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When
I was a kid my father would show my brother, sister, and me 8mm movies
of his fishing trips. There was no sound except that of the film scrolling
through the projector as high-seas adventures played out on our living
room’s white wall.
One
film I watched over and over in slow motion was of a trip to Acapulco,
Mexico, where both my mom and dad caught one sailfish after another. It
seemed like pelagic paradise. The image of the fish tail-walking and leaping
stuck with me as I learned to tie lines, rig baits, and run boats.
Little
wonder then that when my phone rang a few months ago and I was asked if
I would like to visit Los Sueños (“The Dreams”), a
new resort and marina on Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast that
is minutes from big-time billfish, it took all of a New York minute for
me to say yes.
In August,
armed with my own 8mm camcorder, I made the four-and-a-half-hour plane
ride from Newark, New Jersey, to San Jose, Costa Rica. As the plane touched
down, my dream of the big-game promised land was becoming a reality. After
a good night’s sleep, I met up with Alfredo Oporta of Costa Rica’s
Tourist Board for the drive to Herradura, where Los Sueños is located.
The two-hour ride gave me plenty of time to ask Oporta a million questions
about the country, to which he seemed to have every answer. I also had
a chance to take in the scenery as we worked our way through some of the
112 volcanic cones (seven of which are active) that make up Costa Rica,
a country about the size of West Virginia.
The
layers of green that cover this area made for some of the most lush landscape
I’d ever seen. I stared out over the cliffs shooting film. There
were more shades of green than even the Crayola company offers. The teak
on the many plantations we passed were lined up like soldiers and stretched
deep into the forest.
The
way to Herradura held many attractions. We stopped along the road, and
Oporta spoke to a fruit vendor and picked up a bag of jocotes, a fruit
that has a pit like a peach, is lime green before ripened, and turns deep
red when it’s ready to eat. They tasted sweet as sugar, and the
bag didn’t last long. There were sleeping crocodiles, acres of coffee
plantations, and thousands of acres of land preserved to protect the country’s
beloved brightly colored macaw.
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Costa Rica continued > Page 1, 2,
3, 4
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