Nearly 21,000 people in Costa Rica have suffered dengue fever so far this year, the ministerio de Salud (ministry of Health) informed on Thursday.

The ministry said in a report that this represents a 621.6 percent increase over the same period last year, when only 3,326 cases were reported.

The number of dengue patients grew despite government’s preventive campaigns urging the population to eliminate the sources of infection of the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, the agent that transmits the disease, the text added.

Coto Brus, Puntarenas. An American citizen , identified as Kai Desmond Allen, 48, died yesterday in San Francisco de Coto Brus, Puntarenas, when he tried to cross a creek in his car and dragged him .

Authorities found the body yesterday, at 2:20 a. m., about three miles from where the accident occurred.

According to Walter Vargas, an officer of the security forces in Coto Brus, the victim “was in the cab with a seat belt.”

Yesterday was not possible to know what he did or how long resided in the southern zone.

Neighbors said the american citizen tried to cross the creek at a time when weather was bad

The value of the dollar increased against the colon Thursday after the Banco Central said it would purchase $600 million between now and Christmas.

The action by the Central Bank was not so much as to defend the battered dollar but to put the brakes on domestic inflation.

The value of the dollar at Banco Nacional this morning was 524.5 colons to purchase a dollar. Selling one dollar would bring 515 colons.

The spike in the value of the dollar also took place the day after most Costa Ricans got their two weeks of pay.

The sell rate of a dollar flirted with 500 colons this week. That is a substantial drop from 582 colons to the dollar that was the rate last October. The weakening of the dollar caused problems for some expats living on fixed incomes from outside Costa Rica.

The dollar began its decline when the Banco Central ended its system of daily mini-devaluations. That coupled with the perception that the U.S. administration is running up high deficits caused the dollar to dip. The central bank was obligated to defend the dollar if it dipped below 500 colons.

The purchase of an estimated $50 million a month of the public currency exchange will dwarf most transactions there where the minimum purchase is $1,000.

Wednesday night was an unhappy time for many in Costa Rica. Heavy rains and swollen rivers forced more from their homes.

The national emergency commission said Thursday that 175 persons were living in public shelters. Others were with friends and family. Hardest hit seemed to be the canton of Cañas in Guanacaste, La Unión in Cartago and the Osa peninsula.

In the Osa canton bridges were damaged and roads were undermined. A bridge at Agua Buena collapsed isolating the communities of Rancho Quemado, Quebrada Tortuga and Aguilitas.

A U.S. citizen died when his sports utility vehicle got carried away while he was fording a stream between San Gabriel and Santa Cecilia de Agua Buena de Coto Brus, according to the Judicial Investigating Agency. He was identified by the last name of Allen. Agents said he was 47. The vehicle appears to have turned over multiple times and trapped the driver inside. The heavily damaged vehicle was found some distance from where it is presumed the man tried to cross the swollen stream. Another report said he was crossing a wooden bridge and was carried away by a surge of water.

The accident was reported about 10:30 p.m.

Photo by Tom Ploskina Undermined road near Arenal

In Cañas, it was the community of Bebedero where 90 persons had to be evacuated, according to the emergency commission. They ended up in the Escuela La Pacifica de Corobici. A bridge nearby also was reported damaged.

In La Unión, Cartago, 25 persons fled flooded homes and ended up in the local gym in the community of San Diego. A landslide put their homes in jeopardy, and some dwellings fell into the adjacent river, the commission said.
There also was a shelter set up in Golfito that housed 60 persons, said the commission. Other individuals remain in shelters after being flooded out earlier in the week. That includes residents of Barra Honda de Nicoya, Tirrases de Curridabat, Barrio La Cruz de Ciudad Quesada and in San Rafael de Corredores.

Meanwhile another system of low pressure in the Pacific is generating more humidity in the country. The system is further north than Costa Rica, but the influence is being felt here, said the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional in a special bulletin Thursday afternoon. The weather institute said that the system was causing rain along the Pacific coast, in the Central Valley and in the mountains of the northern zone and the Caribbean. The prediction was for showers and downpours through the night.

The regions with the highest probability of flooding were Puntarenas Centro, Esparza, Miramar, Tarrazú, Aguirre, Paquita and Cañas, Dominical and the communities that were flooded Wednesday night, the institute said.

The forecast for today is typical of the season. Partly cloudy or cloudy skies in the morning followed by a high probability of downpours in the afternoon and early evening, said the institute.

The first six months of 2010 saw international tourist arrivals grow by 7 percent, according to the August Interim Update of the World Tourism Organization’s barometer. This result confirms the recovery trend beginning in the last quarter of 2009 and is expected to continue in the second half of the year at a somewhat more moderate rate.

