Show Me the Monkeys!

By Turk Pipkin
T & L Golf Magazine

Pura vida! It's practically the national saying of Costa Rica. A toast, a greeting, even an advertising slogan, it translates literally as "pure life," but pura vida also means "the good life." It means basking in the astonishing natural wonders of this place with friends and family. And in sports, it means those indelible moments when the superfluous falls away, and life and game meld as one.

I was having one of those moments on the seventh tee of Garra de León, a two-year-old resort course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. Ahead of me was a long par five with thirteen bunkers and a green hiding behind a large lake. On my right, the resident pro was challenging me to go for it in two. That kind of pressure should have had me squeezing the life out of my driver, but my nervousness was erased by a large band of howler monkeys scampering across the fairway toward us, the last young howler not much larger than a kitten.

"We love our monkeys," director of golf James McAfee said, "but wait till you see the crocodiles on sixteen."

With all my confusing swing thoughts erased by visions of monkeys and crocodiles, I stepped up to the ball and ripped a long drive straight down the middle. "Pura vida, baby! Show me the monkeys!"

To adventurous travelers, Costa Rica has long been considered one of the world's finest unspoiled destinations, a country smaller than the state of West Virginia but one with an astonishing five percent of the world's total number of species. Even before the international boom in ecotourism, the country had its true believers--frequent visitors who made a point of not telling anyone back home about their secret paradise.

Word eventually got out, of course, resulting in ever-increasing tourism during the last decade, but only in the past year has Costa Rica joined the global golf boom. A forty-five-minute plane ride (or a four-hour drive) from the capital of San José, on a stretch of the Pacific coast known primarily for big-game fishing and near-perfect surfing, golfers are flocking to two playing fields of green--Garra de León, at Meliá Playa Conchal Beach & Golf Resort, and its neighbor, Rancho las Colinas Golf & Country Club.

Both courses are in an area of dry tropical forest (as opposed to rain forest), on rolling land with huge trees--perfect terrain for dramatic golf holes. Garra de León (which translates as "lion's paw") is part of the impressive hotel complex Meliá Playa Conchal. Designed like a self-contained village, the Meliá provides lavish oversize accommodations in small buildings laid out in a cluster set amid the two nines of the course. Shuttles continually ferry guests to the pro shop, the restaurants, the sprawling free-form swimming pool or Playa Conchal itself, a long, palm-shaded stretch of beach made of tiny crushed seashells.

But Costa Rica is lined with beautiful beaches, and the reason for coming here is resort golf in the classic style that Robert Trent Jones Jr. has perfected around the world--wide fairways, short rough and large greens for your average hacker, but plenty of risk and reward for the brave or the foolish.

"It was great fun to work in an ecological wonderland," Jones says. "The feeling is that you come into that valley, and you're in a sanctuary."

The Meliá is also a cultural sanctuary, with many guests never leaving the hotel property.

That's a mistake, for just beyond the Meliá's impressive entrance lies the real Costa Rica. The area's formal tours range from rain forest aerial trams to horseback riding on the beach. But there is more to explore, and when you do, you'll discover that Costa Ricans are perhaps the friendliest people in Latin America. I ventured late one evening to the town of Santa Cruz, about forty-five minutes away, where the local fiesta of the bulls was under way. What I found was a raucous party and bullfighting, Costa Rican style, in which brave and inebriated young men spring into the small ring and demonstrate their foolhardy machismo by touching the bull's horns or grabbing his tail. Although the bulls are never killed, the young men sometimes are, making this strictly a spectator event for tourists.

The next morning I was up at dawn and off to the Flamingo Marina, headquarters to Permit sportfishing, one of the best companies of its kind in the country. My skipper for the day was Art James, who came here five years ago after raising his kids in Washington state. Like every other American expatriate I met on my trip, Art says he's in Costa Rica to stay.

As we motored into the deep blue waters of the Pacific, the ocean began to put on an impressive display. All around us, schools of small skipjack were feeding on the surface, manta rays were jumping completely out of the water and flying fish zipped fifty feet across the surface with amazing bursts of speed. Soon we were racing along with a vast school of spotted dolphin, stretching from our boat nearly to the horizon.

In the spring months, the main sport-fishing goal here is Pacific sailfish and the occasional marlin. There's absolutely no reason to kill these magnificent billfish; everyone practices strict catch-and-release. I'd carefully scheduled my trip to occur after the annual arrival of the sailfish from warmer waters to the south, but the fish were apparently using a different calendar. On the same day that I was skunked, the guests on another boat down the coast landed and released an incredible twenty-one "sails."

But that's fishing, and besides, on the way back to the docks, we trolled for a few minutes near the beach, where I "took the stink off the boat," as Art put it, by catching two fat jack crevalle. Both were strong fighters whose destiny was to provide a nice fish stew for Art's neighbors.

Back on shore I met another fishing guide named Craig Ledbetter (Wildlife Sportfishing), who was eager to show me his home course, the new Rancho las Colinas, located just fifteen minutes south of the Meliá course. Along the way we ate lunch at an open-air restaurant named Las Cruces, where I paid six bucks for a fantastic whole fried red snapper with plantains, and gallo pinto, the Costa Rican staple of black beans and rice.

