I am about as technologically proficient, and dependent, as anyone, with the full complement of computers, cell phone, entertainment system, auto with GPS, etc. But I just couldn’t fathom what my life would be like without the natural component to my world. With four grandchildren already in our brood, my wife, Candy, and I decided that it was time to begin introducing them to the wonders beyond the electronic screen.

Our eldest, Katie Rose Cappeller, at eight, had advanced to the point where we felt she would really respond to such an experience. I have been visiting Costa Rica for a dozen years and felt that was the best place to have her sample so many wonders of the natural world. So Candy and I convinced Katie’s parents to let us have her for a week and off we went. The experience was fulfilling beyond our grandest expectations. The following is a sampling of our journey of exploration, each section introduced by words from the journal Katie kept to share with her classmates. The misspellings have been left, in open defiance of the spell-check program.

Today, I took my first airplane ride. It was realy cool. We sat in first class. I went with my granpa and granma. My favorite part was when we took off and landed. The midle was boring...When we got to Costa Rica it was realy hot. Then I got my passport stamped...

The limo driver arrived at 4:15 a. m. For the first time, Katie became aware of a whole different world at this hour of the morning. Our town, Glen Cove, Long Island, was still pretty much asleep as we headed for the airport. There was only one other vehicle on the road, one patron at the 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts shop. On the Long Island Expressway to JFK, all the overnight construction crews were working under bright lights that created a surreal scene.

At the American Airlines terminal, however, things had already begun to stir. Having never been on an airplane of any kind, Katie wanted to hand the ticket agent her passport, and she did so, only her outstretched hand clearing the counter. Her first experience with the now much-enhanced airport security procedures was flawless, only a handful of people on line in front of us in the pre-dawn hours.

Since this would be Katie’s first commercial flight, Candy, and I decided to use frequent flyer miles to upgrade to first class, so we boarded our Miami-bound flight among the first passengers and took those luxuriously wide leather seats with foot rests. Katie had the first row, left side, window seat; Candy alongside. I was in a seat all by myself in just about the middle of an embarrassingly open space. As we began our takeoff roll, Katie raised her arms and squealed, then sang out, "Oh, cool!" as we lifted off. Is there anything more pleasing than to participate in a child’s moment of discovery?  I remarked to the flight attendant that this was my granddaughter’s first flight ever and he and his colleague were charmingly solicitous throughout. 

Aloft with Nature Air

In Miami, for our connecting flight to Costa Rica, she called her daddy, Eric, and mommy, Annie, and told them about her flight and that she was in Florida now. By the time the flight to the Costa Rican capital of San José took off, she was a seasoned traveler. "Takeoff and landing are fun," she told us.  "The middle is boring. "  When I relayed her comments to the pilot at the end of the flight, he replied, "That’s my job; to keep it boring. "

Our hotel is a palapa. It has a pointy top. It was called Jaguar. Our key was shaped like a jaguar...We went to the jungle. We went on a bridge high above the river. It felt wobaly. We saw lots of birds. The one we mostly saw was called a oropendola....

Bedroom view of Arenal volcano

Our first stop along our journey of natural discovery was Centro Neotrópico Sarapiquís and Reserva Biológica Tirimbina in the Sarapiquí River region of the central Costa Rica. The Reserve has a management affiliation with the Milwaukee Public Museum. Our room was one of eight in a palapa, a circular structure with a huge, cone-shaped roof that resembled the indigenous huts of the region. It was a rustic affair with a ceiling fan to move the hot humid air about, no TV, and telephones only at the front desk. There was an Internet connection at reception, lest one feel totally isolated from the electronic world. After we got settled in, there were still a few hours of late afternoon daylight left, so we decided to take a walk about to get the lay of the land.

Chances are you’ll hear an oropendola before you see one. Their cries are something like a tin can bouncing down a flight of stairs. But they are visually striking as well, large brown birds with bright yellow tail feathers. We spied one, then others, on a walk down to the Río Sarapiquí, whose rushing torrents broke into classic whitewater over large river stones, smoothed almost to spheres over the years. A few yards from the hotel, an 838-foot suspension bridge spanned the river, almost 65 feet above the water. It jitterbugged as we walk across single file, making it impossible not to visualize a scene from an Indian Jones movie, with the bridge giving way as you hung on for dear life, while it pendulumed between cliffsides. But this bridge’s solid-looking metal construction dissolved all thoughts of disaster. It pointed the way into the Tirimbina wildlife refuge, but the darkening skies turned us around.

