A taste of Costa Rica

As we mused about our travels over recent years, we realized that we have been inclined to gravitate towards North America for nature-focused trips and Europe for culture and history. We have tended to return to a handful of favourite countries to explore them in more depth.

This year, we resolved to visit at least a few new places that are out of our comfort zone while we are still capable of travelling. We weighed concerns about long flights, an unknown language, the hassles associated with making local arrangements, and safety, against the opportunity to discover a new country. The wide variety of organized tours available to any destination in the world was a convincing argument for taking a new approach.

Over the years, we had heard many accounts of the natural beauty of Costa Rica, so we decided to go there. We opted to join a group tour and prepared, as usual, with a good guide book and videos.

Prior to the start of our group tour, we visited two museums in the capital, San José: the National Museum of Costa Rica and the Jade and Pre-Colombian Culture Museum. Those informative visits gave us a good grounding in the social, cultural and economic history of the country from the pre-colonization era to the present.

The National Museum is housed in the former Bellavista Military Barracks, a location that saw fierce fighting during the revolution of 1948. The bullet holes in its turrets bear witness to that conflict. In a daring gesture, the newly established democracy abolished its national army in 1949.

In addition to being a land bridge between North and South America, this small country has a varied topography with four mountain ranges and multiple micro-climates, all contributing to its remarkable biodiversity.

The group tour gave us opportunities to explore various parts of the country: the Central Valley, the area around the perfectly conical and active Arenal Volcano, the cloud forest region of the Cordillera de Tilaran, and the Nicoya Peninsula. During our trip, we had a number of memorable stops that gave insights into local culture.

We visited a plantation where we learned about the different steps involved in coffee production. Coffee, bananas and pineapples are the country’s main agricultural exports. In the 19th century, ox-carts were used to transport bags of coffee beans for export from the plantations of the Central Valley to the port of Puntarenas on the Pacific coast. The ox-cart became the national symbol of the country. In 2008, Costa Rica’s ox herding and ox-cart traditions were added to the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

While ox-carts are no longer used to transport coffee, Costa Ricans are proud of that tradition and ox-carts are still viewed as valued ornaments. We saw the largest ox-cart in the world (a Guinness Book of Records entry) in the centre of the town of Sarchi. There, we visited the last remaining ox-cart factory in the country, where traditional methods of production are still used. Similarly, in the town of Guaitil, we saw how traditional knowledge and skills and locally-sourced natural materials combine to produce the beautiful Chorotegan Indigenous pottery.

A well-planned itinerary, a knowledgeable tour guide and a gracious bus driver all contributed to making our trip a memorable one. We hope to return to Costa Rica, as we feel we only had a taste of it and there is still so much more to see. We hope you enjoy some of the highlights of our tour in the two videos below.

Wildlife was all around us, but it was not always easy to capture the animals on film, especially the numerous colourful birds singing high-up in the trees. We saw enough native species to whet our curiosity. We patiently waited and were lucky to observe a basilisk lizard, known as the “Jesus Christ Lizard,” walk on the water of a pond. Afterwards, we had to slow down the film to really see it in action.