(HOST) Nature writer and commentator Ted Levin recently took a break from winter and discovered something very much like a tropical paradise - at least for as long as it lasts.

(LEVIN) Costa Rica is the size of West Virginia with a population of three-and-a-half million people, mostly stationed in urban centers like San Jose, Liberia, and Limon. The country is green, dripping-wet green on the Caribbean side or brittle-dry green on the Pacific, green laced with serpentine vines biologists call lianas. So many lianas, in fact, the jungle looks like macrame gone wild. And residing in this vegetative fabric are parrots and toucans and trogons and sloths and monkeys, some so loud of voice you can hear them more than a mile away, as frayed barks and sonorous booms broadcast through twilit jungles. It is no wonder they're known as howlers.

Costa Rica has everything my younger son and I were looking for in our brief escape from a Vermont winter: heat, shade, pristine beaches and shallow coves filled with sea turtles. Over 800 species of birds breed in Costa Rica, more than all of North America. There are hot springs and volcanoes (some active, some dormant), over a thousand species of orchids, and exotic mammals - jaguars and ocelots among the coolest - rainbow-colored amphibians and snakes, not everyone's personal favorites - but I like them.

Costa Rica is part of the geographic flare off the northwest coast of Columbia, an isthmus along with Panama, its neighbor to the south. Although it is part of that nebulous designation of Central or Meso America, Costa Rica, at least from a biological perspective, has a definite South American flavor. As exotic as the country is, however, there are a few widely adapted mammals roaming the landscape that would be familiar Vermonters: coyote, raccoon, long-tailed weasel, striped skunk, and catamount, which everyone calls puma.

Costa Rica has no army and not all policemen wear guns. Crime is less of a problem than in Chicago or New York City. And health care is affordable, just not as sophisticated as we're used to. When one of the twenty-one Hanover high school students I helped chaperone cracked his head on the side of a swimming pool, he was taken by ambulance to a rural Red Cross station, stitched up, and released without charge.

Costa Rica caters to eco-tourism, one of the mains stays of the economy, along with fruit, coffee, and cattle. Everywhere you go you see the words "pura vida," or pure life, which I am told was once a uniquely Costa Rican expression used for hello, goodbye, peace be with you, a sort of New World version of Shalom. Unfortunately, the phrase has been highjacked by the tourist industry and appears on post cards, tee shirts, key chains, billboards, and signs announcing new real estate developments, which are usually written in English.

And this points to my big concern for Costa Rica. American real estate and its burgeoning baby-boomer retirement market is busily turning Costa Rica into a "new" Florida, clean, green, and peaceful, with thousands of miles of virgin beaches - beaches formerly visited only by sea turtles and other wildlife, fishermen, and surfers.