COSTA RICA TRIP REPORT

None of the 14 people on the trip had ever been to Costa Rica or had even dived in the general area before so this trip was new ground for all of us. Fortunately it turned out to be a nice surprise. Our first glimpse of the country wasn’t so great as we got there at night. The airport is open air and full of large flying insects. We finally got on our bus for the 45 minute ride to the resort. Our resort, Fiesta Premier, was located on the western coast of Costa Rica on Papagayo Bay off the Pacific Ocean. What little terrain we could see from the bus looked pretty hilly and forested. Not many lights could be seen along the highway except for a few roadside establishments. Even I-65 in the middle of nowhere has more lights than some areas of Costa Rica. This relative lack of lights proved a benefit as Ray our club astronomer was able to point out some interesting features in the night sky.

When we finally arrived, we found Fiesta Premier resort to be quite modern and nice. The rooms were decent sized. They had good air conditioning and all seemed to have a nice view. The rooms were very clean and everything seemed new and in good working order (one might expect this to be standard at a resort, but past experiences have taught us this is not the case). The resort has its rooms surrounding a central courtyard which has the pool, the restaurant, bar, snack bar, and patio. The restaurant was enclosed, air conditioned and very nice. It was not the sort of place you would go to in wet swim trunks and tank top. If you didn’t want to clean up, they had a patio area outside where you could get the same food. Food was served buffet style and you had an almost infinite number of choices. Typically they had beef or pork, chicken, fish, pasta, vegetables, and a huge dessert table. This was not a place for travelers on diets. The food was excellent in my humble opinion. The food must have been high quality because to the best of my knowledge no one had any problem with “the affliction” all week long which is a record for this club.

The bar was open air and faced the pool and patio. Our package included unlimited drinks which was not necessarily a good thing for some. They had most mixed or blended drinks, but only a few kinds of beer. Despite the fact that this is a no tipping resort, the service was for the most part outstanding. In fact, you could hardly finish your meal or drink before someone grabbed the empty plate or glass. The Costa Ricans we saw at the resort and in fact all Costa Ricans we saw seemed genuinely friendly and I never once sensed any animosity or hostility. Most of the guests at the resort were Americans like us, but there were some Canadians, Argentines, and Spanish.

The weather was quite pleasant if a little humid. The temperature was in the 80s most of the time. There was a mix of clouds and sun most days. We only had a very little bit of rain. However, upon talking to some people at the resort it seems that for most of the month prior to our arrival it pretty much rained all day every day. Diving was cancelled, tours were cancelled. So we lucked out there. We found out that November is probably the best time to go as in Dec-March it gets very dry and VERY hot. Then the rainy season starts until November again.

OK, on to the diving, which for most of us was the reason we came there in the first place. We met up with the dive shop owner on Sunday morning. Filling out the forms was very easy and painless. We were each given a tag for our mesh bag and left our gear there. The staff put it on the boat every morning and often as not hooked up our BCD and regs. Unlike my last dive trip not once did they put my regulator on upside down! The resort has no dock as Costa Rican rules prohibit them from building any permanent structure on the beach, so we had to be ferried out to the dive boat in a skiff. The staff proved to be good boat drivers as none of us got wet or fell off the boat. Our main dive boat for the week, the FEAR NOT, was a 30-some odd foot long cabin cruiser which was reasonably well set up for about 8-10 divers. The boat was roomy and clean, but had some odd features. Most glaring was the tank rack. Rather than having all the tanks in a row or along the gunwales, the tanks were all grouped together in the stern. This made it difficult to rack up all the tanks with BCDs on them. The other oddity was the lack of a dive ladder on the transom. Instead they had a very large swim platform pretty much at water level. The procedure was to remove your weight belt and fins and then hand up your tank/BCD. For those of us with integrated weights this proved to be a pain. It is rather difficult to remove the weight pouches from some integrated BCDs while floating in the water and the crew nearly got hernias from trying to lift up our weighted BCDs.

Most trips were only a half an hour from the resort. Most of the diving is done right in Papagayo Bay. A typical dive site is in about 40-60 feet of water. The deepest we got all week was 90 feet. The bottom is sand and rock. Conspicuously absent is any semblance of a hard coral reef. The structure is all rock. The visibility was about 30-40 feet. Not bad, but not up to our Caribbean expectations. The water had a sort of greenish cast due to all the particulate matter. Of course it is this particulate and plankton that allows the great profusion of life there. No sooner had we rolled on on our first dive than we saw a school of eagle rays. The sand bottom was full of large southern stingrays up to 5 feet across. They seemed for the most part to be quite tolerant of divers. The cracks and crevices of the rocks were full of fish and critters, too. We saw quite a few eels and more puffers than I thought existed in any one ocean. There were tiny little cousins to the sharpnose puffers, balloonfish, and big porcupine fish. There were probably 5 different kinds of eels from little white faced eels, to medium sized jeweled morays, to big Panaman Green eels. There were a lot of fish and at first us experts on Caribbean fish were somewhat bewildered by the fish we saw. Angelfish were the same shape and size, just the colors were all wrong. There were large schools of grunts and sergent majors, too. Most of the rocks had a thin coating of marine growth (otherwise known as green crud), but very little seaweed or sponges or sea fans were present. Starfish were seen feeding on the growth.