International tourist arrivals are estimated to have grown by 7 percent in the first half of 2010. While growth was modest in April as a consequence of the closure of European airspace following the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, results were strong in May (+10 percent) and June (+8 percent). Data available for July indicates that growth is set to continue at a steady rate.

Growth was positive in all world regions, led by a robust performance of emerging economies expanding at 8 percent compared to 6 percent in advanced economies. Asia and the Pacific (+14 percent) and the Middle East (+20 percent), where results were already positive in the second half of 2009, continue to lead growth in the first half of 2010 with the majority of destinations in both regions posting double digit growth rates.

Asia in particular is experiencing a very dynamic rebound, with strong results from Sri Lanka (+49 percent), Japan (+36 percent), Vietnam (+35 percent), Myanmar (+35 percent), Hong Kong (China) (+23 percent), Macao (China) (+23 percent), Singapore (+23 percent), Fiji (+22 percent) and the Maldives (+21 percent). Thailand (+14 percent) posted encouraging results in spite of the political unrest early this year. As in previous occasions, such as the Asian financial and economic crisis (1997-1998), the SARS outbreak (2003), and the tsunami (2004), Asia has once again shown a strong capacity for recovery. International tourism has been a driving force in a region — currently the second most visited region in the world — with 181 million international tourist arrivals (21 percent of world total) and international tourism receipts of US$ 204 billion (24 percent of world total) in 2009.

In the Americas (+7 percent), Central and South America show steady growth, as does North America. Growth has been slower in the Caribbean but results are still markedly improved as compared to 2008 and 2009. Europe (+2 percent) shows the slowest recovery but results from recent months are slightly more positive. Although recovery has not yet returned to Northern Europe, both Western and Southern Mediterranean Europe show reasonable growth. Africa (+7 percent), the only region to grow in 2009, maintained this momentum during the first half of 2010.

International tourism receipts are expected to lag somewhat behind arrivals in many destinations. Following major shocks, volume tends to recover faster than income as travellers go closer to home for shorter periods of time and seek value for money, while on the supply side increased competition has been driving prices down. This was also the case following the Asian economic and financial crisis and after the 2001 Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Overall, international tourist arrivals totalled 421 million during the first six months of 2010, up 7 percent on 2009, but still 2 percent below that of the record year of 2008 (428 million arrivals in the same period). These results follow one of the toughest years for the tourism sector with international tourist arrivals declining by 4.2 percent in 2009 to 880 million and international tourism receipts reaching $852 billion (€611 billion), a decrease in real terms of 5.7 percent.

For 2010, the World Tourism Organizatin said it maintains its initial forecast of international tourist arrivals growing by 3 percent to 4 percent. Current growth rates, coupled with an improving global economic environment suggest that end-year results are likely to be closer to 4 percent, and may even exceed this figure.

However, high unemployment continues to be a major cause of concern and the austerity measures as well as the rise in taxation implemented in several advanced economies to fight public deficits represent a clear challenge to many leading outbound markets, the agency said.

The tourism report was deliverd at a forum in Guilin, China Thursday.

The awaited “Barrio Chino” (Chintown) in San José will be a reality in 2011.

According to Ana Elena Salas, with the gerencia de Provisión de Servicios for the municipalidad de San José, said the work will commence in the first quarter of 2011 and should take six months to complete.

The delay in developing a Barrio Chino is due to the Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes (MOPT) not authorizing the work fearing increased traffic congestion in the downtown core with the reconstruction work projects by the municipality of several streets.

Currently the municipalidad de San José is reconstructing Avenida 8 after complete similar work on other Avenidas and Calles.

A U.S. federal judge is declining to allow Costa Rica, as well as Chile, to file legal briefs challenging Arizona’s immigration law.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton said in an order Thursday that the two countries missed a July deadline to file “friend of the court” briefs in the case filed by civil rights groups and other plaintiffs.

And she says the countries’ identical motions “provide no assistance to the court.”

Key parts of the law have already been put on hold by Bolton in a ruling in a separate challenge filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

That ruling is now on appeal.

Although the number of visitors has increased over last year, the question by many hotel operators is, where are they staying? because they are not staying in their hotels.

The supposition is that many tourists are opting to stay at “informal housing” to reduce their costs as part of the world economic crisis.

Informal housing includes houses, apartments or condos that were build/bought for residential housing but turned into rentals during the economic crisis. Many tourists are also opting to stay in villas owned by nationals and foreigners alike, turned into rental housing.

