Costa Rica,
Your Way.

Tamarindo is a natural first stop — a beach town with enough infrastructure to make arrival easy and enough character to feel genuinely Costa Rican. The bay's beach break is the ideal introduction to Pacific surfing: consistent, forgiving on the inside, and served by surf schools that can get most people standing by the end of a morning lesson. The estuary at the bay's northern end is where the wildlife encounters begin in earnest — crocodiles in the water, howler monkeys in the trees above, ospreys and kingfishers along the bank, and the transition from the ocean to the mangroves that defines this particular stretch of Pacific coast. The sunset from the beach at Tamarindo, watched from a table at one of the waterfront restaurants with a cold Imperial beer, is a genuinely good way to arrive in Costa Rica. From November to March, the Playa Grande turtle nesting beach across the estuary is one of the finest leatherback turtle experiences in the world — a night excursion guided by local conservationists that most people describe as one of the most extraordinary wildlife encounters of their lives.

Santa Teresa has a character that is genuinely difficult to describe before you arrive and immediately obvious once you're there. The single dirt road that runs along the Nicoya Peninsula's southern tip — Calle Principal — is the spine of the community: surf shops, yoga studios, juice bars, and restaurants that would not be out of place in any major city, interspersed with the small hotels and cabinas that have been here since before the road was paved (which it still mostly isn't). The surf is what brings most people and is what keeps them: Playa Santa Teresa and Playa Carmen on either side of the main break offer conditions for all levels throughout the day, and Playa Hermosa to the north has the more powerful reef break that experienced surfers come specifically for. Away from the surf, the Cabo Blanco Absolute Nature Reserve at the tip of the peninsula — Costa Rica's first and arguably finest protected area — offers primary forest trails through one of the country's most intact ecosystems, with howler monkeys overhead, white-faced capuchins in the trees, and the kind of birding that justifies a morning's walk even for those who don't consider themselves birders. The food in Santa Teresa has developed beyond what the town's size would suggest — fresh ceviche, excellent sushi (the Pacific tuna is extraordinary), wood-fired pizza, and the kind of dinner that surprises people who came expecting surf-town basics. Three nights gives you the surf, the reserve, and enough time to stop rushing.

Monteverde sits at 1,440 metres above sea level and exists in a perpetual mist — a cloud forest that has been accumulating its extraordinary biodiversity for centuries without significant human disturbance. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve offers walking trails of varying difficulty through primary forest where the density of life is staggering: orchids growing on every surface, tree frogs in the leaf litter, resplendent quetzals in the canopy, howler monkeys in the treetops, and more species of bird visible from a single observation platform than in an entire week of birding in temperate climates. The early morning trail walk with a naturalist guide — before the day-trippers arrive from San José — is the essential Monteverde experience: the forest in the mist, the sound of the quetzal's call, the particular quality of light that only exists in a cloud forest at dawn. The zip line above the canopy gives a completely different perspective on the same forest: 3.5 kilometres of line across thirteen platforms, moving through the cloud at speed in a way that makes you understand the scale of what's being protected. The night walk — guided by local naturalists with torches through the Santa Elena Reserve — reveals the cloud forest's nocturnal character: sleeping birds, hunting tree frogs, stick insects of extraordinary size, and the occasional kinkajou moving through the branches overhead. Two nights in Monteverde gives you both the daytime and the nocturnal forest.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is where this trip ends — and where most people wish it didn't. The Caribbean coast of Costa Rica has a character completely different from everything that precedes it on this itinerary: Afro-Caribbean culture shaped by the Jamaican workers who built the railway in the nineteenth century, a food tradition of rice and beans cooked in coconut milk and fresh Caribbean lobster, a soundscape of reggae and the Atlantic surf, and a pace that makes the word unhurried feel like an overstatement. The beaches south of town are the finest on this itinerary. Playa Cocles has the longest stretch of white sand and a consistent beach break; Playa Chiquita is quieter, fringed with jungle, and has the kind of beauty that makes people put their phones away; Punta Uva, reached by bicycle along the coastal road through primary forest, is a curved bay of turquoise water with almost no development and almost no one on it. The Jaguar Rescue Center just outside town rehabilitates injured and orphaned wildlife and offers morning tours that bring visitors within close range of sloths, spider monkeys, toucans, and — in season — jaguars being prepared for release. The Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge to the south is where the rainforest meets the Caribbean in a stretch of protected coastline that sees almost no visitors and contains some of the most intact coral reef remaining on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. Three nights in Puerto Viejo allows all of this to happen without anything feeling rushed — which is, in the end, what pura vida means.