Costa Rica has a strange way of humbling you while simultaneously trying to kill you with humidity.
The air here does not gently surround you. It aggressively introduces itself. Within ten minutes of arriving, you are no longer "a person on vacation." You are essentially soup with luggage. Every shirt becomes a damp confession. Every breath feels like inhaling a greenhouse. And somehow, despite all of it, you stop caring within an hour, because the jungle is too loud and too alive to argue with.
This was three days of it. Three days of mud, monkeys, salt water, and a country that refuses to let you stay a spectator. Somewhere between rappelling down waterfalls, hanging from zip lines over the jungle canopy with my cousin Laurie, and driving muddy ATVs through terrain that looked better suited for Jurassic Park than tourism, I realized this trip was less of a vacation and more of a full-contact conversation with nature.
And nature talks back here. Loudly.
Day one belonged to Ocean Ranch Adventure Park, which felt like nature's version of a trust exercise designed by someone with unresolved anger issues.
Laurie and I spent the first half of the day flying through jungle ATV trails while mud launched at us from every possible direction. At one point I stopped trying to stay clean and simply accepted that the rainforest had claimed me as one of its own. The trails twisted through dense jungle, across streams, and through terrain rough enough to make every rental car in America file a restraining order. By the time we stopped, the mud on my arms had its own zip code.
Then came waterfall rappelling.
There is absolutely nothing instinctively comfortable about stepping backward off a cliff attached to a rope while water crashes beside you. The calls of the jungle, the rushing waterfalls, and the echoing canyon walls are enough to drown out rational thought. Every survival mechanism in the human body immediately objects. Yet somehow, once you lean back and commit, fear turns into focus and pure enjoyment. The water hammered my shoulders, the rope held, and for a few seconds I forgot every email I had ever sent.
Then we zip-lined over the rainforest canopy, which feels exhilarating right up until your brain briefly remembers you are suspended over the jungle by cables and optimism. Any hesitation disappeared quickly once the wind started cutting through the jungle's thick humid air. Laurie and I alternated between laughter and the kind of screaming usually associated with tax audits or near-death amusement park rides.
Oddly enough, it was therapeutic.
Driving back up the coast through Jacó, I watched the sky do something I don't have a clean word for. The clouds over the Pacific lit up from inside — gold, ember, and bruised purple all at once — and the wet sand below mirrored the whole thing back like it had been waiting all day for the assignment. It was the kind of weather that preaches without opening its mouth. I just stood there for a minute and let it talk.
We finished that first day at Hermosa Beach. And of everything that first day held, Hermosa Beach may have hit hardest.
Not because it was dramatic. Quite the opposite. It felt honest. Quiet. Uninterested in impressing anyone.
There is something unsettling about watching the ocean erase your footprints almost as quickly as you make them. Every wave reached forward and quietly removed proof you had ever been there at all.
It forces a question most people spend their lives avoiding:
Are we meant to obsess over what we leave behind, or simply keep walking forward while we are here?
Oddly, I did not find the answer depressing.
I found it freeing.
Maybe life was never about desperately preserving every mark we leave in the sand. Maybe meaning comes from the walking itself. From the moments shared, the conversations had, the risks taken, the people beside us, and the absurd experiences that somehow become the stories we carry afterward.
Day two began at Manuel Antonio National Park.
Heart Above Jacó
Storm veins burn across the sea, Waves strike hard below the glow. A heart ignites inside the spree, Salt winds rake the coast of Jacó.
Read the full poem →Some places collapse under unrealistic expectations. Manuel Antonio somehow exceeds them. Sloths suspended in trees. Monkeys everywhere. Rainforest spilling directly into pale Pacific shoreline like nature showing off without restraint.
Yet the thing I remember most was not the scenery.
It was the feeling.
The strange stillness that settles over you when ocean meets rainforest and both seem completely indifferent to your deadlines, stress, inbox, notifications, or self-importance. Standing there, surrounded by waves and jungle sounds, I found it painfully obvious how much noise people carry around unnecessarily. We import so much weight into places that were never asking us to bring it.
The sloths may actually understand life better than the rest of us.
After the park, Jesse decided to harness his fear, embrace courage, and join us for the Mangrove Monkey Boat Tour — which may have been one of the strangest combinations of serenity and chaos I have ever experienced.
The whole tour threads a quiet canal, and for long stretches the jungle on either side gives way to a palm plantation — rank after orderly rank of palm trees standing at attention, a working farm pretending to be scenery. Everything there felt still, almost suspended in time, like the place itself had lowered its voice.
Then the canal remembered it was alive. We drifted under a low bridge where bats hung in rows from the underside, folded up and resting, completely unbothered by the boat sliding beneath them. Monkeys sprinted across tree limbs overhead before casually dropping onto the canopy above us as if we were interrupting an important staff meeting. Iguanas sunned themselves on branches like they paid rent there. A snake threaded itself along a limb without any apparent hurry. Birds — many, many birds, more than I had names for — argued and announced and showed off the entire way down, as the canal slowly widened and finally bled out into the open ocean.
I do believe Jesse was reassessing his newfound courage while monkeys danced above his head. Had the river been crocodile-free, I suspect he may have considered abandoning ship entirely.
Several monkeys sat there staring directly at us with expressions that somehow communicated judgment.
I have never felt so personally reviewed by wildlife.
Day three belonged to Nauyaca Waterfall Nature Park. And, as it turned out, to Sarita.
We met her twice, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a stranger. The first time, we didn't really meet her at all. We were leaving Nauyaca Waterfall Nature Park on the trolley — a generous word for a truck wearing a canopy and a row of cushioned seats — when I spotted a young blonde woman walking the road alone. I nearly hollered at her to hurry up and grab on, hitch a ride, the kind of joke you make and immediately forget.
Then we pulled out in the car, and there she was again. Same woman, thumb out, looking for a ride back to wherever she was staying. A Swiss hitchhiker named Sarita, appearing twice in one afternoon like the rainforest had filed the paperwork.
We did our due diligence. Only after she admitted, under mild interrogation, that she did not in fact possess the ability to render any of us unconscious with two fingers did we decide she was safe enough — and we gladly offered her a ride up the mountain.
But once we heard where she was staying, the plan quietly expanded, the way the good ones do. We suggested the Whale Tail instead, and dropped her at the beach parking lot, from which she walked the last mile home on foot — the way she had apparently planned to travel the whole day anyway.
After she had gone, I walked that beach myself, at Marino Ballena National Park, and timed it badly. At low tide the water pulls back to reveal a marvelous formation of rock and sand shaped exactly like a whale's tail — the whole reason the place has a name. I missed it by the kind of margin the tide does not negotiate; it was already coming back in, quietly folding the tail under itself. I could have waded out onto what was still showing, but Laurie was waiting in the shade, and it did not seem worth making her wait so I could stand on something the ocean was already taking back. Some sights you are allowed to simply miss.
Costa Rica does not really answer questions.
It just hands you better ones.
And apparently monkeys.
Yours, in ink and embers,
