SECOND INTERLUDE II

LETTER TO MY TRAVEL AGENT

Dear Helen:

“It was a dark and stormy night when we visited the Palace and saw the Queen.” Actually it was morning, and the heavy mist–horizontal rain they call it here–was typical of the season, but the wind was unusually strong. We were in Monteverde, Costa Rica's quintessential cloud forest, and our quest, quite unsurprisingly, was the resplendent quetzal. When asked about our chances of seeing that particular bird, Roberto, our Costa Rican guide, had responded, “Well, it's like visiting Buckingham Palace; you'll certainly enjoy many interesting sights there, but to see the Queen herself is a matter of pure chance.” We did succeed, however.

Your arrangements for my visit to San Francisco worked out very well, as I've already told you. Fortunately when I arrived in Seattle, the weather there was also relatively warm, and I continued my acclimatization comfortably enough with the omnipresent parka and a newly acquired umbrella to replace the one already worn out in Tanzania. Two years, plus or minus six months, seems to be the life expectancy of most such items I bought to facilitate the Peace Corps experience. I got thoroughly drenched, even with a new umbrella, the wet and windy day I spent on the UW campus, but by the time the weather turned clear and colder, with patchy morning and evening fog, my parka and I were able to take it.

Perhaps you still recall that first trip you arranged for me, to Machu Picchu and the Galapagos over the 1983-84 holidays, just ten years ago now. So the passport I acquired then, D2188855, a number I could remember because the sum of its digits is prime–how many eights, how many fives?–recently expired and had to be replaced. I do have an additional passport from the Peace Corps, of course, but I may have to relinquish that before returning home. The clerk at Seattle's Passport Agency was so impressed with the bulk of my two existing passports, each of which had been expanded with a 32-page insert, that she volunteered to request 64 pages right at the outset for the new one. She also promised that it would be in the mail later that day, so I would have it in plenty of time for my departure.

During much of this visit home my stomach has simply demanded pasta, so I tried, each for the first time ever, two of Seattle's most distinguished Italian restaurants: al Boccalini and Il Terrazzo Carmine. The former, located at 1 Yesler Way, adjacent to the Alaskan Way Viaduct, was certainly good, if uninspiring, but the latter, which I visited the day I applied for the passport, provided a most memorable afternoon, ending in a brief chat with Emmett Watson, beloved Seattle sports columnist and author. I also managed a few notable dinners at some favorite haunts–the Georgian Room and Gerard's come readily to mind–but those medical procedures did cost me about ten days of prime dining time.

I was disappointed that my travel plans to the Shelburne Inn and Salishan had to be canceled, and I have long wanted to try the Heathman in Portland, but life would be dull indeed if it contained no surprises. The house in Seattle was mine alone over Christmas, so I had the desired holiday solitude and also some more fresh pasta, this purchased at a local grocery store that offers far more, in quantity, quality, and variety, than the whole of Nairobi and Arusha combined. Talk about reverse culture shock. Only the Shelburne charged me for a night, but they sent along a nice note and a gift certificate for one night's lodging; you deal with good people. Maybe I'll drive to California for next Thanksgiving and stop there en route.

Costa Rica provided a valuable reintroduction to the New World. Its relative isolation and lack of obvious resources seem to have lessened European domination in the early colonial period, and its democratic institutions, political stability, and lack of a standing army are exemplary. Its people are happy, helpful, and almost overly friendly.

The canals of Tortuguero reminded me more than a little of the klongs in Bangkok; perhaps it was the palm trees and simple houses as much as the waterways. The boat rides were particularly interesting, although we all worried about the resulting pollution of water and air, and more than once when we encountered two or three other boats in the same narrow canal, we altered course and went elsewhere. I most enjoyed the ride after dinner on New Year's Eve; few other boats were out, and the silence and solitude were breathtaking. The bar was free that night until 11:00 when it closed with me as sole patron, and I was forced to take a tumbler of Johnny Walker Black Label to my room to help that last hour pass. I suspect that no one else was awake when the New Year began.

Walking along the Caribbean shore was also fun. We had one day of blue skies and warm sunshine and another of gray skies and rain. The latter was nothing like so bad as the storm that hit a few days later, when the departees crouched under umbrellas all morning hoping in vain that the planes could retrieve them, and then spent the afternoon getting totally soaked aboard the boat that used the inland waterway to return them to their destinations.

