Braving The Back Roads Of Guanacaste In Costa Rica, The World’s Happiest Country

by Dave Seminara on

Take a look at a road map of Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula and you’ll see a jumble of squiggly lines that seem to meander in circles with no clear pattern. Before setting off in a rental car from Santa Teresa, at the foot of Nicoya, heading towards Rincon de la Vieja National Park near the Nicaraguan border, I was a bit intimidated by the navigational task at hand. And I’d heard that the roads in this part of the country were a disaster.

But when local cab drivers told me it would cost at least $300 to take a cab to Rincon, I decided to take the plunge on my own in a rental car. I found three rental car companies in Santa Teresa and Budget had the “cheapest” price: $280 to rent an automatic transmission Toyota Rav-4 for two days, including a GPS, a child seat and a surcharge to drop it off at the airport in Liberia. It was more than double the highest price I’d ever paid for a car rental in my life, but after spending our first six days in country carless and at the mercy of taxi drivers, it felt great to have some wheels and a bit of freedom.


We spent much of the first two hours of our trip on Route 160, which is mostly unpaved and ranges in quality from not-too-bad to thank-God-I’m barreling-down-this-cratered- track-in-a-rental-car-rather-than-my-own-vehicle bad. The thought occurred to me that the high cost or rental cars in Costa Rica must be due at least in part to the poor quality of the roads. I was driving carefully but the road was beating the hell out of our Rav-4.

I’m generally an impatient traveler who would rather take the fastest route between two points – no slow-going, scenic routes for me – but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed barnstorming through the decrepit, neglected byways of Guanacaste. The poor quality of the road forced us to take it slow, allowing us to digest the beauty and serenity of slumbering villages where we saw clusters of teens gather to check out someone’s new moped, men in colorful T-shirts and baseball caps selling watermelons and coconut water on the side of the road, and plenty of farm animals roaming free in the streets. In these timeless places, no one had air conditioning – life was lived in the streets and people had their doors open, so we could see right inside people’s homes.

The twisting, dipping and soaring back roads of Guanacaste are filled with buena vistas. Costa Rica literally means “rich coast” and nowhere in the country is that moniker better earned than in Guanacaste. Car travel in the U.S. can be mind numbingly boring. The physical terrain changes but the retail landscape is always familiar and there are no farm animals or people to look at on our highways. Here, there was someone or something to look at everywhere.

In one sleepy village, I hopped out to photograph a pair of teenage girls on a motorcycle and they acted like they’d been chosen to grace the cover of Vogue. In another, a collection of men made a futile attempt to explain what goes on at a lavacar. (Someone help me out here – is this a place to bring animals for a bath?)

On the road leading to a place called Playa Gigante, I stopped to take a photo of a handsome old man tidying his yard with a machete and was surprised when he greeted me in English.

“Hello, my friend,” he said. “What brings you here?”

“Actually, I just wanted to take your photo,” I admitted. “Do you mind?”

“I’m never too busy to make a new friend,” he said, extending his hand to introduce himself.

His name was Christian and he learned English while living in Glendale, California, in the 1980s. I asked him why he came back to Costa Rica and he said that his parents were old and he needed to come back to take care of them.

“Do you like it here?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, looking around at the collection of tidy, modest homes. “We have everything here and it’s nice and quiet.”




Last year, Costa Rica was rated the happiest country in the world by The New Economics Foundation and indeed, most Costa Ricans will tell you that they live in a truly wonderful, if expensive, place.

Eventually we merged onto the paved Pan-American Highway, which was faster but less interesting and we made the trip to Rincon in about five leisurely hours with plenty of stops for random conversations and photo opps. If you find yourself in this part of the world, I highly recommend taking the time to get lost on the back roads of Guanacaste. You won’t get anywhere fast but you won’t soon forget the experience.




[Photo/video credits: Dave Seminara]

Photo Of The Day: Perched Above Guatemala

by Jonathan Kramer on

A view from a ridiculously good vantage point can forge a lifelong memory. This spot above Lake Atitlan in western Guatemala, shot by Shuo Huang, really sets the standard for others to be compared to. This volcanic lake is what adventures are built around and make weeks on the road, battling loneliness and cramped conditions in cross-country buses completely worth it.

Shuo submitted his photo to us through Instagram by mentioning @GadlingTravel and using the #Gadling tag. If you’d like your exciting travel photography to be featured as our Photo Of The Day, do the same or submit it to our Gadling Flickr Pool. Be sure to check out more of Shuo’s phenomenal photos on Instagram here and don’t forget to give us a follow too!

