus stop.
"There was one road in, and one road out. That was it. Only locals. The only tourists to come here were the really hardcore surfers. But word got out and now everyone is wanting a piece of Tamarindo."
I looked down at my empty plate and felt a pang of guilt. Indeed, everyone seemed to be enjoying the delicacies that this booming beach town had to offer.
"Iguanas used to drape themselves all over the place," barb continued, "but now you're lucky to see one or two. Sea turtles used to nest up and down the beach. But not anymore. They're all gone."
I assumed there used to be more birds as well. I was used to hearing stories like this. It wasn't just Tamarindo, this was happening all over North America. And Australia, and Mauritius, and Rota. Cypress and I exchanged sullen glances and I finished my beer, feeling a little bit like a fool.
A pair of white-throated magpie-jays swooped-in and landed on the bar, diverting our attention and changing the somber mood. They plucked a packet of mayonnaise and poked a hole into the side lapping up the thick white paste. They managed to empty four packets before the owner came out and shooed them away. One of the jays absconded with a fifth packet and pecked out the tangy sauce in a tree. The emptied wrapper dropped to the ground as the pair flew off in search of more tasty morsels.
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| Barb tells me about the costs of living comfortably |
We spent our remaining days appreciating the natural beauty surrounding Tamarindo and checking several life-birds off in our field guides. We climbed a back road that led to the highest point of town and spied crested caracaras and black vultures wheeling around the sky. Scissor-tailed flycatchers sallied for insects from exposed branches, their ridiculously long tails streaming behind them like ribbons. At the top, the Pacific Ocean hogged the entire vista sprawling infinitely into the west. We looked at sailboats and large oil tankers through our binoculars but unexpectedly caught a glimpse of a pod of breaching whales making their way south. I wanted to live on top of that hill forever.
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| A view from the top |
On the morning of the 9th it was inevitably time to leave. The mountains and golden-winged warblers called our names. We had said our farewells the night before and now crept quietly out of the condominium into the still morning darkness. Crickets sang and a few birds chirped and stirred in the foliage. The road crunched beneath our feet as we made our way to the bus depot and I reflected fondly on Tamarindo.
It was silly to hope that this town would resist the landslide of development that was coming its way. History had taught me that nothing, no matter how beautiful and rare, would stand in the way of people's comfort and luxury. But I hoped that these future changes would be slow. I hoped that people would understand the importance of working with nature rather than pushing it out of the way. I hoped that the dirt roads would forever remain unpaved, for I had grown to love the sweet smell of molasses. And I hoped the birds would not disappear like the iguana and the sea turtle.
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Like sea turtles, these large iguanas have become rare since Tamarindo
became the favored wintering grounds of retired Westerners |
