Budget Safari

HUNTING & FISHING

Oh, those ads!

SAFARIS. UNBELIEVABLY LOW COST. 30 DAYS IN BOTH UGANDA AND TANGANYIKA. ONLY $3,490.

Ah, well. For the privileged few with $3,500 Holland & Holland rifles and fat letters of credit, Africa is still the place for those snarling big cats and tawny skins to adorn a bare den wall. But nowadays, for U.S. sportsmen with low budgets and yens for high adventure, there's Costa Rica right next door.

Timid Tapirs. Only 4 1/2 hours and $77 from Miami by plane, democratic, relatively peaceful (last revolution: 1938) Costa Rica is a zoologist's and hunters dream. No one ever heard of bag limits, game wardens don't exist, and critters are everywhere. Last month, just ten miles outside-the mountain-circled capital city of San Jose, a farmer' plugged a wild black cat that measured 6 1/2 ft. from nose to tail.

Guanacaste Province, in the west, is the winter haven of all those pintail ducks and Canadian geese that flapped south over the U.S. last fall. Herds of venados, er white-tailed deer, bound over the plains, pursued by hungry pumas; 6-ft. iguanas and huge (up to 4 ft. wide) alligators sun themselves along the river banks. But it is for the dense jungles of Sarapiqui, northeast of San Jose, that U.S. hunters are heading. There, packs of as many as 1,000 wild pigs grunt through the bush, uprooting and trampling all the foliage in their path. Timid, 600-lb. tapirs--distant relatives of the African rhinoceros--plod warily along the narrow, muddy trails. Chachalacas, parrots and howler monkeys noise endlessly from the tree tops.

El Tigre. More important to nimrods who want to shoot their own fur coats, the Sarapiqui jungle is home to five different varieties of wild cat, ranging from the little margay (about the size of an overgrown Siamese) to El Tigre himself: the jaguar--third largest cat in the world (behind the true tiger and the African lion).

A jaguar safari in Sarapiqui is no sport for weak knees or weak stomachs. Not for Costa Ricans are the portable refrigerators, battery-operated LP phonographs and folding beds of the Kenya set. In Sarapiqui it is man; tent, sleeping bag and insect repellent against the elements. The. jungle is so thick, even on the-trails, that it sometimes takes a machete-wieldiag hunter 20 minutes to go 100 yds., Standard safari fare is beans and rice, plus what, ever the hunter shoots for the pot--boar steaks,, perhaps, or delicate morsels of tepez-cuintle, a 25-lb. creature that claims kinship with the rat.

Nighttime Lesson. The jaguar, a wily, elusive beast that is vicious when cornered, is hunted either by day with dogs or by night with lights. Daredevil bushland residents, like Sarapiqui's Froylan Ponce, prefer night hunting because "it is surer--El Tigre moves at night." Others, like Enrique Martinez, a professional guide from San Jose, have learned a lesson or two. Two years ago Martinez was leading a hunting party that jumped a 250-lb. jaguar at night. He trained his coal miner's head lamp on the animal while one of the hunters took aim and fired. Wounded and enraged, the jaguar leaped--straight for

Martinez' head lamp. In the nick of time, he flung the lamp to the ground, and the party scattered into the bush. Says Martinez: "I'm still shuddering."

A hunter's delight, Costa Rica is just as much an angler's paradise. Trusting, and innocently ignorant of flies with hooks, big rainbow trout swim serenely in never-fished mountain streams. Rivers churn with exotic fresh-water game-fish that cannot even be found in angling encyclopedias. There is the bobo, or bubblefish, an elusive silverside that dwells in the rapids and attacks a wet fly like something good to eat. There is the machaca, an acrobatic inhabitant of still-water pockets that looks like a cross between a herring and a white shad and often leaps itself spectacularly ta death when hooked. And there is the lavender-hued guapote, a tasty pan fish that weighs anywhere from 2 to 12 Ibs., can sever a sturdy" wire leader with one crunch of its needle-sharp teeth.

Liver Shippers. From Puntarenas, on the Pacific Coast," saltwater fishermen set out to tackle big niarlin and sailfish, and each spring the river mouths along Costa Rica's Caribbean coast are choked with spawning snook and tarpon--so thick that thousands can sometimes be seen roiling the surface of the water. Where the school fish congregate, so do the predators--monster sawfish, and sharks, sharks, sharks. Using only hand lines, fishermen of the Caribbean village of Colorado last year caught 1,800 sharks in less than three months--and shipped the livers to Chinese medicine makers on Formosa.

Colorado (pop. 800) is also the site of Costa Rica's biggest attraction for foreign fishermen: the annual Holy Week tarpon-fishing tournament sponsored by San Jose's Club Amateur de Pesca. The 62 entrants in this year's contest came from such chilly climes as Worcester, Mass., and included a group of 17 from Indiana. Flying into San Jose two weeks ago, they boarded buses, rode four hours to Puerto Viejo --the end of the road. There they packed their gear into dugout canoes equipped with outboards, put-putted for another nine hours down the Sarapiqui River and the San Juan. The fishing more than made up for the hardship. One of the world's ten top gamefish, the tarpon is a jumping fool that often runs well over 100 Ibs., can snap a line almost at will or make a reel smoke with his furious runs. Experienced fishermen count themselves lucky to boat one out of every ten tarpon they hook into. In three short days at Colorado, contestants boated 102 fish.

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