There is much excitement in Cabanga and Guatuso recently over the road that runs from Guatuso to Arenal. This also means a lot to us since that road passes in front of our base of operations. What a difference four years makes! It is almost four years ago we bought the Monte Cristo property, and at the time there was a road, but the bridges were less than marginal. In fact, a little less than three years ago when we moved to Monte Cristo with our stuff, when the driver of the truck saw the bridge, he took off his seatbelt in case he had to jump. I was riding with him, and after I did a double-take, I took off my seatbelt, too!

Since that time, both bridges have been repaired thanks to the local businessmen augmenting the resources of the town, and the road has been graded various times. But now they are getting serious, and we are getting a luxury road — for Costa Rica.

There are various stages of roads here. Phase one is send a bulldozer that carves it out but leaves it dirt. This leaves a road that is servicable about 4 months out of the year for vehicles. The rest of the time, only tractors and horses will pass.

The next phase is to take rock and sand dredged out of the river and dump it on the road. This is called “lastre.” You won’t get stuck, but it is jarring, so you would almost prefer dirt. The rock runs from gravel to 6 inches in diameter and more. Kind of fun on a mountian bike, but I probably can’t think of anything that would do a better job destroying a vehicle’s suspension than a river rock road. A lot of people can’t afford repairs, so evry day we hear wham! wham! wham! as pickup trucks and cars go by with their chassis hitting bottom on every big rock. This has been the road in front of our operation these four years and one of the reasons we have a fulltime mechanic.

Now they are going to the next phase, an actual gravel road! Make the road uniform in width, fix all the drainage systems, and spread actual gravel. It is going to be wonderful.

To give you an idea why I sound so excited, our operation is only about 4 miles (6 kilometers) from Guatuso, but it can take 20 minutes to get there due to the road. We are 14 kilometers (10 miles) from Nuevo Arenal, but that is at least 45 minutes of driving on a much worse road. (Imagine driving over ski moguls.) With the new road, I can imagine being in Arenal in under 20 minutes! Not that there is anything to buy in Arenal, except at a very good German Bakery, but we do at times pass through Arenal heading for Liberia to get parts and construction supplies.

There is not only the increase in convenience to us and far fewer repairs to suspension — we seem to change the oil and the bushings on our car at the same time — but it will change the traffic flow of tourism to go right in front of our operation. This allows us to create a storefront for souvenirs and furniture. We are getting more and more walk-in traffic for our furniture business, and this could increase it considerably. Even people passing by this mixed-species plantation is a good thing, because it can raise awareness of what is being done to bring back more native trees to Costa Rica.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 4:58 am and is filed under culture, roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.