Goodbye Nosara … Hello Arenal

20 March 2009

Today, we made the long (in time) drive eastward from Nosara to Arenal. Including two long stops, the trip took 7.5 h even though the distance was only about 230 km. The drive was bookended by about 35 km on rugged and dusty dirt roads that form the main theme for today.

Nosara has an odd mixture — apparently not uncommon in CR — of expatriots from around the world looking for “pura vida” and native ticos. Here, there are fantastic beaches with excellent surf, a certain ruggedness, and decent preservation of the dry tropical forests, which supports rich wildlife.

These points all set up the main part of this story. There is a significant resistance in parts of CR to paving the roads. We saw this in Monteverde, where the Quaker dairy farmers seem intent to maintain something of the slow pace of life. And we see it here in Nosara, where (I suspect, but don’t know) the paving of roads would be seen as a step toward indiscriminate development and desecration of the natural wonders of this place.

In Monteverde, without a real dry season, dirt roads are one thing. Here, they are quite another. The on-road particle exposures must be staggering. There are no sidewalks, so walkers share the road with motorized vehicles. A fair number of people move around by bicycle or by motorcycle or by ATV with no protection from the dust at all. A few households take defensive measures by watering the road in front of their property frequently, maybe even continuously in some cases. There are signs posted around requesting people not drive in excess of 20 km per hour because of the “medical emergency” associated with the dust. These signs have no apparent effect.

Apart from some agricultural burning (not a dominant feature of our experience here), the air quality is generally very good, as one would expect of a not-so-densely populated country with so much coastline. However, exposure to vehicle-associated pollutants is probably not so good. In remote locations in the drier parts of the country, road dust would be the major concern. In the more populous areas, where the roads are paved, diesel exhaust would be a major concern.

So closes the Nosara chapter of our time in Costa Rica. The opening shot was taken from the grounds of a moorish-influenced mansion on a hillside separating Playa Pelada from Playa Guiones. We walked up to this mansion. It had no gate or fence around it and looked to be abandoned, so we continued upward into the grounds. Suddenly, as we were climbing some stairs, my head rose above a fence line and I saw into a pool area, which was in perfectly good repair. Furthermore, the pool had 3-4 young adults in it, who were clearly enjoying themselves. We didn’t stick around to learn more. (And we forgot to ask around in town for the story of this mansion.) But I did snap this picture that seems somehow to capture a lot of our experience of Costa Rica.