On arrival at Corcovado we were met by Michael Kaye, owner of Costa Rica Expeditions, the in-country agency used until now by Mountain Travel-Sobek, and the three facilities at which we stayed. I talked with him at length about the status of MT-S and the reasons it would no longer be using CRE. He indicated that both Mountain Travel and Sobek had been acquired “as an ego trip” by an “absentee owner in Chicago.” This owner dictated the merger of the two organizations, both of which were having financial problems, and it is he who now makes decisions rather than the individuals who have directed operations since the companies were started. Wilderness Travel still uses CRE, and Kaye thinks it may now be the adventure travel company of choice. I have also heard good things about International Expeditions, in Birmingham, Alabama. Should we be considering these companies, just in case?

The accommodations at Corcovado are tents with shared showers and toilets. The ocean view from the bluff is how I suspect the South Pacific looks, but you've never sent me there. How come? Birds were plentiful in the trees and shrubs around the camp, several raptors were often visible above the ridge behind, but the star attractions were the scarlet macaws that occasionally flew screeching overhead. One couple, not in our group, claimed to have seen two pumas about one hundred yards from camp; the staff said, “Yeah, it's possible,” but no one really believed them. The closest I came to spotting the legendary harpy eagle was the drawing of one on the tee shirt I bought at the office.

Michael Kaye and a colleague have developed a surf-crossing vessel modeled on something used to run the rapids in the Grand Canyon. It's basically two large pontoons topped by a platform and powered by an outboard engine. The day we went out on Guacamaya, as it's called, the surf was almost nonexistent, and we had the rare privilege of circumnavigating, at very close range, an offshore rock. Somewhat smaller than Haystack Rock at Oregon’s Cannon Beach, it was covered with brown boobies and yellow-crowned night herons. Even our guides–there were two groups of us aboard Guacamaya that day–were surprised and enthralled to see a peregrine falcon fly off the rock. I suppose it's a sign of advancing senility, but this morning on the water put me in mind of the Galapagos. When are we going to find eight tourists, a naturalist, and a sailboat on which to enjoy a month there?

Most of that day was spent slogging through the jungle. The two older couples that comprised the other group on Guacamaya graciously invited me to join them for the walk, which I most happily did. The men were associated with Emory University, and at least one of the women was a teacher, so we had quite a bit in common. It was also very helpful in spotting birds to be one of five instead of one of fifteen. They had their own guide, Jim, who has lived for many years in Costa Rica but came originally from Davenport, Iowa, and he has more knowledge of birds, particularly in a world-wide perspective, even than Bobby, as our guide was usually called. It was an exciting and tiring day, and my only regrets are that I ran afoul of some army ants early that morning while watching birds from behind my tent, and that nobody warned us that the jungle is full of chiggers. Because of all the water splashing over Guacamaya, the uniform of the day was swimming trunks, a tee shirt, and sandals, and the only protection I applied came from sunscreen and an Off stick, the latter being standard Peace Corps issue. From then onward, however, I applied Jungle Juice liberally every morning from the knees downward. Even a week later, my epidermis from the calves down resembled a battlefield in the war against smallpox.

Almost always in the past, someplace during a trip you've arranged for me I've experienced something so exciting that it has brought tears to my eyes. It didn't happen on this trip, but I came close on two occasions. The first occurred the day after the Guacamaya expedition. I arose around 4:00 to admire some of the Southern constellations and to see the Big Dipper barely above the horizon; it’s reassuring to a Seattle boy both to be facing the Pacific Ocean and to view the heavens right side up. I ate a hasty breakfast at 5:00–French toast was a welcome alternative to gallo pintos–and then ambled up the beach toward the rising sun. Around 6:30 we took off in a five-passenger, single-engine plane; the flight began quite smoothly but then became moderately turbulent over the mountains near San Jose. It was soon bumpy enough to awaken the sleeping and terrify the religious. I've experienced much worse, and my only concern was that the pilot spoke no English, and there was thus nothing but his placid demeanor to inspire confidence. Despite the shrieks of his female passengers, he kept his course tight against the mountainsides, which maintained the turbulence but reduced fuel consumption for the trip, I suppose. When all three planeloads of us were reassembled in our bus for the ride to Monteverde, Bobby told us the story of his famous “coffee tour.” It was Michael Kaye who had suggested I ask him about it, and when I did, Bobby replied only, “Later.” At a more propitious time he explained that he had been aboard the first time any plane chartered by CRE had crashed, that one into a coffee plantation when its engine stopped. The only other crash in over 2500 flights occurred on takeoff from Corcovado. It's obvious why he waited until after our final flight to tell us about it.

