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I Said I’d Never Join a Group Tour, but…
Discovering my ‘off switch’ in Costa Rica
I closed the guidebook to Costa Rica, stumped. I always enjoy planning a trip, opening maps and books across the floor, sketching routes. So why couldn’t I get started on a 24-day trip around Costa Rica?
It’s not as if my partner and I weren’t keen to go. Countless friends referred to Costa Rica as their favourite country, citing friendly people and a vast range of wildlife.
For me it went back to a well-thumbed copy of The Old Patagonian Express by travel writer Paul Theroux. His account of travelling from Massachusetts to Patagonia had enough dark alleys and squalid hotels to put me off retracing any of his steps, except for Costa Rica, which inspired his subsequent novel The Mosquito Coast.
‘How do you like Costa Rica?’
I told him that I thought it was a beautiful country… The mountains, I said … I told him I thought the people in Costa Rica were extremely pleasant … It was a green country, I said.
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (1979).
I was excited to be heading there, but different zones and so many national parks made it hard to select a focus. It didn’t help that friends said we’d need to use guides, else we ‘wouldn’t see the wildlife’.