As we sat over cool soft drinks in the alfresco bar, a rufous-tailed hummingbird working the bright red blossom of a ginger lily seemed determined to add a tiny dot at the bottom of our bird-watching exclamation point where the more grandiose birds like oropendolas commanded the top end.

At breakfast today when we were finished a tucan came and tried to eat a lot of eggs. His name was Tookie. His beak was yellow and brown. After breakfast we met our guide. Her name was Maria...

Studying bats with Mariamalia

It was like breakfasting in an aviary. A few yards beyond the open-air dining area, there were two platforms with fruit placed upon them, just in front of a stand of trees that provided cover for the birds come to feast there. Among them, were blue-gray and scarlet tanagers, red-legged honeycreepers, scarlet-rumped caciques, even a Baltimore oriole. But the hands-down star of the show on this particular morning was "Tookie," a wild, chestnut-mandibled toucan that had flown into the breakfast area and was scrounging fruit, rice and the remnants of scrambled eggs from plates left by departed diners. Tookie, we were to learn, was a regular visitor. Katie approached close enough for me to get a picture of them together. When she sat to have her breakfast, Tookie took up a position on the back of her chair. When we didn’t feed him quickly enough, he nipped at Katie’s hair. She loved it. But we acceded to his demands and placed a plate with slices of pineapple and papaya on a nearby table, which drew his attention just far enough away for us to enjoy his antics without having to worry what he’d do next. That big, bright-yellow beak did have its ominous potential.

Mariamalia Araya represents the best of what my travels to Costa Rica over the years have convinced me is one of the country’s principal claims to ecotourism eminence: its knowledgeable, personable guides. As coordinator of education for Tirimbina, she is an absolute fount of knowledge about everything from history and geography to botany and zoology, all of which translated to an incredibly revealing walk in the woods for an eight-year-old, and her grandparents.

In the jungle I got to hold a couple of things. The first thing was a poison dart frog. After that I held a lizard. It felt slimey. My favorite plant is a touch-me-not. When you touch it, it closes up. We went on a bridge and we saw howler monkeys in a fig tree. I heard them howling...

We could hear the chirping of the poison dart frog coming from somewhere near the base of a cecropia tree. Mariamalia located it beneath some foliage and swept it up in the cup of her hand, then held it gently between her fingers, remarking about the lush red of its upper body as opposed to the blue-jean color of its back legs. It literally looked as if it were wearing a shirt and pants. Our guide asked Katie to pour some of her bottled water onto the frog, then convinced Katie to hold it gently by its legs, explaining that the poison on the creature’s skin caused its victim’s damage internally, for any animal which swallowed it. While many animals employed camouflage as a defense, the frog’s bright coloring served as a warning of the consequences to those who would consider it a hopping hors d’oeuvre. 

The rest of the hike, along an easily negotiated trail, looping out from or paralleling the Sarapiquí, was an unending lesson in fascinating biodiversity, delivered by an educated guide who had obviously had a great deal of OJT in the forest. Along the way, Mariamalia pointed out leaf-cutter ants, descending giant trees, then traveling along a seemingly endless trail, carrying sail-shaped slices of leaves they used to nourish underground farms of the fungus, which was their diet.

The iguana tree

Spotting a banana leaf, folded lengthwise in the shape of a tent, Mariamalia slid under it and pointed out a half-dozen white tent bats, resting up before their nocturnal hunt for lush tropical fruits. The bats, she explained, had chewed along the spine of the leaf, causing both sides to descend into the A-frame configuration that sheltered them.

As we walked beneath a giant ficus, figs were falling to the ground. "Howlers," Mariamalia said, pointing to the crown of the tree where three, jet-black shapes were weaving from limb to limb, biting into the fruit, then dropping the remnants to the ground. We hurried back up to the suspension bridge, where we got an even better view of the monkeys from a position just below the crown of the ficus.

