Costa Rica: learning to look again

It’s a surfboard at sunset — a single figure reduced to silhouette as the day drains quietly out of the sky.

That feels about right.

Because Costa Rica didn’t perform for us. It didn’t line things up for applause or demand to be admired. What it did — steadily, generously — was reward attention. If you slowed down enough, it revealed itself. If you didn’t, it carried on quite happily without you.

We arrived a little ahead of the Explore trip, spending Easter weekend in San José. We walked the city properly and happened upon an Easter procession — not booked, not planned, just life unfolding as we passed through. We wandered Parque Metropolitano La Sabana, once an airfield and now simply space returned to people, which felt quietly emblematic of the country’s instincts: restraint, reuse, choosing what not to build.

There were small moments too. In San José, the way coffee was served at Alma de Café, just off the Teatro, stayed with me — the care in the preparation, the unhurried certainty of how it was done. Not performative. Not rushed. Just practiced. When something is made that way, you feel it immediately.

The first proper step away from the city came with our visit to the Doka coffee plantation. Leaving San José behind, we moved not into scenery but into systems. What stayed with me there wasn’t presentation, but process — beans carefully separated and laid out, time and consistency doing most of the work. It felt less like visiting an attraction and more like being offered a quiet lesson in how patience, repeated daily, becomes infrastructure.

Then the trip itself began.

Thirteen of us — enough for companionship, not so many that you disappear — led by JC, with Koki driving throughout. From the outset there was a calm confidence about how the days were held together. No fuss. No forced enthusiasm. Just quiet competence that lets everything else work as it should.

We came, if we’re honest, with names in our heads: quetzal, sloth — the wildlife wish‑list you carry without really acknowledging it. But Costa Rica resists being reduced to targets. You don’t so much get shown things as arrive at the point where you’re able to notice them.

That lesson begins early.

In the cloud forest around Savegre, it quickly becomes clear that rushing your gaze is pointless. You look once and see nothing. You look again, more carefully, and the forest rearranges itself. Not because something new has arrived, but because you’ve finally tuned yourself properly. Attention, here, isn’t passive — it’s an active choice.

Once your attention adjusts, the world starts arriving without warning. Memories are jumbled across the two weeks, an abundance of wildlife. Sloths hung motionless where there had been only branches seconds before. Capuchin monkeys leapt onto our boat as we drifted through mangrove channels in Manuel Antonio, close enough to feel them land — and JC had been very clear beforehand: don’t smile. Bared teeth can read as aggression. There were fer‑de‑lance snakes, coati and agouti moving through the edges of paths; flashes of blue from tanagers; the unmistakable heft of toucans in the trees — Cosi’s favourites. Blue morpho butterflies skimmed across water like something briefly unbound by gravity, mariposa everywhere, hummingbirds stitching impossible colour into the air. And in many places the sound: Montezuma oropendolas calling constantly from the trees above us, impossible to ignore — less something to spot than something you found yourself inside.

As the days passed, contrast became the rhythm of the journey. Cooler uplands gave way to heat. Dense green quiet gave way to brightness and space. Landscapes shifted faster than your expectations could keep up with.

One evening, at a rural finca, we helped cook our own dinner — hands shaping empanadas, patacones frying while stories passed back and forth. It sounds modest, and it was, but it mattered. Travel changes when your hands are involved. Observation becomes participation, even briefly, and something settles as a result.

Later came Tortuguero.

Arriving by boat, gliding downriver toward the lodge with forest pressing in on all sides, did something to my sense of time. Water as the only route. The feeling — practical, not romanticised — of how this country was once navigated. It isn’t difficult to understand why Tortuguero recalibrates people. It asks you to meet the place on its terms.

By the time we reached the Pacific at Manuel Antonio, the heat was almost confrontational — salt on skin, the sun asserting itself without apology. And it’s there, oddly, when things feel clearest.

Because somewhere between cloud forest and coast, another layer began to emerge.

Costa Rica isn’t just biodiverse; it’s philosophically different. A country with no standing army, choosing decades ago to invest instead in education. A place where earthquakes are a fact of life, yet the dominant response has been long‑term thinking rather than fear. Much of the nation’s energy comes from renewables, and standing near Arenal — shaped by fire, calmed by time — you feel the power of a landscape that isn’t conquered, but collaborated with.

JC embodied that sensibility. Not through slogans or speeches, but through a grounded pride in his country — its choices, its ambition, its refusal to posture. It was optimism without naivety, confidence without noise. Alongside him, Koki drove day after day, and between the two of them wildlife appeared where moments before there had seemed to be nothing at all. Not luck — practice. Years of looking properly.

Gradually, without ceremony, my own pace shifted. Not in a spa‑brochure way, but in a more useful one. The background hum dropped away. The need to narrate everything eased. Moments stopped queuing up to be processed and simply arrived as themselves.

I fondly referred to Koki and JC as the ‘Fantas-Ticos’. Trips like this do something else, quietly, while you’re paying attention to everything around you. Shared days, early starts, moments of surprise and stillness — they bind people together beyond the trip itself. Long after the details blur, what remains are friendships strengthened, stories that resurface unprompted, and memories that belong to a group rather than an individual.

Which brings me back to the surfboard at sunset.

That image doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t boast. It isn’t an achievement shot. It simply holds a feeling most of us are short of: balance. An ending without urgency. A day that didn’t ask to be justified.

If Costa Rica taught me anything, it’s this:
we are far more starved of genuine attention than we realise.

It didn’t entertain us. It didn’t need to.
It simply revealed itself — once we learned how to look.

And that, in the end, feels like the real souvenir.

With thanks and further information

Explore – Costa Rica Wildlife Tour
https://www.explore.co.uk/holidays/costa-rica-wildlife-tour

Travel Counsellors – Trevor Smith
https://www.travelcounsellors.co.uk/trevor.smith

Hacienda Doka Coffee Estate
https://www.haciendadoka.com/