[Photo credit: Instagram User shuotography]

Meet Pabrö Sanchez, Costa Rica’s Monkey Whisperer

by Dave Seminara on

A good guide can help a traveler interpret the local culture. But sometimes a guide can sanitize and filter your experience by telling and showing you only what they think you want to hear and see. Pabrö Sanchez, a guide I hired through the Florblanca Resort in Costa Rica to take me to the Curu Wildlife Refuge on the Nicoya Peninsula, is not such a person.

Before we’d even arrived at Curu, Pabrö, a 32-year-old anthropologist and archaeology student with roots in both Costa Rica and El Salvador, had given me an earful of his opinions. According to him, Costa Rica’s President, Laura Chinchilla, is the worst in the country’s history. And most of the businesses in town are owned by foreigners who hire other foreigners, most of whom have no legal right to work in the country.

I like a guide who isn’t full of shit, even if I don’t agree with all of their opinions, so I liked Pabrö immediately. But I realized that he was worth his weight in gold just a few minutes into our hike at Curu, a gorgeous, 175-acre, privately owned nature reserve near the Tambor airport, when we came upon a cluster of howler monkeys in a tree. They were unleashing their trademark deep, guttural howls and I asked him if he could imitate them.

“Of course I can,” he said, and proceeded to let out a series of calls that, if you closed your eyes, sounded almost the same as that of the monkeys (see video).

He explained that howlers are vegetarians with big throat cavities, which explains why their howl is so deep and haunting. We talked about how important monkeys were to Costa Rican tourism and the country’s economy and Pabrö said, “Maybe they should be running the government. They’d probably do a better job.”



As we hiked through a dense, tropical forest on a bright sunny day, we had the place nearly to ourselves, and I couldn’t have been happier. Every time we passed a bird or another creature, Pabrö could immediately recognize it. Hoffmann woodpecker. Mangrove black hawk. White-tipped dove. Owl butterfly. Black headed trogon. White tail deer. Jesus Christ lizard. Coati. Mot mot. Great tailed crackle. He knew everything or at least sounded confident enough to fool me.

Pabrö also knew about all the soaring trees we were walking past but lost me trying to explain how his fellow native Meso American peoples had a deep connection to trees and nature.

“Trees are very interested in humans,” he said, before going on to explain that trees signified 13 realities, and one needed to go up a tree in order to experience them all.

“To access reality, you have to use a tree to get there,” he said, as I nodded thoughtfully, fascinated but unsure of exactly what he was talking about.

Pabrö talked a bit about native people in the area and mentioned that there is a tribe that lives near the Amistad National Park in Costa Rica that has no interaction with the outside world and is hostile toward visitors.

“Even I couldn’t go there,” he said. “I would not be welcomed.”

We crossed a rickety bridge over a mangrove swamp and caught a glimpse of Tortuga Island in the distance, as Pabrö plucked some leaves from a pochete tree and insisted that I eat them. They were tart, citrusy and oddly tasty. As we heard more howlers bellowing in the forest, Pabrö said that there were four types of monkeys in Costa Rica: howlers, white faced capuchins, titis (on the Carribean side) and spider monkeys.

“But the spider monkeys are nearly endangered,” he said. “People poach them because think they taste amazing and some farmers believe the monkeys come and steal children at night.”



After a long walk on a deserted beach, we retreated to the car and found Hilberth, our driver, slumbering in a reclined positioned in the car. He was a bit overweight and his tight pair of jeans, weren’t really appropriate for hiking in the heat.

“Come on man, you could use the exercise,” Pabrö teased, goading him into joining us.

The three of us set off towards a mangrove plantation and I asked Hilberth why he didn’t like hiking.

“He’s lazy and also he’s probably embarrassed to be seen walking around with a tourist,” Pabrö said in his typically blunt fashion, answering for him.

Hilberth spotted a coati, and Pabrö could barely contain his excitement.

“He’s a male – look at the size of his balls! Usually they travel in groups but sometimes the alpha males like him will travel alone.”

We walked up to a distinctive Guanacaste tree and Pabrö talked about their significance to this region, which was the last province to join Costa Rica. Pabrö told me about how the Costa Rican army defeated William Walker, a diminutive American white supremacist and “filibuster” or military adventurer, who attempted to conquer Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the hopes of annexing them for the United States in the 1850s. I was struck by the fact that while I knew nothing about this episode in history, it’s probably taught in every school in Central America.

After a few hours hiking at Curu, we repaired to a Costa Rican “soda” or humble canteen and sat on plastic chairs next to a river enjoying a round of cold drinks. After a long talk about politics the conversation turned toward Santa Teresa and how much it’s changed since Pabrö moved there in 2001.

“The place is five times bigger than it was,” he said. “People come here to see nature and virgin beaches. How can we keep that?”