After dinner we saw the eclipse. It was really cool. After dinner we saw bats. I was scared and Maria showed me, you don’t need to be scared. I fed them sugar water. My favorite one was white. We let them all go after we saw them. My day was really fun...

As if the day had not been filled with enough to absorb, the night featured a total eclipse of the moon, which we could watch with incredible clarity minus the light pollution of a metropolitan area. Then, Mariamalia directed us to an education center on the property, where she brought out seven cloth bags, each of which contained a bat that had been trapped using a fine mesh net stretched between trees near a place the bats fed. She explained that bats were grossly misunderstood, only a fraction of a percent being the vampires that were ubiquitous villains in horror movies, and even those rarely taking blood from humans. Virtually all species ate either fruit or insects, the insect-eating species being a contributing factor in the low-level of mosquitoes in the area.

She donned a work glove, then, one-by-one, removed the bats, holding them gently with the gloved hand and pointing out their furry, mammalian bodies and silky wings. Each bit at her gloved hand — for defensive reasons — with their tiny mouths. All looked like miniature puppies. Mariamalia allowed each of us to gently touch and pet each of them. Katie fed each sugared water from a teaspoon, then each was released.

There is a wonderful museum on the property here, which details the history and culture of Costa Rica’s indigenous peoples via beautiful displays of their finger-paintings on bark, wood-carved masks painted in rich colors, and healing sticks created by shamans to help dispel evil spirits. A video and interactive computer display are both educational and fascinating.

This hotel was a little bigger than the other one. It was really cool because there is a volcano outside our window...I forgot to say, on our way to the hotel we saw iguanas. There were a lot of them and we saw an ant eater while we were eating lunch...

On the way up to the Arenal Observatory Lodge, the only hotel within the national park that includes the most active of Costa Rica’s four active volcanoes, we stopped at a small town called Muelle de San Carlos to give Katie a close-up view of the local attraction: iguanas. From the perspective of a restaurant and gift shop situated on a rise above a river, we were eye level with tree tops that hosted several dozen of the creatures, green and grey being the dominant colors, but oranges, reds and blues also in evidence. Some of these spiny-backed lizards were approaching three meters in length. "Big," Katie observed, from a safe distance, "really big. "

The final nine kilometers to the lodge were along an unimproved road that took a half-hour to negotiate. But, as we snaked along it, the dominating mountain began to claim more of our undivided attention. Ravines twisted down its sides, clearly cut by lava flows, although they appeared to have been excavated, as well, by the runoff from persistent precipitation this high in the mountains that define the spine of Costa Rica. Here, at Arenal, however, the clouds that swiped at the mountain top seemed to have been augmented by steam piping from the caldera.

We popped into the restaurant for lunch and were taken by the magnificent play of light through the vegetation that thrived in the rich, volcanic soil. Despite the midday hour, birds were still flitting about, but the temperature here was spring-like, low 70s, not oppressive like the rainforest. A coatimundi, we mistook as an anteater, sauntered by, then disappeared around the side of hotel. I was struck by how casual were its movements; clearly it knew no harm would come to it here.

Eschewing any further wildlife watching in favor of a dip in the pool — Katie had seen it on the way to lunch — we traded pleasantries with guests from the U. S. and Canada. Kate was intrigued by a hot tub the size of a small swimming pool and spent hours swimming in its amniotic-like waters.

Today it rained alot. After breakfast we went with a couple other people on a ride to the rain forest. We saw a squirrel cuckoo bird. We also saw a family of four coatimundis. It looks like a black fury cat with a long tail and a pointy nose. While we were walking on the rocks that came out of the volcano, we heard all the rocks falling down the mountain. The way there we had to take our shoes off and socks. We had to go across the river. The second time we did it my granpa carried me on his back. Back in our room the volcano erupted and a big puff came out...

At breakfast the next morning, a rain shower started as a light mist then grew into a persistent downpour. It slowly thinned the ranks around the bird feeders, whose bananas and slices of papaya and pineapple had attracted blue-gray tanagers, yellow- and red-legged honeycreepers, clay-colored robins and finally an oropendola who bullied the others away until he’d had his fill.   We joined two other couples and a guide for a short hike up to the lower slope of the volcano and back.   We began by fording a narrow stretch of the Río Agua Caliente. The chilly river was anything but "caliente," as we walked barefooted through water maybe two inches deep. We were in an area that was leveled by an eruption in 1968, killing 87 people. Consequently, there was no old growth forest here and the trees were considerably smaller than in the rainforest at Tirimbina.  