With an old school design (and some clever innovations) by Ron Garl, Las Colinas isn't as lush as Garra de León, but it's every bit as much fun to play. The best holes are ten through sixteen, which form a full circle around a small mountain. The signature hole is thirteen, a par four spanning a creek and leading up a steep hill to a green atop a plateau carved out of solid rock. The stone face in front of the green makes this one of the most difficult approach shots in all of golf.

Because we were playing with Mike Osborne, one of the course's owners, who'd left his home of Las Vegas to take a gamble on Costa Rica, we made a Vegas-size wager: a hundred a hole. If the bet had been for dollars instead of colones--the Costa Rican currency, valued at about one-third of a cent--I'd have won more than a cold after-round drink at a neighborhood dance hall.

The third golf course of my trip was the nation's oldest eighteen-holer, the splendid Cariari Country Club, opened in 1974 on the outskirts of San José. It's a members-only course unless you're staying at the nearby Herradura Hotel or the adjacent Meliá Cariari Conference Center & Golf Resort, where I checked in and teed up within a half hour.

By any country's standards, this is an excellent track. Designed by George Fazio (and built by nephew Tom), the course features long, narrow fairways lined by towering pine trees. I was reminded of Torrey Pines, or Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course, another alpine layout designed by the elder Fazio. At nearly four thousand feet above sea level, the air here is cool and refreshing, far from what you'd expect in Central America. With my foursome playing late in the day, two in the group were shivering by the time we made it to eighteen.

I took two non-golf side trips while I was in the country, both of them memorable. The first was a potholed but spectacular three-hour drive from the international airport at San José to the town of La Fortuna, which is located at the base of the Arenal volcano. Constantly active since a major eruption in 1968 (which killed seventy-eight people and covered an area of almost eight square miles in rock, lava and ash), Arenal is rightfully one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. The premier hotel is the remote Arenal Observatory Lodge, built by the Smithsonian Institute on a ridge considered the perfect place to study and monitor the volcano's activity.

Depending upon the weather, the views of the volcano from the hotel's bar and rooms can be spectacular, though I was equally amazed by the tropical birds, whose exotic names--like red-legged honeycreeper, yellow-throated euphonia, and scarlet-rumped tanager--didn't do justice to their actual appearances.

The lodge's nighttime Hot Lava Tour takes you close enough to hear the whooshing roars of gas escaping the lava dome, and seconds later, to see bright red car-size boulders of thousand-degree lava falling out of the clouds and tumbling down the mountain toward you. Exhausted but exalted on the way back to the lodge, I stopped at Tabecón Resort for dinner, cocktails and a long soak in the spa's volcano-heated mineral waters.

Despite the natural beauty of Arenal, the highlight of my trip was Hotel Punta Islita, a secluded haven overlooking a small Pacific bay and surrounded by lush valleys and dramatic mountain ridges.

Most guests choose to fly here from the capital, but I made the three-hour drive from the Meliá Playa Conchal, stopping primarily to scout a couple of rivers I had to drive through that were running at least fifty-feet wide. Arriving at an architectural gem of thatched conical roofs and 360-degree views, I was so impressed that my very first item of business was to add an extra night to my reservation. I peeled off my dusty clothes after checking into my plush casita and slipped into the private plunge pool, staring out at the ocean and ducking a bit as three green parrots came squawking just overhead.

There are miles of hiking trails here, fine riding horses, the hotel's own fishing fleet and a beautiful beach club on a protected cove. The food at the hotel's formal restaurant measures up to the nighttime views. Seated beneath the stars after dinner, I enjoyed a Cuban cigar and began to dream of my next visit to Costa Rica.

My passion for the game is the strongest when I am playing somewhere new and wonderful, where the smells on the afternoon breeze are exotic and unidentifiable, where the crashing curl of the ocean waves in the distance matches the curl of a putt as it falls into Mother Earth, where the golf course becomes a part of its natural surroundings, not the other way around.

Though Punta Islita is not ever likely to have golf beyond its driving range, the most memorable moment of my trip occurred here on the beach. Crossing the curving stretch of sand and an area of cliff-side tidal pools filled with all sorts of mysterious creatures, I came to land's end, where I discovered a sea cave running into the tall cliff protecting the bay. Looking closer, I saw the rays of the afternoon sun coming through the opening and realized it was not a cave, but a natural tunnel, four feet high and maybe fifty feet long.

Even at low tide, the surge of the waves and the slick, wet rocks made the journey potentially dangerous, but I knew already that I had to go through that tunnel, had to see what was on the other side. Timing my jump with the ebb of t he waves, I scrambled down the slick rocks and made my way into the chamber. All around me, inches from my arms and face, thousands of fat crabs crawled up the sides of the tunnel to escape my progress. I pressed on, climbing the incline and emerging on miles of deserted beach with the last rays of a glorious sunset. I only had a few minutes of this splendor before the rising tide would block my return. But a few moments was enough, and I headed back into the tunnel, where the crabs again surrounded me by the thousands.

Pura vida they call it. And now I know why.