Costa Rica in June. Pouring rain. My friend Jaci and I, twenty-something and broke-ish, three checked bags between us and a Google Doc of color-coded plans we were already losing track of.
This was 2016. Back when I still thought “jungle adventure” meant something I’d seen in a movie.
We’d flown LA ? Liberia for $280 round-trip, which felt like a heist. We booked hostels and Airbnbs because the budget didn’t stretch to anything else, and also because, honestly, neither of us wanted to be the kind of traveler who flies somewhere green and stays in a hotel. Five days, four nights. No real plan beyond a list of national parks and a lot of optimism.
The trip at a glance — June 2016 · 5 days, 4 nights · LA ? Liberia · $280 round-trip · Hostels + Airbnbs · Travel companion: Jaci
Customs took ten minutes. Then a downpour started before we made it out of the parking lot. Our pre-arranged ride was a small van and a driver who didn’t speak much English, and the road to the hostel was — let me check the technical term — a mud trough. Empty stomach, growing carsickness, and Jaci somehow doing crossword puzzles in her lap like nothing was happening. Some people are just built different.
We asked the driver where to eat. He turned around at the next intersection and dropped us at a roadside market with hot food. I ordered a Casado: rice, black beans, plantains, salad, a tortilla, and beef. Five US dollars, Coke included. It was the best meal of the trip. I’m not even kidding — five days of restaurants and tour-package food, and the $5 plate by the side of the road was the one I’d order again.
Our hostel was tucked deep into a cloud forest. Bunk beds with mosquito nets that made the whole room look like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. Outside the window, every shade of green I’d ever seen plus about twelve I hadn’t. The wifi was bad. The water pressure was worse. I loved it.
Day 1 — Ziplines, cloud forest, and a small panic at the top
First morning. Selvatura Park, Diamond Package — translation: zip lines, treetop walkways, butterfly garden, plus a couple of hours of wait, I have to step off the platform from how high?
Monteverde is a cloud forest, which sounds poetic until you realize it means you are literally inside the clouds. Visibility goes from 100 meters to 5 in the time it takes you to clip into a harness. You step off the platform, you can’t see the next one, and you just have to trust that physics still applies up there.
About five hours of canopy and walkways. Comfortable shoes, rain gear, binoculars if you’ve got ’em. Lunch after at El Jardín — the kind of restaurant where you don’t remember the menu but you remember exactly how good the iced coffee was. Highly recommend.
Day 2 — Floating in a thermal pool with a volcano in the background
A scenic ferry across Laguna de Arenal in the morning. Volcano Lodge for the afternoon. There’s a thermal pool there, and you can float on your back in warm water with Volcán Arenal looming in the distance, and it rains, and you don’t care because the water’s hot.
Look, I’ll be honest. I wasn’t even thirty yet when I took this trip. I was a different person — pre-marriage, pre-mortgage, pre-everything. I didn’t know yet that “floating in a hot pool while it rains and a volcano watches” was a thing I’d want to do every year for the rest of my life. I figured this was just a Tuesday in Costa Rica.
Reader, it was not just a Tuesday. Build a trip around this if you can.
Day 3 — Termites taste like lemons (for real)
Day three was supposed to be the up-close volcano hike at Arenal Volcano National Park. The volcano had other ideas — it was venting more than usual and the rangers kept us back. Fine. We improvised.
Our guide cracked open a piece of a ceiba branch, scooped out a finger of live termites, and ate them. Then he held some out to us. Look. I don’t know what I expected. I knew on some level that bugs were edible. But knowing it and putting it in your mouth are different journeys.
They taste like lemons. Like, exactly like lemons. The kind of citrus burst you’d get from squeezing a lime over a taco. I have not stopped telling this story.
Lunch at Restaurante Rana Roja afterward. Then Baldi Hot Springs, which is best described as “thermal water park for adults.” Multiple pools at multiple temperatures, a couple of swim-up bars, the kind of place where you go in for two hours and come out four hours later. We made it to Bahía Coco that night feeling like we’d lived three days in one.
Day 4 — Coastal pivot
Day four was the pivot — out of the rainforest, over to the Pacific coast. We stopped in Tilarán at Café Macadamia (decent coffee, great views, weird vibes — go for the patio), pressed on to Bahía Coco, dropped our bags at an Airbnb, and went to find the beach.
Bahía Coco is a small coastal town with a tianguis-style market in the center — the kind of place where the same family probably runs the food stand, the surf rental, and the beachside bar. We grabbed jet skis at the local dock (neither of us had any business operating one but the rental guy didn’t ask) and spent the afternoon laughing on the water.
Dinner at Hard Rock Guanacaste, which I picked because I was tired of guessing menus. It was fine. Don’t judge me.
Day 5 — The drive back
Liberia Airport at sunrise. Quiet drive. Everything I’d packed was now half-wet from rainforest air. Jaci was already half-asleep in the passenger seat. I remember thinking: I have to come back here. I haven’t yet — life is what it is — but I still mean it.
Costa Rica was the first trip where I realized travel didn’t have to be expensive to be life-changing. $280 plane ticket. $5 lunches. A hostel deep enough in the jungle that the wifi gave up. And it remains, almost a decade later, one of the best weeks of my life.
More from this trip — photos in the Costa Rica camera roll ?
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