Costa Rica’s densely packed tin-roof houses provide a convenient refuge from the heat of the afternoon sun.

Photos and story by Eileen McGee

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We landed at the airport in San José, Costa Rica, at 10 o’clock at night, and spent the longest hour of my life in customs. Finally, we were free and stepped out into the warm night air.

“You need a taxi?” the young Tico asked, breaking through the crowd of recent arrivals and taxi drivers just outside. “Where are you going? I’ve got a taxi. What’s the name of your hotel? My car? It’s up there in the parking garage,” he assured us, pointing to the top of the airport multilevel parking facility. My eyes darted around frantically, looking for someone from our hotel holding a sign for us. They were supposed to pick us up. Where were they?

“I’ve got a cell phone. Do you have the hotel number?” he pushed on with a new tack. The crowd was thinning and clearly there was no one there to pick us up as promised when we made the hotel reservation. I retrieved the travel book with the number from my bag. The cabby impersonator then dialed the number and handed me the phone. “Yes, we have your reservation. No, we didn’t send anyone to pick you up. It’s too late. Do you still want the room?”

“They’re coming to pick us up,” I announced, handing the phone back with a tip for his trouble. “Thanks so much.” He turned away to work on someone else, and I immediately grabbed my bag, motioned for my traveling companion, Kent, to follow, and jumped into an empty orange cab at the curb.

“What are you doing?” Kent wailed in confusion.

“The travel book said never get into an unmarked cab, and I’m not,” I told him resolutely. The travel book had also explained that orange cabs go to and from the airport and red cabs take people around the city. Moments later, the driver of the orange cab noticed he had customers.

“Where to?” he asked, sliding into the front seat, and off we sped into the night.

He drove fast and spoke very little as we whipped through the dark, empty city streets, never slowing down for the innumerable ruts, honking at the occasional figure scurrying across the road. Just as I was wondering if my impulsive decision was a mistake, the cab stopped in front of our hotel. Such was our introduction to Costa Rica.

Our first two days were spent exploring the area, while waiting for friends to arrive. We discovered that daytime in the city is loud, crowded, and reeks overwhelmingly of diesel. Gritty, and yet metropolitan — Costa Rica has incredible museums, beautiful churches, and wonderful restaurants interspersed in dingy soot-covered neighborhoods. It also has rainforests, beaches and monkeys. That’s what we came to see.

Poring over travel books and Web sites on cold, rainy North Coast evenings by the wood stove, we had enthusiastically debated which of the many and varied natural wonders we’d be able to actually visit in 11 days. Costa Ricans have come to realize what an important part of their national heritage the local biodiversity is, and with a seemingly unprecedented aggressiveness, the government has moved to protect this treasure. Consequently, it has created a model national conservation system of parks and wildlife reserves. The official tourist Web site lists 25 national parks, eight biological reserves, 49 national wildlife refuges, 11 forest reserves, 31 protected areas, 14 wetlands, and two absolute natural reserves — all within an area about the size of Virginia.

Our friends Joe and Christine had finally arrived and the four of us decided to head for Quepos on the Pacific Coast. As we wound our way down from the high plateau, we saw hills covered with small coffee and banana plantations and what seemed an endless variety of huge-leafed tropical plants.

Just north of Quepos, we turned down a dirt road and found our little slice of heaven in Damas. Pueblo Real sits on the water’s edge at the mouth of the Damas Estuary just across from Isla Damas.

Rosa spotted us and waved the four of us over to her little soda on the water. Sodas are small, open-air cafes scattered all over Costa Rica. Many, like Rosa’s, seem to be in the middle of nowhere, making one wonder how they survive.

“Cuatro cervezas?” Along with the four bottles of Imperial (the Budweiser of Costa Rica — only better), Rosa brought four complimentary bowls of mahi ceviche. We were impressed. “I cook your breakfast in the morning?” It was agreed; we would come at 8:30 in the morning and Rosa would make us breakfast.

“This is my friend, Lladio,” Rosa announced, gesturing to the burly man standing next to her. Lladio had leathery red-brown skin and eyes the color of the Caribbean. She explained that Lladio had a boat and could take us on a mangrove swamp tour tomorrow afternoon.

“Mañana, a la una de la tarde,” he told us, holding up one finger.