Everybody I met in Costa Rica seemed to be knowledgeable about birds, and our driver, Manuel, fit this pattern. He spotted an amazing variety on wires and in trees beside the road while skillfully and safely guiding our vehicle toward its evening destination. He was also sensitive to other of our needs; when the dining room staff was slow in meeting a guest’s request, for example, Manuel was quickly in the kitchen to do it himself. But I especially remember that tree near Monteverde beside which he stopped a little before dusk. A parrot and some parakeets had first caught his attention, and then he discovered a Hoffman’s woodpecker, high in the same tree. What I saw first, however, was another bird on the tree’s lowest branch. “Motmot,” I yelled before anyone else said a word about it, and sure enough, Bobby and Manuel verified it to be a turquoise-browed motmot. A beautiful bird with two small tufts of feathers hanging from its tail, it is one of my two favorites from the trip. For the first time I felt such excitement and buoyancy that I almost floated off the seat.

A day or two earlier Bobby had asked which one of the birds we had seen was my favorite. I told him I really didn’t know and would have to give him an answer sometime later. I decided that night and was very surprised that my choice was a vulture. I spotted it during our first beach walk at Corcovado while he and I were looking at a small shorebird, trying to decide just which particular sandpiper it was. I put down my glasses and looked up just as a huge bird floated by only a few feet to the side and perhaps twenty-five feet above us. Huge and ugly, it was a king vulture.

This reminded me of two other memorable sightings of huge vultures. The bearded vulture, or lammergeyer, nests on some cliffs near Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, but Peter and I couldn’t find any when we visited there a year ago. On an earlier trek around Annapurna, however, just as our tents were being set up one afternoon, one of these huge vultures flew back and forth several times at low altitude over our heads. “Awesome” is the only word adequate for such a sight. While in Patagonia and Antarctica a few months before that, I saw the most magnificent of all vultures, the Andean condor, many times. The sighting I’ll remember longest occurred near Argentina’s Mt. Fitzroy, where I had spent the night in a modest dormitory and was taking a last walk before boarding a public bus that would return me to the small village, Calafate, where I was spending a week. Light snow was falling, the visibility was very limited, and as usual I was walking alone and with no identification other than my name and Seattle address on the MT-S tag attached to my daypack. Disappointed at not seeing Fitzroy during my visit, I waited to turn back as late as I dared. Then, after returning only a few steps, I saw it. At first it looked like a person standing atop a distant ridge and obscured by the swirling snow. Then I realized it was nearer and had to be something smaller. Finally I knew it was a condor. I thought of detouring a bit to see it from closer range but decided not to. It looked huge, threatening, ominous, almost mystical. And later, just as the bus pulled away from the park, the clouds evaporated, revealing Mt. Fitzroy in all its grandeur. I rode backwards as long as it stayed in my view.

In contrast to my first excitement, concentrated as it was on a single tree, my second was spread over an entire morning’s walk through the cloud forest. Our route was along the sides of a triangle formed of trails, and by starting at dawn and walking in the direction opposite that usually followed, we saw very few other people on the first two legs. The forest is indescribably beautiful, the plant life of nearly infinite variety, and the whole of this universe is completely bathed in mist. It was good to see it at this time; it would be much too wet during the rainy season and hardly a rain forest during the dry.

Costa Rica is renowned for its bird population–Bobby claimed it has more species, in an area the size of West Virginia, than all of Europe and North America combined–and during the few hours each day we looked for them, I recorded about 120. Bobby, Jim, and Manuel pointed out at least that many more, but I simply couldn’t locate them in the dense foliage; walking with 14 other people also made it difficult to know just where the leader was pointing. The most interesting concept, something totally new to me, was that of a feeding flock, a group of perhaps a dozen different species moving together through the forest, each feeding at a different level and on a particular food source, and each able to signal an alarm of danger understandable to all the others. The passage of such a flock over the trail presented a good opportunity to identify several species, but they seldom lingered long enough to make it easy.

