Tamarindo, on Costa Rica's Pacific Coast, struggles to balance mass tourism with its fragile environment

Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (MCT) - I was on my back in the sand staring at the sky, listening to the waves collapse lazily onto the Pacific shore of Costa Rica. I'd been waiting for turtles for three hours.

The half moon edged the passing clouds with silver filigree.

Our guide kept looking at his watch. For him, this was work. He'd spent more than 100 nights in a row waiting for leatherback turtles at the Baulas National Park ranger station. It was mid-February and this was the second-to-last turtle tour of the season. "I think we're going to call it, guys," he said at about 11 p.m. to the group of 30 sleepy tourists. "No turtles tonight."

So, we began the hourlong walk back to the condos, hotels and vacation homes that make up the jumble of civilization known as Tamarindo. After about 10 minutes, the guide's radio squawked with a message from the rangers: A turtle had come ashore 3 miles up the coast.

"We go back, guys," the guide said. So we turned heel and with renewed vigor headed north in the soft sand.

The leatherback turtle, which can weigh 2,000 pounds and be up to 9 feet long, had come from as far as 6,000 miles away to lay her eggs _ swimming perhaps all the way from the Galapagos. The leatherback is part of a turtle family that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They've been around for 100 million years, and there are only a few thousand left in the world.

To forgo a little sleep, to walk a few hours in the sand _ small sacrifices to make to meet such a traveler.

I did not go to Tamarindo because of the leatherbacks; when I'd made my plans, I had no idea they laid eggs on the beach just north of town. I went to Tamarindo for the simple reason that it's the nearest resort town to the international airport at Liberia, where, until last year, Northwest Airlines had sent a planeload of tourists on a direct flight every Saturday during the winter vacation season.

I spent four days in Costa Rica's interior, exploring the cloud forest and watching the Arenal volcano rumble and spit fire. And then I went to Tamarindo to enjoy the beach for a few days before flying home.

Costa Rica's national parks and preserves are often cited as sterling examples of what responsible tourism can be. Regulated eco-tourism provides an incentive to preserve wild habitat. It brings tourists who stay for a few days or a week or more, and who want to learn about the people and the place they're visiting. They need guides, they need food, they need places to stay. In interior towns such as Monteverde, small family-run hotels and cafes are the norm. The money brought by tourists stays in the communities.

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Tamarindo is another story. Thirty years ago, it was a quiet fishing village. Now it's a booming tourist town with malls, fast-food franchises and urban problems. The traffic was backed up 2 miles outside the city limits when I arrived. "It gets worse every year," groused my driver. "It didn't used to be like this."

The town is a 2-mile strip of businesses along the shore, with condos and hotels rapidly colonizing the green hills beyond the beach. It was a swelteringly hot noontime; clouds of dust from road construction hung in the humid air. I checked into the massive Tamarindo Diria Resort, which occupies the central swath of the town's broad, beautiful beach. A bored clerk sealed a neon green plastic band on my wrist _ similar to an I.D. bracelet given at a hospital _ and handed me my room keys.

"Have a nice stay."

The turtle tour started at 6:30 p.m., shortly after sunset. The group gathered at a shack by the shore just a 20-minute walk from the busiest part of the city; this is the gateway to Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas de Guanacaste _ Leatherback National Park. We loaded into long wooden launches and motored across the mouth of the Tamarindo estuary to get to the beach on the other side.

The leatherback is the biggest turtle in the world, and the most endangered of the sea turtles. Our lead guide, Miguel Mora, said Baulas was established in 1990 to preserve their nesting area. At that time, about 1,400 turtles came ashore to lay eggs; last year, 73 were spotted, he said. Human predation, incidental death in commercial fishing operations, habitat loss and light pollution that interferes with hatchlings all take a toll.

Mora told us that cameras, with or without flash, were forbidden; flashes disorient the turtles.

From October through February, the turtles will lay eggs as many as eight times, he said. That assumes that the conditions are right. The turtles _ extremely vulnerable on land _ dig a large hole for their bodies, then carve out a smaller nest for the eggs with their hind legs.

The process is fragile, Mora said. The sand has to be wet enough to hold its shape _ if the sand is too dry, the nest keeps collapsing, and the turtle will abandon the attempt. "It hasn't rained much," he said. "The conditions are rough for the nest."

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I was on the pay phone in the town square in the morning, talking with my wife, when the drug dealer approached. "Something for your brain?" he asked in English.

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"I'm on the phone, and my brain is fine, thanks," I said.

It was the fifth time I'd been approached by drug dealers in central Tamarindo, and I hadn't been in town a full day.

I picked up a copy of the English-language paper of Costa Rica's Pacific Coast, the Beach Times, and headed to Walter's Place, an open-sided restaurant a few steps from the shore, for breakfast. The lead story, about wrangling over taxes to build a new sewage plant, contained this gem: "In Tamarindo, one of the most popular beach towns in the (Guanacaste) province, hotel reservations were canceled and the community expressed outrage after water tests last year found extremely elevated levels of fecal matter in 13 streams feeding the internationally famous beach."

As I reconsidered the idea of going surfing later, I overheard this conversation between two elderly American men at the table behind me, pertaining to the same topic:

The first man said, "More taxes will kill the municipality. What happens to the jobs of the maids and gardeners?"

