A German tour guide was eaten here by a crocodile recently when he tried to push a boat off a mud flat. His tour party had to row back on their own. They’d paid for an adventure holiday, and boy did they get one.
David, our first estate agent, fills us in on the gory details soon after he picks us up at the hotel and we strike out into the beachside jungles north of Nosara in David’s indestructible Toyota. The Costa Rican real-estate salesman is a chatty and likeable breed.
They’re here because they don’t want to be somewhere else, somewhere easier, so these are smart people with their senses on red alert, guys who know how to survive and tell the tale. David recognises all the trees. He knows all the animals. He knows all the geo-graphy. He’s American, but this Americanism is something he is turning his back on. Everybody knows him. Every village we drive through, he gets waved at and honked at. He’s a character, the local estate agent, as specific a member of the community as the doctor or the priest. Being in his car is a whole lot of fun.
A scary drive up a muddy hill — did I tell you it was the middle of the rainy season? — ends with David steering the Toyota into a clump of jungle and somehow emerging on the other side at the summit of a hill. Back in England, on the computer, this was described as 100 untouched acres of Junquillal mountainside, with lovely sea views. There were photos and everything. But the photos didn’t do the vistas any justice at all. These aren’t sea views. These are painted horizons for a Hollywood epic. To own all this would make you an emperor, wouldn’t it? Monkeys rustle up in the trees. A toucan flaps by.
A few dozen butterfly species come to investigate. It’s stupendous. But it’s not close enough to the beach. So, what’s the next place? David has 10 acres that lead down to the sea, but there are no roads yet within the property, so are we prepared to walk? Of course we are prepared to walk. Had we been going around a national park, this would be called “a guided tour” and would be costing us $30 a head. It takes an hour to get to the beach. We force our way over a ridge thick with pochote trees, a sort of tree-sized bramble that is abundant here, and learn to identify the two types of land crab that keep sticking their heads out of the holes under your feet. The orange and purple ones are a hoot.
Patrolling the waves at washing-line height is the lonely pelican who lives here. The sea has chucked generous hunks of hardwood onto the sand for sitting on and watching him. Has anyone been here before? It doesn’t feel as if they have. It’s utterly gorgeous. But not being a wizard yet at crossing flooded rivers, and having so many of them between here and the airport, I don’t have the guts to go this wild. That’s another thing about Propo- Tourism: it tests your mettle in subtler ways than the conventional adventure holiday.
So, back to Nosara we skid and slide, keen to revisit the pleasures of infrastructure. Pretty much everything we see over the next few days is ridiculously tempting. Small wonder that so many retired Americans have chosen to end their days within walking distance of Nosara beach, where Al-Qaeda has no cells and where all the gardens are extra-large. On this fine stretch of the Nicoya Peninsula, nature has done an excellent deal with the real-estate business. Put something in the ground on Monday and by Friday it’s a fully fruiting mango. I suppose there are lots of people living here, but you can’t really see them through the trees.
But, of course, you come to Costa Rica to get away from Americans, not to settle among them, so I had no regrets about setting off on the modest-looking drive down to the underpopulated southern willy. It was about 150 miles. That’s all. But what with all the constant slaloming to avoid the holes, we must have covered twice that distance; and it took two terrifying, action-packed, nerve-tingling days. At one point, we found ourselves at the back of a small traffic jam and, jumping out to see why, we witnessed a sloth crossing the road. It took him 20 minutes.
Because all the waters were up, the various types of river crossing were invariably interesting. As darkness fell on the second day, my headlights picked out what seemed to be a yawning chasm in the middle of a bridge. Getting out to inspect, we discovered a yawning chasm in the middle of the bridge, with two girders going across it. The trick was to get your wheels onto these girders and drive forwards, perfectly straight. The chap behind us knew another way across.
He put his foot down and leapt the divide. Why pay for white-knuckle rides on kayaks when you can go property-hunting? We arrived in the middle of the night, shaking with fear and pessimism. The rain was power-showering down. The end of the world was nigh. But within a few moments of the sun coming up the next morning, it had all dried out, as it does in the tropics. And to wake us up we had the loudest and brightest alarm clock in paradise: a flock of screeching scarlet macaws passing overhead. They are common on the Osa Peninsula. In Puerto Jimenez, they come into town to feed on the almond trees in the town square.
The Golfo Dulce — the sweet gulf — sheltering within the droop of the Osa, is another magically flat expanse of water. It reminded me, of all places, of the lagoon in Venice, which I know well. It has that same bigness of vista to it. Though Venice, I agree, doesn’t have the dolphins. We’d arranged to be picked up at the dock at Jimenez and boated across to the other side, where a range of gulf-side plantations were on offer. The boat was all ours, except for the captain and the estate agent. These two turned out to be a couple from Frisco who had arrived on a sailing adventure 20 years ago and never worked up the momentum to leave. They did a bit of this and a bit of that, acquired a superb fund of tropical tales to tell, and eventually blundered into the real- estate business. It was like being shown around Key Largo by Bogart and Bacall.
The first property consisted of 1,000 acres of rainforest — a small country, basically — a tiny bit of which had been cleared to create a huge lawn on the gulf with a fabulous tropical lodge at its centre, made of hardwoods. They had a table in there, cut out of a single maho-gany trunk, that could seat 30 people easily. It was the largest and most awesomely beautiful piece of wood I have ever seen.
