Don't go chasing waterfalls

Sorry about that title. I couldn't resist.

I'm just back from a day's guided tour, with all the students in our program, to Poas Volcano and La Paz waterfall. I was cold for the first time here (sorry to say that for those of you in Minnesota). Even with my polar fleece, jeans, and a raincoat that now seems like a brilliant investment (though I wondered about spending that 26 bucks at the time) I shivered nearly the whole time at the blustery, rainy, and completely obscured-by-clouds volcano. We got a nice workout walking the trails, but as we were actually inside the clouds, there was nothing to see. By the time we left the volcano, about 11, the place was totally overrun with other tourists who would see exactly the same cloud we saw. Truly, the gift shop was so packed I got a wave of claustrophobia just glancing in.

The crowd at the volcano should have prepared me for the waterfall, but I just blithely assumed we were the only folks in all of Costa Rica wanting to take such an excursion. The first stop at the waterfall site was actually the butterfly garden, a truly spectacular place. I don't know how many butterflies floated around--hundreds, thousands--landing on the clothes of some lucky people. There were red and black ones, yellow ones, orange ones, and the most beautiful huge blue ones that excelled at avoiding being photographed. When the blue ones closed up they looked like big brown moths, but when they opened their wings and flew, then they were magical. Many of us attempted to wait out the suckers, aiming our cameras at the unremarkable brown, closed wings, but I tell you it was impossible to catch that split second between rest and flight, between plain and stunning. In a way, though, not catching the image made the experience more remarkable.

When we proceeded to the waterfalls, we got caught in human traffic. We waited and waited for our turn to descend to the first of the falls. Once there, we all tried to snap photos before the next group pressed in. One American man in the group after ours turned to one of my students and said, "Move." This was not fun. It was not pleasant. I, particularly, struggled to enjoy nature in spite of, well, everything. At another waterfall (there are five and they are maybe the most beautiful I've ever seen, for the brief minutes I could actually look at them) I was standing quietly, trying to just relax and take the scene in, when a woman came up and asked me to move so she could take a picture. I understand that there aren't easy solutions to such overcrowding--the country needs the tourism, and everyone else there had as much right to see the falls as I did. But the experience was marred, to say the least, by the too-many-human beings.

As we drove through the coffee plantations on the way up to the volcano, a man stuck his tongue out at our passing tour bus. I thought about that as we returned from our trip. If I tire of tourists, being one, what must the native Costa Ricans think? How do they put up with us?

But, on the road home from the waterfall, a herd of slowpoke cows, moving back to the barn to be milked, stopped traffic in both lanes. The bus driver sort of herded the cows from behind while the farmer kept redirecting the few that really wanted to left instead of right toward home. How can I not love such a place?