The alternative is good for the visitor who ends up spending less on lodging while forsaking items like a reception desk, restaurant and bar, games room and a maid to make the bed. And for the owners who can generate revenue from a vacant house, apartment or villa.

Unlike in the past, today the internet is an ally of the homeowner to turn his or her home into an informal housing and the visitor in search of inexpensive lodging A search of the world wide web shows an increase of web pages, web sites and web blogs dedicated to this informal business.

In beach areas like Samara, Mal Pais, Coco, Hermosa, Panama, Jacó and Manuel Antonio informal housing for visitors is abundant and at times at half the cost of a hotel room.

In San José and surrounding areas, empty condos purchased during the peak real estate rush and now empty have quickly been converted to providing temporary housing to visitors.

Informal housing makes it difficult for hotel operators to compete. According to Pablo Solano of the Cámara Costarricense de Hoteles (CCH), hotels have to abide by “rigid” rules while the informal housing does not, including not issuing “facturas” (receipts) and the payment of taxes and other fees and permits.

The government recognized this trend last year by removing the 3% sales tax on hotel rooms and requiring visitors to pay a us$15 fee that is added to all airline tickets to Costa Rica.

According to the CCH the average occupancy rate for hotels this year is 53%, down from 58% in 2009 and 64% in 2008, despite an increase of 9.6% of tourist arrivals this year over the same period last year.

For the time being the Ministerio de Turismo (Tourism ministry) is not commenting on the concerns of hotel operators.

Costa Rica’s central bank plans to buy as much as us$50 million a month in the foreign-exchange market in a move that analysts say is a bid to stem a rally that’s sent the colon to a two-year high.

The colon has surged 7 percent in the past three months and touched ¢504.75 per dollar on Aug. 31, leaving it within 1 percent of the stronger end of the ¢500-to-¢645 band that the central bank seeks to keep the exchange rate. The colon weakened 0.4 percent to ¢508.27 today, its biggest slide in six weeks, after the bank said in the statement that it will buy up to $600 million in the market by December 2011.

The colon reached “a level that may have been deemed as too close for comfort by the central bank,” said Alberto Franco, a former Costa Rican central bank director who is an economist with Ecoanalisis, a financial consultant group in San Jose.

The purchases could begin as soon as today, the central bank said in a statement dated Sept. 1 on its website. The bank said the goal of the purchases is to bolster its foreign reserves.

The colon has surged 11.2 percent this year against the dollar, the second-best performance in the world after the Colombian peso, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Costa Rica Lake Arenal – a man made lake in 1978, Lake Arenal-map was formed when the waters of Rio Arenal were diverted to fill and stock what is today a 40,000 sq. impoundment. Water depth near the dam runs up to 190 feet; the water depth in the channels will run up to 120 feet. Water temperature varies less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit year round.

La Fortuna Area – this small community is approximately 400 meters above sea level, and 16 km ( 9.5 miles ) from the entrance to Arenal Volcano National Park. La Fortuna serves as an ideal base from which to enjoy the volcano, Lake Arenal, Caño Negro Reserve, and the many other outdoor activities, i.e. windsurfing, fishing, mountain biking, and white water rafting. The town of La Fortuna contains several small hotels/cabinas, restaurants and souvenir shops, all of which are within walking distance. There are several travel/adventure agencies which can arrange local tours in the surrounding area. As you depart La Fortuna, heading towards Lake Arenal, numerous larger hotels are situated along the roadside, inlcuding several which are presently under construction. Terrific views of the volcano can be seen from these hotels, as well as from the roadside. From La Fortuna, buses depart to San Jose and Tiliran, which is located on the west side of Lake Arenal.

Sport Fishing – Lake Arenal contains primarily two different types of fish, the Machaca and Rainbow Bass. The Machaca are flashy acrobatic fish which can reach 9 lbs. within the lake, and perhaps 15 lbs. in norther and coastal rivers. More prone to stike smaller and faster lures, ultra light an d light spinning gear spolled with 4-8 lb. monofilament line is the rule. Fly fisherman should be using 8-10 wt. rods and 9 ft. leaders and smaller (size 4-8) poppers and streamers. The Rainbow Bass, which ranges in size up to 16 pounds, spawns year round and is found throughout the fresh waters in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. Generally speaking, the same tackle used to catch large mouth bass will be adequate here, i.e. surface plugs spinner baits, and rattle traps. Monofilament of 12-20 lb. is recommended with a “shock tippet” of 25-40 lb. Fly fishermen are advised to use rods of 8-10 wt. with 9 ft. leaders and large poppers, medium sized streamers in bright or lighter colors.

