This week’s travel dream: Costa Rica’s untamed peninsula

I came to Costa Rica to find its wild side, said Andrew McCarthy in Travel + Leisure. This Central American nation has been attracting eco-minded tourists in hordes since backpackers embraced its natural wonders in the early 1990s, but there are areas still almost untouched by the modern world, and I wanted to experience them. That’s why I headed to the Osa Peninsula on the southern Pacific coast—“a primitive paradise of rain forests, empty beaches, and backwater settlements.” In the region’s biggest town, little Puerto Jiménez, “dogs wander free, scarlet macaws squawk from trees,” and the few streets have no names.

It doesn’t take long to find a man willing to show me how to pan for gold on the Río Tigre. I even have a little gold dust in my pocket when I find lodging. Lapa Rios is an eco-lodge with 16 cabins high on a hillside overlooking a long surf break. Outside the lodge’s entrance, “I watch a 15-foot boa constrictor coil itself around a fig tree.” Near my room’s deck, “a toucan with a long rainbow beak lands on a branch, and spider monkeys scamper across the railing.” One day, I ride horses with a man who claims to have never worn shoes in his life. We ride through a “dense rain forest, past porcupine palm and fig,” until we reach a two-mile stretch of deserted beach. “Sea turtles have come ashore to lay their eggs,” and three dozen pelicans fly in formation above us.

Alone again, I travel to Corcovado National Park, which has been called the “most ecologically intense place on earth.” I see why. After walking “under mango trees and through stands of bamboo,” I skirt along a stretch of ocean where a bull shark is patrolling. “Hummingbirds whiz past” as I grab a “fallen coconut, hack it open, and drink its sweet milk.” At a rustic camp the next morning, “I watch the sky turn to purple, then turquoise, and listen as the rain forest roars back to life.” A large puma appears from behind some trees, and I laugh after he leaves, realizing that I have stopped breathing.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

At Lapa Rios (laparios.com), a cabin for two starts at $500 a night.