Jungle booked

Published on Wednesday 23 January 2008 11:40

IN ANY league table of the world's most ecologically aware nations, Costa Rica is near the top. By a happy combination of size, political stability and acute foresight, this small nation sandwiched between Nicaragua and Panama, squeezed between Atlantic and Pacific, has avoided becoming another Latin American banana republic. Instead it has positioned itself as a high-end and environmentally sensitive tourist destination where every visitor can shuck off the carbon guilt involved in flying i

Cynics will carp at Costa Rica's eco-credentials, suggesting that in some cases they are no more than the latest marketing buzzword or token gestures, and that "zip-line" canopy tours, involving intrusive whizzing around the rainforest on cables, are hardly in harmony with the surroundings.

Such quibbles fall silent, though, in the face of a resort like Lapa Rios. In a country where eco-lodges vie to be the coolest and most discreet, Lapa Rios is in the vanguard, nestling in Central America's last lowland tropical rainforest in the south-west of the country, with Panama just a Pacific zephyr away.

Getting here, on a tiny plane from the capital, San Jos, meandering over the Golfo Dulce to the tiny shoreside landing-strip at Puerto Jimnez, then heading in a four-wheel drive along rutted tracks to the lodge, makes it clear that you are in one of the world's more remote resorts. Accommodation is in 16 chalet-like huts, constructed in the style of the ancient Guaymi natives. With thatched-rush roofs, they blend into the rainforest all around. The architecture renders air conditioning unnecessary. If the immediate impression is of elegant seclusion, tranquillity is only a relative term here. It's likely you'll be woken at sunrise by the clamouring of a howler monkey demonstrating how it got its name or landing with a thud on your roof.

That racket, and the occasional shy coatimundi drifting over the paths at dawn or dusk, demonstrates the partial success of the ideal of Lapa Rios, to let the rainforest and its inhabitants carry on as undisturbed as possible.

The Lapa Rios ethos is to provide its local community with all the bounty of the tourist industry rather than see it creamed off into some multinational's Swiss accounts. This ambitious conservation project uses tourism to fund sustainability programmes, and finance the Carbonera community school. Lodge staff are from local villages, so while some are not so fluent in English, they have the knowledge to help you get the most from a rainforest holiday.

Lapa Rios works to make its guests feel virtuous while enjoying an exotic escape; nobody is too preachy or insistent. At mealtimes you can choose between Costa Rican cuisine, from local ingredients, or western staples. Watch the more conservative visitors stubbornly sticking to steak and chips for a day or two before discovering the delights of fresh grilled fish or mashed chayote squash with rice and chilli. You don't have to be too adventurous. Tico cuisine is rarely overelaborate, with the signature dish being "casado", literally a "marriage" of rice and beans.

Not that you will spend much time hanging around the restaurant or bars. Lapa Rios offers a range of tours and activities giving visitors an insight into the area. Start off with a rainforest walk, where guides point out the wide variety of birds, monkeys and maybe the poison-dart frog, which traditionally provided the natives with handy toxins for their blow-pipes.

Other walks introduce you to the natural medicines of the rainforest. You can even spend the night in the middle of the jungle, on a raised platform, listening as eerie noises emerge from the foliage. Dawn and dusk tours let you see the more reticent fauna and birdlife, and get a sense of the rainforest's beauty, lit by pale morning rays slanting in from the direction of the Atlantic, or the crimson evening shades as the sun reflects off the Pacific.

If you're particularly eco-curious you might even enjoy a sustainability tour of the lodge's various green schemes and the aromatic secrets of the "bio-gas" produced by the pigs. Now, if only they could find some way of flying the planes on the by-products of porcine flatulence, that sustainability dream could be fully realised.

Factfile

HOW TO GET THERE

Delta Airlines (www.delta.com) flies to San Jos from Edinburgh via Atlanta, from 879 return.

Exsus Travel Scotland (tel: [phone], www.exsus.com) has packages to Costa Rica from Edinburgh, including Lapa Rios, prices according to trip.

WHERE TO STAY

A night at Lapa Rios (tel: [phone], www.laparios.com) including meals and a guided tour starts at 150pp during high season (November-May).

AND THERE'S MORE

For more on Costa Rica, visit www.visitcostarica.com

To calculate and offset your carbon footprint, visit www.carbonfootprint.com or www.offsetcarbon.co.uk