A spin through Tarzan country on the Osa Peninsula

By Rob Story

ABOUT A MINUTE after my wife and I set off on our first mountain-bike ride on Costa Rica's remote Osa Peninsula, we heard them: legions of howler monkeys making the case that they are the most appropriately named species on earth. Their announcement was augmented by the caws of toucans and scarlet macaws, the thrumming of insects, and the croaking of frogs.

It took some concentration for us to turn our ears back to the whir of our chainrings; we kept getting distracted by the sensory overload of southwest Costa Rica. The cedros marías trees enveloped us in green, their overhanging branches screening out the sky. Blades of palm fronds scissored together with an audible whttt, an unseen mammal yowled, and a butterfly fluttered by in a hallucination of red and black. I had dreamed of exploring the jungle since I was 13, when I devoted a miserably hot Midwestern summer to reading every single book in the Tarzan series, all 24 of them. Here I was in the thick of it, and snaking through on a mountain bike seemed only marginally inferior to swinging on vines.

The Osa Peninsula, where there are no more paved roads in Y2K than there were in Y1K, abounds with dirt—read: mountain-bike opportunities. One day we traced the beach around the southwest coast from Puerto Jiménez to Carate, pedaling from Tierra de Milagros, a vegetarian hippie enclave that teaches yoga on the sand, to beachfront pastures where Brahman cattle radiate dignity in spite of their floppy, Jar Jar Binks ears. On another day, we parked our bikes along a small, clear stream, and then scrambled up the streambed's slippery rocks to an impenetrable thicket at the top where we came upon a 12-foot waterfall so aesthetically perfect that Hilton architects would transport it to a Hawaii megahotel if only science could develop the crucial waterfall-airlift technology.

Other good rides include Corcovado National Park, a 42,000-hectare tropical forest harboring jaguars, sloths, crocodiles, macaws, and tapirs. Its jungly trails aren't always rideable, but experts will enjoy the 25-mile hike-and-bike in its remote southern section. An interesting dirt road winds northeast from the Sirena Station past the Los Patos Station to the town of La Palma (about 20 miles). Or make the daylong ride to Drake Bay, where you can camp on the beach.

The Osa's soil is superior to that of other tropical destinations, and you won't have to deal with the laissez-faire traction of sand, the tire-ripping nastiness of coral, or the wrist-jarring tumult of volcanic rock that you find in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Except for a little sand, you mostly ride gravelly dirt and red clay. Osa's jungle—the third-largest in Central America and the healthiest remaining tract of Pacific coastal rainforest—quickly swallows all but the most trodden singletrack.

No matter. I didn't miss adrenaline-fueled thrill rides. It was fine just to pedal the Osa's byways—and difficult to get bothered about much when we could grant our feet amnesty from our dank bike shoes in the bathtub-warm water while munching on locally grown pineapples and mangoes.

In the end, it's the drama of the ecosystem that makes a Costa Rican expedition so memorable: The country occupies only .01 percent of our planet's landmass yet houses five percent of its biodiversity. Our wildlife tally included a cross-section of species: the feathered (spoonbill, stork, scarlet macaw, and toucan), the furry (at least four types of monkey, three-toed sloth, ocelot, possum, peccary, and the raccoonlike coatimundi), the scaly (basilisk lizard, iguana, crocodile, venomous snakes, and nonvenomous snakes disguised to appear venomous), and the slimy (assorted salamanders). I'd like to think they enjoyed having us, two hominid refugees from computers and strip malls who migrated south to share their strange universe.