We were on the final leg of our walk and only a short distance from its end when the Queen was seen. Appropriately it was a female quetzal, and she was perched fairly near the trail, but in shadows too deep to reveal much of her color. The most notable feature to me was size; she was much larger than I expected. Then someone spotted the male, much farther away, partly obscured by intervening foliage, but in full sunlight. Bobby focused his telescope on this gorgeous bird, and all of us, plus quite a few passersby, viewed him for as long as we wished. Once located he could also be seen through binoculars and with unaided vision. Magnificent birds indeed, but my favorites, at least partially because of the circumstances under which I saw them, remain the vulture and the motmot.

The tour was titled the Natural History of Costa Rica, and even without its emphasis on ecology, conservation, and the environment, it would not be possible to be there and not have these concerns constantly in mind. Bobby is a living encyclopedia of taxonomy, knowing the names of untold scores of plants and animals in English, Spanish, and Latin, and often in indigenous languages as well. That the continents of the Old and New Worlds drifted apart before birds evolved is apparent from what I’ve seen in Africa and Nepal in contrast to Costa Rica and at home. But it was Bobby who first suggested to me that the late emergence of Central America from beneath the sea and its comparative warmth, because of its equatorial location, during epochs of glacial ice advancing from the poles, accounted for Costa Rica’s great biological diversity.

The rapid disappearance of habitat continues to threaten species at all levels of biological complexity, including, I believe, Homo sapiens ourselves. Costa Rica presently protects more than one quarter of its area in parks and reserves. But how long can such levels be sustained in light of increasing population and the concomitant need for economic expansion? And what impact will increased tourism have? During much of the morning I walked at the end of the line, enjoying the forest sights and sounds in the solitude and with the contemplation they deserve. In one portion of the reserve only 150 people are allowed at any time, and the daily total is restricted to 700. I was saddened to see many hikers, particularly younger people in whose hands the earth’s future will soon rest, walking rapidly along the trails, jabbering about irrelevant matters, and hardly aware of where they were. It seemed a shame, almost a crime, that the few slots available should be filled by those with limited interests. But, it is not for me to judge; perhaps a Monteverde Cloud Forest Marathon is just what the world needs. My suggestion here is the same as it is for Africa: Go soon to experience what remains.

MT-S sent most of the material you requested for me, but I am still interested in the three trip descriptions that are not yet available: Ethiopia, Uganda extension, and Fitzroy. The last trip is at least a year ahead for me, if indeed I can get in adequate physical condition again, but the first two I can possibly do anytime. Helen, please accept my gratitude for your friendship and all the assistance you’ve given me, especially during the past ten years.

My original plan to go from San Jose to Arusha via Washington, London, and Nairobi was aborted by the need to finish some tasks in Seattle and the desire to return my trekking gear there. It probably would have been changed by the unusually stormy winter weather in the east anyway. It allowed me to attend the opening performance of Seattle Opera’s Norma, which alone was more than worth the trouble of returning. What an electrifying performance! It still seems impossible that the story of illicit love between a Druid priestess and a Roman centurion and the surrounding barbarity of Gaul in 50 B.C. could be done in the bel canto style of 1830, but for me, at least, it worked.

My new passport did arrive promptly in the mail as promised, but it doesn't contain 64 pages. In fact it is of a new design with an estimated 50 pages–they’re neither numbered nor lettered–and an astonishing final page that begins “This edition of the United States passport honors both Dr. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps our most distinguished early diplomat, and the bicentennial anniversary of the U.S. Consular Service.” A lot of what Franklin did in Paris was less than distinguished, if I remember correctly what I read while attending his eponymous Seattle high school, unless it set the pattern of behavior apparently followed by most of our presidents from then until now. I wonder what Emmett will write when he gets his new passport. The final sentence on that page is also interesting: “Please be assured that this passport, which you now bear as a citizen or national of the United States, guarantees that you will find a welcoming beacon wherever the U.S. flag flies abroad.”

Yeah, sure, especially when you're trying to start Social Security benefit payments.

W. Vance Johnson

14 Jan 94