Months Machaca Rainbow Bass
Jan.-Feb. Excellent Good
Mar.-July Good Excellent
Aug.-Dec. Excellent Fair

Waterfall – just 3.2 km ( 1.9 miles ) east of La Fortuna lies one of Costa Rica’s most spectacular waterfalls(see photo). The road leading to the waterfall is partially paved, the initial 1.1 km ( 1/2 mile ), while the remaining section is a dirt/gravel road. Best suited for a four-wheel drive vehicle, the trip can be made in a sedan if driven slowly; the steep inclines have been some what paved to provide better traction. Taxi’s are available in La Fortuna and charge in the neighborhood of 2,400 colones for the trip, regardless of the number of passengers. A large percentage of people walk to the falls, as the road passes through lush, green countryside, and is quite an enjoyable stroll. Along the way, there are a few small eateries where you can purchase water and other beverages. However, we recommend that you bring bottled water, particularly if you have plans to hike to the waterfall’s base.

The entrance fee to view and descend to the waterfall is 300 colones, and there is no limit to the amount of time you can spend at the falls. The steep, downhill climb to the base of the waterfall, while challenging, is well worth the time and effort. A well defined path helps you traverse the deep, rocky canyon wall as you hear the thundering water below. Swimming is permissible, however, stay clear away from the waterfall itself.

Hot Springs – Approximately 12 km(7.2 miles) from La Fortuna lies the Tabacon Hot Springs Resort. Located at the base of the volcano, this facility contains pools, in addition to streams of hot, spring water. You can pay by the hour or by the day, the difference being minimal. A bit further towards the volcano are public springs on the left side of the road; several cars are usually parked along the roadside. After parking, descend down towards the springs which are commonly enjoyed by the local community.

Caves of Venado – Located just south of La Fortuna are the Caves of Venado. Dating back over 7 million years, the Venado Caves are the direct result of water currents penetrating and passing through the surrounding limestone rocks. Over time, the continual flow of water opened crevasses and forced sediments to flow throughout the caves, leaving in it’s wake an endless network of deep tunnels. About an hour drive from La Fortuna, these caves are a must for anyone visiting the area.

How to get to Lake Arenal
There are three different routes you can take en route to Lake Arenal (Arenal Volcano), however, it depends on which end of the lake you are most interested. The eastern end of the lake (La Fortuna) provides access to the Arenal Volcano National Park and Caño Negro Reserve, while the western side of the lake brings you to the town of Tilirán, which is where most of the windsurfing related hotels and businesses are based.

Via La Fortuna – the most direct route is via San Ramon, for which there is a clearly marked exit sign off the auto pista (Interamerica Highway); which departs west of San José, past the airport and continues northwest past the coastal port of Puntarenas. The exit for San Ramon is approximately 31.5 miles or 50.5 kms from San José. Generally speaking, the road conditions are in very good condition, particularly once you get off at the San Ramon exit; your trip to La Fortuna will take between 2 1/2-3 hours. As a second alternative, you can exit the auto-pista just prior to the exit for San Ramon (approximately 23.5 miles or 37.5 kms from San José), at an exit for San Carlos (Ciudad Quesada). This route to La Fortuna will take you through the small community of Zarcero, which has one of the most picturesque main squares in the country. The colorful gardens, which reside just in front of the church, are filled with hand trimmed hedges depicting arches, animals and other odd shapes. Zacero provides for terrific photographic opportunities. Once again, the road conditions are in very good condition, and your trip to La Fortuna will require a 3 hour drive from San Jose.

Regardless of which route you take, your drive through the northern zone of Costa Rica will be most enjoyable. Steep inclines, twisting turning roads, lined with small farms and green rolling hills is what you can expect to see en route to La Fortuna. Your trip north is perhaps one of the most scenic and enjoyable in Costa Rica. Both routes are clearly marked with roads signs directing you to the small community of La Fortuna or Lake Arenal.

Via Tilirán – For those whose prefer to visit the west end of the lake, you can take the Panamerican Highway towards Liberia, getting of at Cañas. There is a large sign on the right side of the road for Cañas, Lake Arenal and Tilirán; it is just after the red bull ring. Take this road straight to the end and turn left following it until it reaches Tilirán, approximately 21 kms (12.5 miles). You enter Tilirán at a fork, for those who want to continue to Lake Arenal, turn left at the fork and continue on straight. From this side of the lake, one can easily access the famous windsurfing spots which are concentrated on this end of the lake.