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What The Pros Say

Paul kvinta

Long, Strange Trip

The cell tower isn't the only head-turning change on the peninsula. I'd come here to dive once before, in 1996, and back then, getting to Osa was a marathon event, a rite of passage packed with drama and suspense, like something out of The African Queen. I'd taken a 12-seater plane from San Jose to the tin-shack "airport" in Palmar Sur, trundled through a banana plantation in a wheezing VW cab, and snaked down the Sierpe River in a 16-foot skiff past yawning crocodiles and screaming howler monkeys. Spit out finally into the heaving swells of the Pacific, the skiff transported me across Drake Bay to my lodge, the Aguila de Osa Inn.

This time, I fly straight into Drake Bay, thanks to a 500-foot, red clay scar in the rain forest where someone has clear-cut an airstrip. The journey lacks the romance of my first trip, which is something Bradd Johnson, owner of Aguila de Osa, grumbles about upon my arrival. "I didn't want that airstrip," he insists. "I argued against it, but I lost that one."

I find Johnson just as I'd left him eight years earlier--lounging in his rocker, cocktail in one hand, plate of fresh fruit in the other and a sweeping view of Drake Bay before him. A lanky old salt from Rhode Island who made a killing in real estate, the guy dropped out of the rat race in 1991, plunked down in the rain forest and carved out the kind of exquisite, ecologically balanced lodge Costa Rica is famous for.

But now Johnson is tearing his hair out. The Osa, he explains, this Garden of Eden where animals run free, finds itself at a critical crossroads. All along the Pacific coast, the Cancun model of resort development is steamrolling the small-scale, tree-hugging approach that once earned Costa Rica its reputation as the cradle of ecotourism. Osa is one of the last holdouts. Its future largely depends on the village of Agujitas, the last town in Costa Rica without electricity. Politicians have promised the 250 families that power will come soon, a move that could trigger more development. Tourism officials recently released a study recommending that, when electricity comes, Osa increase its number of rooms for tourists from 142 to more than 700. "The people in the village should have electricity because they deserve it," says Johnson. "But there's a sustainable way to develop."

What will happen here? Johnson refuses to make predictions. But he does let me in on another change: "The mobula rays are gone." It's like a sucker punch to the stomach. The mobulas are the reason I've returned. Eight years earlier, I experienced one of my all-time perfect dive moments when I looked up from 50 feet down at Bajo del Diablo and watched a huge flock of rays soaring near the surface, 30 to 40 of them perfectly backlit by the sun. "El Niño, 2001," explains Johnson. "Ran 'em off, the big groups, anyway."