The water temperature was about 75F on the surface and maybe 71F on the bottom. There were definite halo and thermoclines which tended to be somewhat erratic and non predictable especially near the rocks. Below the thermocline it got down into the upper 60s. Only a few of us had the proper wetsuit (5mm fullsuit) so we got to see a wide variety of patched together combinations of 3mm suits, skins, farmer john parts and the like. The divemasters at first wanted us to stay close together as a group and adhere to a 45 minute profile, but quickly each of us got back into our regular dive routine. As long as we were back at the end nothing was said. One thing we noticed right away was that the boat was rarely if ever where we left it. And if there WAS a boat at our entry point chances were very good that it wasn’t our boat. With the reduced visibility it was easy for divers to get separated and at the end of the dive Ignacio, the captain, was constantly driving around to pick up divers. This would have been a good place to have a see-me sausage. It was very calm for 90% of our dives, but if the waves had been high, spotting divers could have been tough. I have to hand it to the boat crew, though. I never had to wait very long for a pick up.

The crew was quite adept with handing cameras in and out of the boat. They had a nice big camera rinse tank on board. Too bad it hardly ever had much water in it.

During the surface interval rather than bob around on the boat, they took us to one of the many nearby beaches. I guess all beaches are public property in Costa Rica so it was no problem for us to just anchor offshore and swim in. One beach had a rocky cave nearby which we could explore. One was a turtle nesting ground (which had fresh turtle tracks from the night before). One had a deer habitat next to it which we got to tour. Since our group had the whole boat (we were in fact the only divers at the resort that week) they were pretty lax with our surface interval times (meaning we could putz at the beach as long as we wanted). The beaches in Costa Rica are made of a little coarser sand than most beaches and some of it is black volcanic sand which gives the sand a dirty appearance. There are very few shells or coral or dead fish or whatever floating along the beach. Only once did we run into any sea wasps.

We only got to do 2 dives each day, but there were other things to do when we were done diving. One day a bunch of us went on a Rain Forest Canopy tour. The operator had strung heavy metal cables from treetop to treetop of the enormous trees some 200 feet high. We all were strapped into a harness with a small pulley attached which fit over the cable. Each cable had a slight drop so we could just roll down to the next platform or tree. The views were quite spectacular if not a little unnerving for those of us not too fond of high places. The operation seemed to be very safe. The guides made sure we were either connected to the cable or attached to the platform by the safety line. There was not a terribly large amount of critters, but we saw some howler monkeys, lizards, and birds. True to its name, it was raining a bit in the rain forest.

Another day some of us rented 4-wheel ATVs and went riding on a rain forest tour. This was not a terribly environmentally friendly way to appreciate the rain forest I am afraid. One can imagine a scene from a National Geographic special zooming in on a small creek with some tiny tree frogs mating or something and then here comes an ATV crashing through the brush and splashing into the creek at 40 mph. It was a lot of fun, however, and the guide did insist that we stay on the trail so damage to the flora and fauna was kept to a minimum as was damage to the ATVs and passengers! Not so our clothes and shoes which quickly became covered in dust, water, and mud. One of our number who shall remain nameless (oh what the heck, it was Kenny) proved to be a complete nut on the ATV and was always passing the rest of us at the most inopportune times so we all got wet. Of course none of us expected to stay very dry so it wasn’t a big problem. Again, we didn’t see a huge number of animals although we did come across some lizards, birds, and the ubiquitous howler monkeys. In all, the tour lasted almost 2 hours. It cost $70 US.

The final tour was the Coribici River Raft safari. We all piled on a bus and were subjected to a lovely ride from pothole to pothole on the pan-American highway. Imagine the crappiest, most neglected section of patched 2-lane asphalt highway with no shoulder and you will have an appreciation for the pan-American highway. Our driver kept driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid the worst of the potholes which I am sure unnerved the oncoming drivers almost as much as it did us. We did get to see a lot of the countryside which pretty much looks like any agricultural/forested area in the summertime. We finally arrived at our destination; the Coribici River. It is a medium sized, medium-slow moving river which eventually winds up draining into the Ocean. We split up into 3 groups at 6 people to a raft. Only the guide had oars. The rest of us were just passengers. The guides seemed to know exactly what to do. We never hit anything and the few rapids we encountered were no problem at all. In contrast to the other 2 tours, this river was literally crawling with critters. The guide on my raft turned out to be an amateur ornithologist so we actually found out which birds we were seeing. There were many Storks, herons, egrets, and a few fishing eagles and kingfishers. Along the shore (and up in the trees) we saw lots of iguanas of various shapes, colors, and sizes. We also saw 2 other very interesting lizards. One was the Basilisk or Jesus Christ lizard. So named because when threatened, it can run across the surface of the water from its log to the shore or vice versa. Quite a remarkable feat to see in real life. The other lizard was the American Crocodile. We saw 3 on this tour all about 6-7 feet long. Not terribly huge as crocodiles go, but big enough to ensure that all of us kept our butts safely in the raft at all times and I didn’t notice anyone dragging their hands in the water, either. The shore line was for the most part rain forest with huge trees and clumps of bamboo and vines. Again in some of the trees we saw families of howler monkeys. This trip also cost $70 US. On the way back, we stopped at a big cat preserve. They had a lot of cages of big cats, but I think they must have partied too hearty the night before because all of them were completely crashed out. The monkeys and foxes were awake and playful, though.

Back at the resort we had a lot of time to enjoy the bar in the evenings (as long as you remembered to apply liberal amounts of OFF). The bar area was infested with mosquitoes despite the large number of gekkos on the ceiling. The resort also had a musical and dance type show each night in their auditorium. Unfortunately this show didn’t start until 930PM. It got dark at 530 so there was a lot of down time in the evening. They had a casino, but not many people went there after they used up their complimentary $5 in tokens. It is hard to get excited about a 2-bit casino when we have 4 right here at home.

Overall Costa Rica was a very pleasant surprise. Pretty much everything went right on this trip, even the weather. The diving was not spectacular in terms of visibility and warmth, but it was very interesting and I would gladly go back next year.