IF YOU GO: If you’d like to hire Pabrö as your guide while in Costa Rica, contact him at Pabro@sapoaadventures.com, 506-8996-9990, Sapoa Adventures on Facebook.

[Photo/video credits: Dave Seminara]

The World According To A Costa Rican Cab Driver

by Dave Seminara on

I would never think of getting in a cab in my hometown of Chicago and asking for a lift to Indianapolis, Iowa City or Milwaukee. But when I’m outside the U.S. without a rental car, I sometimes resort to long-distance taxi rides as a way of getting from point A to point B. On a recent trip to Costa Rica I took a three-hour taxi ride from Heredia, near San Jose, to Manuel Antonio National Park and two more long rides to get from Manuel Antonio to Santa Teresa on the Nicoya Peninsula after failing to find a reasonable car rental.

Costa Rica is blessed with incredible natural beauty. It has 26 national parks with a ridiculous array of wildlife and every type of natural terrain you can imagine, from beaches to volcanoes to mountains and more. But like any country, it has some grubby areas as well and while driving in the outskirts of San Jose, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many homes and businesses had barbed wire fences.

“You can buy drugs really cheap here,” said Mario, my 36-year-old taxi driver, when I asked him what was up with all the barbed wire. “Drug addicts need to feed their habits so they steal and people are afraid.”I was surprised to hear that drugs were cheap because it seemed like everything in Costa Rica was expensive.

“You can get some drugs here for like a dollar,” he said.

“Drugs for a buck, what kind?” I asked.

“Crack,” he said.

I was confused by the cut-rate Costa Rican crack but also a little perplexed as to why there were white horses tied up outside tiny, very humble looking urban homes that seemed to have no real space for animals.

“The people like to take their horses into town and show them off for parades,” Mario said, explaining the phenomenon.

Mario spent a huge amount of time fiddling with his mobile phone and I resisted the urge to ask him to concentrate on the road. Eventually I realized that he was trying to stream Toy Story 3 for my children, who were sitting in the back seat of the minivan. My sons were excited to hear Buzz and Woody at an ear-splitting volume but they couldn’t really see the movie from their vantage point on his little phone and quickly lost interest.

As we barreled southbound on the highway, Mario kept fiddling with his phone until he found a song he liked. Sadly, it turned out to be John Waite’s truly reprehensible, “I Ain’t Missing You (At All).”

And it’s my heart that’s breaking down this long-distance line tonight.
I ain’t missing you at all
Since you’ve been gone away.
I ain’t missing you
No matter what my friends say.

He was humming it and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to its loathsome rhythm and when I noticed that my wife was sleeping and both my boys were entranced in a movie on our Kindle, I decided to nod off myself, hoping to avoid more American power ballads.

I woke up in a town called Jaco to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love (But It’s Over Now).” The earworm stayed in my head for days.

After DJ Mario played Gangnam Style for us, he told me he learned English working as a waiter on cruise ships. It was good money, by Costa Rican standards, but he worked at least 12 hours a day for 9 months at a time with no days off.

“You can’t even really meet girls,” he said as we motored through a stretch of road that was encircled by dense palm oil plants. “But when you get into the ports, well, you have to do something.”

He signed his first contract without telling his wife he was leaving the country, just days before he leaving town. She was annoyed but got over it. But after four years, once he had saved up enough money to buy a house, he decided it was time to move back to Costa Rica.

“I only needed a little big of money,” he said. “I don’t need to get rich.”

As we approached Quepos, the nearest town to Manuel Antonio, we saw derelict men sleeping off hangovers on benches, lobster-shaded gringos walking on the side of the road with next to no clothing on, and a host of signs advertising surf schools, lodges, adventure tours and even a “gentleman’s club.”

“They got a choice of girls,” Mario explained. “Costa Rican, Colombians, and plenty of Nicaraguans.”

Mario said that Costa Ricans are getting a little soft and there are tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans in the country doing the jobs Costa Ricans supposedly don’t want.

I asked him about Laura Chinchilla, the country’s (first) female president.

“She changes her mind too much and she’s not very powerful,” he said. “But at least she’s honest.”

We caught a few tantalizing glimpses of the Pacific, dotted with a few rocky little islands, and as we pulled up in front of our hotel, Mario handed us his business card.

“I’ll come back and drive you anywhere in the country you want to go,” he said. It made no sense to me at all, but I just thanked him. As he drove off, I wondered what his profit margin on our $150 fare was. And I wondered what horrible American power ballads he planned to blast on the way back to San Jose.

[Photo credit: twicepix on Flickr]

Releasing My Inner Gringo In Costa Rica

by Dave Seminara on

I try not to be the stereotypical ugly gringo when I’m in Latin America. I tolerate leisurely or downright rude service, I use my poor but functional Spanish, and I try to go with the flow, bearing in mind that things are just different south of the border. But no matter how hard I try, there are occasions when I can’t help but act like a gringo.