The other man replied, "I'm happy to be in the idiot faction. ... I don't mind more restaurants and I don't mind more people. But more people means more (expletive for human waste). And what are you going to do with the (expletive)?"

Good question.

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Mora told us some things as we walked. One of them is that the life of the leatherback, outside of its nesting practices, is largely a mystery. He said leatherbacks are thought to live on jellyfish, mainly. That the males never come back to shore after hatching. The turtles can dive to as deep as 4,000 feet and stay underwater an hour.

He said that a variety of limits had been put on construction in Tamarindo, partly to protect the turtles from artificial lights that disorient hatchlings and partly to preserve the environment. But he said those regulations had been ignored, pointing to brightly lit high-rise condos that far exceed the zoning laws.

"You will see signs and petitions all over town protesting those buildings and what's going on," he said. "Costa Ricans don't like to argue, but when we get together, it counts, because we vote."

Our long walk came to an end when we spotted the turtle, flinging loose sand away from her blue-black body in the moonlight. Mora split the group into three sets of 10, and each of us had a chance to see the turtle from a few feet away.

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A set of rough tracks from the sea led to her nesting site; it must have been a severe labor dragging 600 pounds of bulk 100 yards under the burden of gravity. I could hear her breathing, heavy and hoarse.

Seven longitudinal ridges gave her carapace a beautiful, symmetrical form, which also happens to be aquadynamic. Her awkward flailing on land said nothing of the grace with which she could fly underwater, where she would be weightless.

For an hour, we took turns watching. The sides of the nest kept collapsing; she moved to a new site, which also collapsed, and then she slowly, awkwardly returned to the sea. I felt defeated on her behalf. All that work for nothing.

Someone asked Mora what she'd do. "Maybe she goes back to Ecuador, maybe she comes back to try again tomorrow night. I don't know," he said.

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I saw the protest signs in Tamarindo and one of them led me to the Cabinas Marielos. Maria (Marielos) de los Angeles Molina Gonzalez is a retired English professor from San Jose. In the fragrant garden of her 24-unit motel on Tamarindo's main drag, she expressed her rage fluently.

"Ninety-five percent of Costa Rica's coast is in foreign hands," she said. "The best spots of our country are owned or developed by outsiders, and the profits do not go to the locals.

"When I first came here in 1978, this was an amazing place," she said. "The lagoon was full of snapper and snook. Now there are few or none. Unfortunately, with development comes destruction. When they sold away this land, they sold the hen that lays the golden eggs. And now what we get in return is garbage, drugs and prostitution. We need sewers, we need police, we need garbagemen. ... I would sell out, but then there would be one less Costa Rican here."

After talking to her, and damning the reports of fecal contamination, I rented a surfboard and kicked my way out beyond the wave-break on beautiful Tamarindo Beach. I sat on the board and looked at the sea, at the green hills and the concrete towers. If I had never stopped to talk to anybody, I would not have left Tamarindo with so many painful questions weighing on my mind.

On the way to the airport, I saw a billboard that showed, from behind, a young couple in an infinity pool. They gazed over an endless expanse of pristine water and a sky ablaze with the reds and oranges of tropical dusk. It was an ad for a condo development in Tamarindo. The caption said, "Don't just look at a sunset, own it."

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IF YOU GO:

TAMARINDO: Tamarindo is like Cancun, Acapulco or any one of dozens of tropical destinations that started out as nothing more than a village on a pretty beach.

Unlike Cancun or Acapulco, there's still a fight going on over its soul. Should Tamarindo, a town of about 2,000 people, become a major resort destination or try to retain its small-town charm? Rapid condo development has outpaced infrastructure, leading to wastewater contamination that affects Tamarindo's most important asset for tourism: its broad, beautiful beach. The Tamarindo News (tamarindonews.com) and the Beach Times (www.thebeachtimes.com) cover the continuing story; the letters to the editor in both papers feature the arguments of locals over what to do. The choices aren't easy.

For tourists, Tamarindo remains an appealing destination, especially for surfers and sun worshipers, turtle fans and bird watchers. You can help preserve the nature of the area by choosing small, locally owned hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and not staying at the big hotels (they're not as interesting or even necessarily as comfortable, as I found out in Tamarindo).

ETHICAL TRAVEL: To learn more about ethical tourism, download the United Nations' tips for responsible travelers at www.world-tourism.org/code(underscore)ethics/eng/responsible.htm and check out www.ethicaltraveler.org.

WHERE TO STAY: Were I to do it over, I'd stay at Cabinas Marielos (www.cabinasmarieloscr.com), a comfortable, affordable hotel with a shared kitchen and a beautiful garden; it's right across the street from the beach. Doubles are about $35 a night with air conditioning and $25 a night without it.

TOURS: The chance to see leatherback turtles nesting is a rare one; a variety of companies offer tours, and the standard price is about $30. There is a boathouse office at the south shore of the Tamarindo Estuary (where the main, urban part of the beach ends; on the other side of the estuary Las Baulas National Park begins). Hotels all have booking desks for rain forest canopy tours, zip lines and other activities. Two-hour boat or kayak tours of the mangrove forest in the estuary will give you a shot at seeing an American crocodile as well as hundreds of tropical shorebirds.

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© 2009, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)