Lladio pulled up to the dock at 1 o’clock sharp. His flat-bottomed boat with benches on each side had a cloth canopy top and could easily have accommodated eight passengers, but we had the boat and Lladio all to ourselves. Lladio’s English was about as good as our Spanish, which made communication a bit of a challenge. Somehow, he managed to tell us the names of every plant, tree, bird and animal we saw - and even those we didn’t see. Cruising through the narrow canals, he’d cut the engine to point out a particular species and allow time for photographs. Lladio’s sharp eyes picked out crocodiles, nesting pelicans, little canaries, first blossoms, and even a boa constrictor high in the trees - things we surely would have missed. “Hey, hey, hey,” he bellowed, navigating the maze of waterways. He was calling to the monkeys. More than anything else, we wanted to see monkeys. Lladio cut the engine again, stepping to the front of the boat. He opened a cooler of iced beer, bottled water, and a container full of fresh, sliced, fully ripe tropical fruit.

A white-faced monkey eats a snack on a tree branch in its Luz de Mono area home.

“Hey, hey, hey!” We were off again. A little boy ran to the water’s edge from a cluster of cabinas on the island, speaking rapidly and pointing to something ahead of us. Lladio cut the engine again. “Hey, hey, hey!”

Monkeys! The trees overhead were full of white-faced monkeys. Lladio was handing us bananas, showing us how to hold them so the monkeys would take them from our hands. A mother with a baby clinging to her back warned the others to back off , her teeth bared as she jumped onto the boat to grab a piece. Squawking in protest, an old monkey waited his turn. It was delightful! Fumbling back and forth in the little boat, we were torn between snapping pictures and holding out fruit-filled hands. When the bananas were gone, so were the monkeys.

Winding our way back we passed another flat-bottomed boat full of people. Lladio was obviously telling the young guide where we had seen the monkeys, but what else? “He wanted to know if I had any bananas,” Lladio chuckled. “Amateur,” we laughed, appreciating Lladio’s conscientiousness. This day would not soon be forgotten.

Montezuma was very different; a laid-back village at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, populated with aging hippies, surfers, Europeans and Ticos, as Costa Ricans are affectionately known. The streets are filled with people from the time the sun comes up, sitting in the open-air sodas, dining on everything from the traditional Costa Rican breakfast of black beans and rice, to fresh baked goods with homemade yogurt and herb tea. The streets are still full long after the sun goes down, but with more of a party atmosphere. (It was a surprise to me that the sun goes down at about 6 p.m. year round.)

We settled into a wonderful cabina built of stone and teak , nestled in the side of a hill at the Luz de Mono. The Luz de Mono sits just above a beautiful beach at the end of town where the road is no longer paved and, as its name implies, monkeys inhabit the profuse greenery on the property, as well as the surrounding jungle. White-faced monkeys scampered through the branches just above the bakery each morning munching on bananas left at the base of the trees.

Watching the sun descend in the sky from our deck one afternoon, we heard the elusive, but very vocal, howler monkeys for the first time. The only way I can describe their call is somewhere between a big cat’s growl and the hoarse bark of a very big dog. It echoed loudly through the forest. Kent followed the calls. Running back down the hill, excitedly pointing in the direction of the sound, he almost ran into Christine running excitedly up the hill. They were both talking at the same time.

“They’re right up there!” he whispered, hardly able to contain himself.

“Somebody left a baby howler monkey with Andres in the lobby! They found it in the road,” she blurted breathing hard from the run up the hill.

This wasn’t rocket science. The Luz de Mono sits just below a sharp curve in the road that winds down to the village and the sharp curve is where Kent had spotted the monkeys. We ran down to tell our young Costa Rican host, Andres, that we might know where the baby belonged.

The little monkey, in a plastic milk crate under a cloth, was terrified. Andres had the frantic look of an anxious father. He grabbed the crate and followed us up the hill, bravely scooping the screeching little critter up every time it jumped out, fecal matter and banana smeared on its back.

Reaching our destination, we saw the monkeys gathering in the trees overhead. “We can’t let it go to a male,” Andres warned. “They’ll kill it.”

One female in particular came down lower in the tree than the others. Her call had a different quality to it, a quality we interpreted as that of a distressed mother. Andres set the baby at the base of this tree. The baby climbed up and the female came lower, hesitant because of our presence. It was time to leave. Slowly we backed down the trail, hoping we had done the right thing.

We spent our last evening in Montezuma drinking fine Costa Rican rum and wondering what it would be like to call Costa Rica home. Living on the North Coast, we’re fortunate to be surrounded by incredible natural beauty, sometimes making it difficult to be all that impressed when traveling to other places. But Costa Rica’s richly diverse environment is so magnificent, with lush, vigorous vegetation and near-perfect weather. As the iguanas lazed in the sun and the birds and insects created a symphony — along with the haunted wails of the howler monkeys — we were reminded that we weren’t in Humboldt any more.