Costa Rica Through the Lens: 20 Pictures from Paradise

Perillo Tours took 29 travel agents to Costa Rica to showcase its escorted tour program of the country as well as its Learning Journeys program. It was a one-week itinerary that was a slightly shortened version of Perillo’s Nine Days in Costa Rica, and it was spiced with yoga and some of the features of Learning Journeys custom trips.

Here is a selection of some of the snaps I took to help you go where no words have gone before. This was a travel agent familiarization trip, and I was fortunate to be able to travel with a group of bodacious, wild and fun-loving travel agents. They were also very serious professionals and selected by Perillo as good investments for taking on a fam trip. These people, as we say, move a lot of product.

Our first stop after landing at the San Jose airport was the DoubleTree Cariari hotel in a small municipality within the San Jose area. It was a good headquarters hotel, close to the airport, in an urban setting, but not too urban. A lot of open land and rich, colorful vegetation. Strategically located for bringing people into the country and then taking them out again.

The first night we met for an opening dinner, for people to meet each other and celebrate the ceremonial beginning of the trip. We took a ride up a mountainside to a restaurant called Tequicia Restaurant overlooking San Jose, which appeared as a giant collection of lights from that altitude.

The six nights of the trip were divided into three hotels to show three distinct ranges of experience in Costa Rica. The in-and-out hotel was the DoubleTree Carriari. After that it was two nights at Villa Blanca in the cloudforest and two nights at the Parador Hotel on the Pacific Coast at the edge of Manuel Antonio National Park. Villa Blanca is an enchanted place high in the forest where the mountains reach the clouds. There was an energy there that cannot be pinpointed or named but was present and palpable.

Who knows whatever combination of elements combine to create the feeling it evokes to experience such a place? The exquisite mountain forest scenery, the misty clouds, the vigorousness of nature shown in the animals and plants that thrive there, the altitude, the atmospheric electrical charges, the tendency for certain kinds of energies to gather at mountain peaks, the humidity, the proximity to volcanic activity in Costa Rica, the creativity and aesthetic beauty expressed by nature, the narrowness of the isthmus there dividing the Pacific from the Caribbean and connecting the giant land masses of North and South America – all these things and innumerable others all converge at this magical little place.

We can’t know the all the sources of what we feel there, but we can feel it and experience it. I venture to say it would be nearly impossible to resist its influence. At Villa Blanca, they do not try to keep all of nature outside of the resort. This garden is in an indoor sitting area in the main lodge.

On our first day waking up at Villa Blanca, we took a drive toward Arenal Volcano to go ziplining almost in the shadow of the giant peak of Arenal. We drove a couple of hours to get there. We saw it emerge on the landscape, grow larger and larger as we got nearer, then we drove around it to the other side where Sky Adventures, the zipline operator, is located.

The volcano loomed overhead powerfully as we rode on pulleys running down cables between platforms mounted in the forest canopy. What a sight Arenal was! And Arenal Lake below, too, was a giant, overwhelming sight, though it was “manmade” in the sense that the water was dammed after the 1968 eruption of Arenal after a few hundred years of people assuming it was dead. Dormant, yes. Dead!? Very much alive.

On Perillo’s brochure itinerary, guests stay three nights instead of two at Villa Blanca, and that’s great because we needed more time to just take in the basics on the property. Much of what is amazing about Villa Blanca is not what hits you square on, as powerful as that experience is.

It’s what owner Jim Damalas says is “behind the curtain.” The operation of Villa Blanca mirrors the owner’s aspiration to preserve and protect the wilderness. With all of its many environmental protection initiatives, the resort has achieved essentially a carbon-neutral presence in the cloudforest. It is not hurting its environment in the ways that human habitations usually do.

The cloudforest itself is impossible to capture in words or with any camera I have access to. It’s irresistible to try to capture good photographic images, but remember, they convey about 1 iota of what it’s like to actually stand there taking it all in three or more dimensions, the original surround sound, the tactile sensations on your skin, of your breathing ...

The vigorousness of nature in Costa Rica is really something to experience. It’s so great to be able to look up and see a big bunch of bananas in a tree. Costa Rica is said to have more biodiversity, more different species of plants and animals than the entire continental United States.

And it’s a tiny country the size of West Virginia. We saw monkeys, sloths, crocodiles, caiman, parrots, raccoons, big butterflies and tiny hummingbirds. Nature’s display in Costa Rica is dazzling. Most of the best wildlife eluded my camera. And some of the best scenes also. I didn’t take my camera ziplining. Sometimes you are too busy to stop and take a photo.

At a coffee farm we got to see what coffee looks like as fruit on the vine.

At a family farm where we stopped for lunch, we saw a demonstration of traditional Costa Rican dance. This was one of the dancers.

Our driver, Juan Carlos, had a sharp eye for spotting wildlife while he was driving, and he spotted these scarlet mackaws, maybe 20 of them congregating in a tree. These birds are unbelievably bright and beautiful. This was taken near Manuel Antonio National Park near the Pacific coast.

Our tour director was Héctor Castillo Alonso, the man of responsabilidad última, where the buck stops. When you depend on one person for so much, to make sure you get where you are trying to go in a foreign country, it’s great to have a totally solid ally. Bravo Héctor!

This is about as close as I wish to get to a crocodile. These were not totally in the wild, though we saw some that were. These were in Manuel Antonio Nature Reserve, which is next to the national park. These are not fenced in, but they are restricted in terms of where they can go, i.e. they are prevented from eating you. This one may have been fantasizing about just that in this photo.

When we left Villa Blanca and headed from the cloudforest to the Pacific Coast our headquarters was the Parador Hotel. The blue on top is the sky; in the middle it’s the Pacific, and in the foreground it’s Parador’s pool.

This is a view inside the Parador’s inner courtyard. The balcony of the room I stayed in is actually on the upper right of this photo.

This is a view from Si, Como No, a resort near the Parador. As the photo shows, the resorts can’t build right on the Oceanside. That area is protected. So you walk through a forested area to get from the resort to the beach.

Near the entrance to Manuel Antonio National Park was this funky little beach. Sweet!

At Santa Juana, we went to a remote mountain setting with a wonderful swimming hole with waterfall. After swimming and jumping from the cliff into the water, we were offered a chance to participate in a yoga class conducted by Carol Dimopoulos, president of Learning Journeys Powered by Perillo, overlooking the misty, splashing rapids of the stream just below platform where we sat. I could not imagine a better setting for yoga, meditation, relaxing, reading, or just enjoying the dynamic splendor of nature.

Bye Bye Costa Rica. Vaya con Dios hasta la vista.