My first, and hopefully last, real gringo moment on a recent trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua came at a ticket office in the Costa Rican port of Puntarenas. I arrived with my wife and two little boys about 15 minutes before our 11 a.m. ferry was due to depart for the Nicoya Peninsula and found a long, slow moving line with just one clerk selling tickets in a little booth behind a window.

I am not the kind of worrywart who shows up three hours early for a domestic flight, but as the line barely moved in the next few minutes, I started to get nervous. It was already well over 90 degrees and if we missed the 11 a.m. ferry, we’d have to wait three hours for the next boat in a dull, sweltering limbo, essentially killing a whole day of our trip.

Even worse, a cab driver was supposed to meet us on the other side to make the 90-minute ride from the ferry port in Paquera to our hotel in Santa Teresa. We had no functioning cellphone and no clue if the driver or anyone else would be there to meet us if we turned up three hours late.

As the clock ticked towards 11 and the ferry blew its horn, apparently warning us that it was getting ready to depart, I had so little personal space in the line that I was pretty sure I knew what the guy behind me had for lunch (I think it was rotten eggs). As we inched forward, ever so slowly, I analyzed each transaction that took place at the window and silently stewed.

Why is this woman just now digging through her purse for money? Did she think the tickets were going to be free? And what about this guy? Why is he asking so many questions? Buy your damn ticket and get out. What’s she doing now? Is she talking on the phone? No! Sell tickets!

At 10:54, there was a woman buying her ticket who seemed to be making small talk with the clerk. It was a good thing her back was turned to me because I think the intensity of my glare in her general direction could have singed her eyebrows. The ticket office was right across the street from the boat, but we had baggage, a stroller and small kids to shepherd on board, and I had no reason to believe the ship wouldn’t depart on time.

I continued to check my watch in 30-second intervals, since there was nothing better to do but worry, as beads of sweat pored down my back. At 10:56, there was only one person in front of me in the line.

But just as the man in front of me was about to proceed to the window, a woman in a uniform came by, stopped him, and made an announcement in Spanish and English. She wanted all the passengers bringing vehicles on the ferry to step forward and form a new line. About half of the thirty or so people behind me stepped forward and the woman announced that all of the passengers with vehicles would get to buy their tickets first.

Instead of being second in line, I was now about 17th and with just four minutes to spare. The woman in uniform offered us no consolation like, “Don’t worry, everyone in line will get tickets.”

I called after her to ask if the ship was going to leave without us, but she ignored me and walked away. A middle-aged American guy, a surfer type, who just vaulted ahead of me in line so he’d be next, said, “Dude, relax, you’ll get your ticket.”

Relax? In what alternate reality could one find waiting in a long line in the sweltering heat under these circumstances relaxing? In an abstract sense, I could understand why they needed people with cars to go first – it takes longer to board with a car than it does on foot. But the vehicle passenger tickets cost almost 20 times as much as foot passenger tickets. Were they using the few remaining minutes to sell the most expensive tickets to maximize profit? The old man in front of me in the passenger line look nonplussed. Perhaps he assumed the boat would depart late? Or did he have nothing better to do than wait for the 2 o’clock ferry?

I said nothing to the American who told me to relax, and waited as a few of the sanctioned line jumpers were serviced. At 10:59, the ship’s horn blasted again and, in a moment of panic and chutzpah, I barged right ahead of a meek looking man in the newly formed line and pleaded for the clerk to sell me a ticket, which she did, despite some grumbling from the people I’d cut in front of (I wanted to say, “You cut me, now I’m cutting you, deal with it,” but I had no time to spare).

We dashed across the street, baggage, children and stroller in tow and by the time I hauled all of our gear up two steep flights of steps onto the first passenger deck, I was drenched in sweat but relieved to be on the damn boat.

We pulled out of the harbor about five minutes late and I looked around to see if the man who was in front of me in the screwed over passenger line had made it, but I found no sign of him. Perhaps everyone in line had somehow secured tickets and made it on board but I doubt it.

As Americans, we carry a lot of baggage when we travel outside the country. I try to be cognizant of the fact that some of the people I encounter will formulate an opinion about my country based on how I act. There are times when you have to swallow your anger and just deal with situations as they unfold, even if it’s to your detriment.

And then there are times when you have to be assertive and follow the rules of the jungle. Perhaps I should have waited stoically and hoped for the best, but if I’d followed that course and had missed the boat, my inner-gringo would have released even more negative vibes on everyone in my vicinity.

What would you have done?

[Photo credits: Dave Seminara]