There's a lot that the first-time Trini visitor to Costa Rica will find familiar. The shape of the Central American country roughly matches that of Tobago, if you flopped that island laterally and increased its size by a factor of 170.
It is bounded by the Caribbean Sea on its eastern coast, the Pacific Ocean on its western coast, Nicaragua to its north and Panama to its south.
This huge land mass is home to a range of businesses, with tourism long outstripping the country’s banana crops, which thrived under the exploitative oversight of the United Fruit company.
[caption id="attachment_1076877" align="alignnone" width="754"] DiquÍs Sphere on display at the National Museum's park in San Jose. There are 300 known instances of these stone spheres in varying states of finish and weathering in Costa Rica and the best are displayed as examples of indigenous culture and ability. Each stone was sculpted from a larger stone with stone implements. - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
Banana exports are now ranked alongside integrated circuit production and medical appliance manufacture as key export products.
The dominance of the tourism product is the result of both a range of natural attractions, which the government has wisely protected, if not overtly developed with much enthusiasm. The work of making something out the range of natural assets has been left to individuals and small companies, who bring an agreeable enthusiasm to the work of pleasing curious tourists despite a notable lack of resources.
One such project is the work of Federico Gutiérrez, or to be exact, his entire family, led by his father and brothers, resulting in the Nochebuena Volcano Museum, an educational centre just a few metres uphill from the family's restaurant, which is itself just five kilometres downhill from the volcano site.
[caption id="attachment_1076882" align="alignnone" width="1024"] The interior of the BasÍlica de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles in Cartago on Jueves Santo or Holy Thursday. - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
It's a useful stop to get some refreshment, acclimatise to the air, which, at almost 3,500 km above sea level, is both chilly and thin, and get some context for the three massive calderas that constitute the Irazú volcanic site.
It's at the museum that you discover the scale of the calderas that constitute the site, representing eruptions separated by centuries. The most recent of these major eruptions started in 1963, spewing rock and ash-laden steam across vast swaths of the Cartago and San Jose provinces across four years.
That caldera, a huge, still angry-looking gouge in the earth is quite different from the earliest indicator of eruption, now just a concave depression full of black volcanic dust which hosts some particularly hardy and hard-done-by tufts of brown, struggling grasses.
[caption id="attachment_1076886" align="alignnone" width="768"] A craftsman works on decorated plates at the Joaquin Chaverri Oxcart Factory, which produces a range of painted craft items. - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
Eleven s
