I couldn’t have spotted that quetzal if it had been wearing a blinking neon sign, because I had no idea what to look for. Same with the three-toed sloth that had been hanging for a couple of days just outside our cabin on an organic farm near San Ramon. Or the tiny blue-jeans frog on the underside of a leaf, the orange-kneed tarantula in a tiny hole, or the baby sea spiders beneath a rock inside a surf-splashed cave on the Golfo de Papagayo.
For a city person, sampling the “pura vida,’’ or natural life, in this strip of Central America between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea is a bit like awakening in a tropical Eden populated with thousands of species of exotic birds, mammals, insects, vegetables, fruits, and flowers. There are coatis and agoutis, fer-de-lances and red-eyed tree snakes, toucans and clay-colored robins, white-faced capuchin monkeys and long-nosed bats, blue morpho butterflies and bullet ants, jewel beetles and the water-walking Jesus Christ lizard.
This lush and hilly country, which is smaller than West Virginia, contains 5 percent of the world’s plant and animal species living in a variety of microclimates. Between Guanacaste and Alajuela provinces in the northwest you can experience several of them within a 90-mile drive. On the western beaches last month, the weather was 90 degrees and breezy by midmorning. A few miles northeast, near the national parks, it was warm and dry. In the rain forest near Lake Arenal, it was cool but humid. And in the cloud forest a few miles to the southeast, it was misty and chilly enough for a windbreaker.
Midwinter is a fine time for some informal ecotouring in Costa Rica; the holiday crush is past and the spring rains haven’t yet arrived. The most convenient place to start is Papagayo, a short drive from the Liberia airport, which is a better option than flying into San José, the crowded and chaotic capital that is a challenging four-hour drive away.
