Tuesday, April 22, 2014

TOPICS IN THE TROPICS (Part Three)



The Cortland News, Friday, April 20, 1883.
TOPICS IN THE TROPICS (Part Three)
Letter from D. Eugene Smith.
San Jose, Costa Rica, Feb. 23, 1883.
   Costa Rica lies just north of the Isthmus of Panama, and is entered on the
eastern side at Port Limon, a miserable, swampy town about the size of Virgil, with none of that town's attractiveness. It is everything that is undesirable in climate, in inhabitants, in its buildings and its accommodations. Excepting Aspinwall it is the worst town I ever saw, and even the latter place is its superior in many points.
   From Limon a railroad runs into t he country seventy miles; and such a road! The U. I. and E. is better! [Utica, Ithaca and Elmira Railroad--CC editor.] Even the cars look as if they had the malaria. The road lies through a forest broken only here and there by a small clearing with from one to a dozen palm huts in it. Eight miles of the track runs through a palmetto swamp—a gigantic corn-field set in inky waters whose pestilential vapors spread death for miles about. The forest itself is a vast jungle, impassable save where the hunters have cut a path for the pursuit of game. The trees are tall and majestic, but bushes and small palms and ferns of infinite variety fill the space even to the earth, so that the forests are one mass of foliage.
   The terminus of the road is Rio Sucio, a name meaning Dirty River. It is a small, straggling group of huts, compared with one of which the meanest shanty in Cortland would be a respectable mansion. The hotel, a three dollar house, is poorer than the poorest house in Cortland county. Here the traveler has to remain over night before pursuing his journey farther. I pass over the unpleasant features of a night in Rio Sucio. I endured them; it is not necessary to inflict them on the public.
   At six in the morning, with the rain pouring down in torrents, I mounted a mule, and rode by the diseased looking huts, along the banks of the Dirty River, and began my journey over the mountains alone. Thenceforward I was in a Spanish-speaking country, unsettled, half-civilized. For twenty miles my road lay through very picturesque scenery. Now at the bottom of a deep canyon, now along the edge of precipices, and again up the zigzag paths that scale the mountain side.
    Occasionally an old volcanic crater was seen, with its peculiar colorings of red and yellow from the iron and sulphur which had been thrown out. Now and then a grave was passed, with its rude, unlettered wooden cross—pleasant features to one three thousand miles from an acquaintance! Waterfalls of surprising beauty suddenly appear as the rider rounds some curve in the road, and picturesque bridges allow a view down the canyon until it is lost in the dense foliage that everywhere abounds. Finally the summit is reached and the descent begins to the great Central American tableland.
   The clouds are so near that their movements seem as swift as of a railroad train, though they were only the slow sailings of the light summer cumuli. Over on the summit of Irazu, an adjacent volcano, the smoke is seen slowly rising and floating away to form a new cloud hundreds of feet above the natural ones below.
   Civilization now begins to appear. A few miles brings in view the great coffee plantations for which Central America is celebrated. The trees, about as large as our dwarf pears, are laid out with the same regularity that we find in our orchards, while near the house is a large plastered square, a hundred or so feet across, whereon the coffee berries are dried for market. A few banana, orange and lemon groves are seen, and occasionally a little cacao.
   The road winds along over a rolling plain, in which houses begin to scatter thickly, and finally the suburbs of San Jose are reached, and after some feeble attempts at talking Spanish I find my way to the hotel after being eight hours in the saddle.
   San Jose is a thoroughly Spanish town. Brick houses with tile roofs, almost all with but one story, on account of the earthquakes, and all plastered without and painted white, pale blue or pink! The city is clean, an unheard of recommendation for a tropical town, and the people seem of a purer blood than those in the low-lands. The climate is perfect during this, the dry season, the thermometer indicating always between sixty-five and eighty-five. It is the most attractive tropical city I have seen. About it rise seven volcanoes, none of which are active save for occasional jets of smoke and flame which do no damage. The gently sloping sides of these mountains are extensively cultivated, being covered with coffee plantations and vegetable gardens. Beginning at the city limits Irazu rises 9000 feet above us. South Hill in Cortland is three hundred feet high. It would take thirty South Hills to reach the height of the crater of this volcano, which rises a thousand feet above the clouds. I remain here a few days, and then return to the coast for a steamer.
D. E. S.

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