Costa Rica

Originally, we had planned to stay a full month in Guatemala. However, after some trepidatious itinerary planning, a 10-hour bus ride looked inevitable to see the Caribbean side of Guatemala. We are ashamed to say that as we enter our mid-30s, the idea of a 10-hour bus ride does not hold the same promise of adventure as it did a decade earlier so we pivoted and decided to spend 2 weeks in Costa Rica instead. We rented a car in San Jose to give us more flexibility. Our first stop was Atenas, a small town about 45 minutes from San Jose where we stayed in a hilltop Airbnb. It turned out to be a great little recovery place where we cooked, swam, read, and watched some pretty remarkable sunsets from our lanai hammock.

After two restful days, we started our trek north to the small town of Valle Azul where we had picked out an Airbnb at a frog reserve. On the drive up, we went to a hummingbird and butterfly sanctuary where we saw a charm of colorful hummingbirds and a kaleidoscope of butterflies, including the national symbol of Costa Rica: the Blue Morpho butterfly. We were immediately greeted by three toucans at the Airbnb in Valle Azul and we spent our afternoon trying to spot exotic birds from the porch. We realized that we had truly settled into our 30s with the amount of joy we derived from sitting with our binoculars on the porch looking for motmots and toucans and macaws. On our first night, we ventured out to try to spot some frogs on the sanctuary and we were proud to find an hourglass frog and far too many beetles and spiders. The next day, we drove to Tio Victor‘s Nature Reserve to hike and had a lovely and muddy trek through the jungle. That night, one of the hosts at Valle Azul gave us a tour and we found an army of frogs with his guidance. We spotted another hourglass frog, four red-eyed tree frogs, a blue-jeans poison dart frog, a glass frog, and, again, far too many beetles and spiders.

We had not spotted any sloths in Valle Azul so we decided that we should enlist another guide to help with this. So, we had an early morning drive north and looped through the Monteverde Cloud Forest to La Fortuna. Our tour guide was a Tico who grew up in the forest and almost immediately spotted our first sloth. It looked identical to the dark clumps of dead leaves surrounding it until we looked through his monocular scope- it was indeed our first sloth! In that reserve, there were two types of sloth, 3-toed and 2-toed. We saw both types that day in addition to more toucans. All of the sloths were slumbering in what appeared to be impossible sleeping positions (we found out their odd head positions are due to 2 extra cervical vertebrae compared to humans) but finally our last sloth, a female 3-toed, gave us a good show of scratching, eating, and climbing. When she looked at us with the eternal sloth smile, Em melted into a puddle.

We drove another 3 hours or so to Monteverde where we had booked a treehouse just adjacent to the cloud forest. This was a really nice change in weather with nearly constant fog in the cloud forest, 100% humidity, and temps in the 60s. We saw howler monkeys, toucans, macaws, and were visited by a troop of coatis on our front porch sniffing us out for treats. A coati reminded us of a cross between a a raccoon, a monkey, and a dogs. We walked some nice forest trails as well, trying to spy some Resplendent Quetzal (we knew this was a long shot and did not have any luck seeing these crazy birds) but we did happen upon a 7-foot boa constrictor on one of our walks which was really impressive. Em would argue “impressive” probably is not the most appropriate word to describe how she felt about the snake.

We left the cloud forest en route to Playa Hermosa, which was about a 4 hour drive further south along the Pacific coast. We made a pit stop in Tarcoles at Mirador de Cocodrilos, which did not disappoint. We immediately spotted a huge crocodile basking in the sun. We pondered for a bit staring at these dinosaurs but the heat was suffocating so we finished our drive and found ourselves at a lovely Airbnb with a cold pool and a birdwatching observation deck. What else could we ask for?

We spent our days in Playa Hermosa birdwatching, swimming, cruising the beach and hoped for surfable waves but unfortunately there was no swell while we were there. We saw some impressive birds- scarlet macaws, yellow-throated toucans, Baltimore orioles, Lesson’s Motmot, and Yellow-headed Caracara. We know that these probably are not exciting to real birdwatchers as they are not uncommon, but they are so exotic looking and strange that we really loved watching them.

From Playa Hermosa, we drove back to San Jose and prepared for our next leg in South America.

There were a lot of elements of Costa Rica that reminded us of the U.S. Costa Rica is not cheap, most everyone speaks very good English, and there are a ton of retired expats. They even accept USD in stores. These aspects maybe weren’t as new or exciting to us. But, the wildlife is really what sets Costa Rica apart. Every drive, every neighborhood stroll, every glance at a treetop seemed to promise the chance of seeing a novel, beautiful, strange creature. That’s what we’ll we take away from this fertile and vibrant country.