Along the trail, our guide, Bernardo, explained a good deal about the vegetation, how some of it existed in certain symbiotic relationships.   For example, the aquacatillo (as in "little avocado") was protected from herbivores by ants that live within its limbs.

"In the forest, everything is competitive," Bernardo said, explaining how the "walking" palm shot out roots that literally walked the plant to a sunnier location at the rate of a few inches each year. 

The far point of our hike was a boulder field, huge stones tossed from the mountain during the ’68 eruption. As if cued, Arenal rumbled a couple of times, then sent more boulders avalanching down its slopes, a safe distance from us.

On the way back, we spied a huge banana spider in a web it had woven across the trail far enough above head height for us to duck beneath it. Bernardo heard a squirrel cuckoo, then pointed it out to us, its most prominent feature a long, café-con-leché colored tail. A family of coatimundis crossed the trail about 50 yards in front of us.

While we relaxed in the Jacuzzi for our afternoon dip, Arenal spouted off again: first the loud rumbles, then, this time, plumes of ashen smoke. It was hypnotic. We found ourselves staring at the peak and watching the smoke rising high into the air.

We went on a little plain all by our selves. I got to sit with the pilet. I felt scared a little bit. There were all kinds of buttuns. My granpa and granma were right behind us...

The three-hour drive from Arenal to Tobias Bolanos Airport on the outskirts of San José was a twisty, up-and-down, switchback, hairpin-turn, misty/rainy-weather affair that left us a bit queasy. However, at the end of the road was Katie’s stint in the co-pilot’s seat of our 20-minute hop on Nature Air to Quepos on the Pacific Coast. The pilot introduced himself as Heiner Quiros and said he’d be pleased to have her join him up front, with Mama and Papa in the row directly behind, of course. We were, in fact, the only people aboard the small craft. Katie’s head came barely above the back of the seat, her line of sight forward about halfway up the instrument panel, but she had a clear view out the side window and I could feel her childish exhilaration as we lifted off.

The clouds seem almost tactile when you’re in a small plane, billows of pillow stuffing parting with our approach. Katie pointed out mountain ridges and river valleys, the likes of which I’d seen countless times before, but this time they were a joy, not part of the otherwise monotony we generally associate with going from A to B.

Then we had lunch and went in the pool. They have a slide. You can sit on a stool in the water near a restaurant.

Hotel Si Como No is the brainchild of Jim Damalas, ex of Hollywood, who has combined his experience in the world of film with a deep, abiding love of the natural world to create a truly unique property. Built dramatically into a steep hillside above the Pacific, just about every element of the hotel seems suspended in air: guest rooms, restaurants, reception area, all of it. At a state-of-the-art theatre, guests are treated to a movie each evening, while in the alfresco restaurant, musicians present local melodies. The gift shop has a wonderful array of local artwork and crafts and an Internet connection for an e-mail fix. From the prow-shaped balcony at the far end of the reception area, Katie could see that one amenity that made a hotel acceptable to her: the pool. And this one was embellished with a swim-up bar (soft drinks in her case) and waterslide. Si Como No may as well have been translated: say no more.

We went to the butterfly garden. My favorite butterfly was called a Blue Morpho. One side looked like two eyes and the other side was blue. A girl named Alejandra showed me a butterfly wing under the microscope...

Aside from its assets as a place just to hang, Si Como No is also in one of the most biologically interesting areas of Costa Rica.   And one of the most interesting attractions is just across the road: Finca Naturales, as in natural farm.   Centerpiece of the Finca is its butterfly garden.   The head guide there, Roy Orozco, took Candy and me through the various stages of butterfly and moth development, from egg to larva to caterpillar to chrysalis to metamorphosis into beautifully colored wingéd creatures.   The most astonishing part of the process is the chrysalis phase, where the caterpillar is reduced to liquid DNA, which is reconstituted into the butterfly.   He said there were some 2,000 species of butterflies in Costa Rica and 12,000 of moths.  

Animal watching in the Damas Canals

"Butterflies and moths are like little rechargeable batteries," Roy explained. "They charge up in the sunlight, then lose energy at night." Color, he added, was determinant in males attracting females. Males, on the other hand, were attracted to females via pheromones they could lock onto from as far away as three miles.

Where was Katie during this? Aside from the fulltime staff at the butterfly garden, there are students doing hands-on training there. One of them, Alejandra Araya, (no relation to Tirimbina’s Mariamalia, but clearly a budding naturalist in her own right) had taken Katie under her wing as soon as we’d entered and gave her the child’s version of the tour. That included delicately handling some of the live specimens and viewing the wing of a blue morpho under the microscope, revealing scale-like elements not unlike those of a fish. The blue morpho is, unquestionably, the star of any butterfly garden. Its iridescent wings are as dramatically blue as anything, anywhere on the planet.

We went on a boat and saw a snake, some birds, some crabs, and monkeys. My favorite was the monkeys. They are called white faced monkeys. The monkeys went into our boat and pulled my grandma’s hair..

If butterflies are delicate and strikingly beautiful, it is the playfulness of capuchin monkeys that is the attraction. One of the safest bets for interacting with these white-faced primates is in the mangrove-rimmed canals of Isla Damas. Along stretches of the canals — some natural; others man-made — red mangroves form the outer fringes of the shorelines, while white mangroves behind them soar 100 feet or more above massive root structures that look like tripods that have mutated many extra legs. Some canals are so thickly canopied the light darkens to dusk in midday.

Capuchin monkeys arrive

On our cruise, we stopped to examine a mangrove boa constrictor which had coiled about a limb of one of the red mangroves. Blue herons and snowy egrets flitted about. But the rustling trees and the furry silhouetted creatures swinging through them were the main event. A trio of monkeys thumped onto the canvas roof of our boat, then immediately began peering around the edges, grabbing at fingers, hanks of hair; begging water from cupped hands. When the monkeys grew bored with us, we motored off to another densely foliaged canal, whereupon our guide, Elias, began calling, "ho-ho-ho-ho, venga," until, sure enough, the tops of the trees began to dip and bend and we repeated the earlier scene, this time with a quartet of monkeys. As with most children, Katie had seen monkeys at the zoo, but interacting with them in the wild — in their environment — was far more exciting.

On our penultimate day, we relocated to the capital, San José, again on a Nature Air twin-prop six-seater, but Katie had to surrender her co-pilot position for weight-and-balance reasons. This time the 20-minute flight bounced about a bit, skirting darker, grayer clouds, but now she had acclimated to air travel and was enjoying the roller-coastering.

When we got to our hotel, we looked in the gift shop. We bought a shirt for my dad. I also bought a box for my mom. It had a turtle on it. Our room had a TV. We watched Sponge Bob in Spanish. Then we went to sleep and I dreamed that I was home...

We spent our final night at Hotel Grano de Oro, one of my favorite hotels anywhere. Antique furniture, paintings, lush flowers decorate every nook and cranny of this one-time mansion turned hotel.   Everything about it speaks of tasteful elegance.   The restaurant is one of only two in San José that have been awarded the highest rating by the food critic of the daily La Nacion.   We dined in the airy indoor/outdoor restaurant and, despite its sense of adult formality, Katie was the picture of contentment with the chicken nuggets the kitchen had specially prepared just for her. Grano de Oro was the perfect element for departure from our memorable week in Costa Rica with our granddaughter.   It is the type of place that demands you return.

At the airport we went to ALOT of gift shops to get things to bring home. I slept on the plane alot. When we got to the airport my mom picked us up. I was so happy to be home.

While there is never any place like home, no one quite like mom and dad, a child’s daily existence has been enhanced by having a taste of the larger world she has inherited.   Years ago, when Katie was barely one, I took her outside one day in the midst of a summer shower, had her little hand touch the drops that had accumulated on a leaf, then turned her palm upward to show that the water was falling from the sky.   The smile she gave me that day is the one that keeps repeating itself when I treat her to more of the wonders of nature.   I knew then and there that it was one of the principal roles Candy and I would play as grandparents. Now, bring on Samantha, 5; Michael, 5; and Cali, 3.