Mike in the Wild

I had thought that Manuel Antonio National Park only allowed six hundred visitors to enter daily. While eating an early breakfast on my hotel restaurant's patio in Quepos, I could see a line of people waiting to enter through the park's gate shortly after the seven o'clock opening time.  I queued for almost ten minutes when I was admitted closer to nine o'clock, the time I had reserved two weeks before through the preserve's on-line ticketing portal.  Crowds were a new phenomenon during my mid-winter Costa Rica trip.  Why was Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica's smallest national park, also its busiest?   In Arenal Volcano National Park, I had stayed at the only hotel situated immediately in the park.  My impression was the hotel wasn't full and even day visitors were scarce.  When I visited Monteverde Cloud Forest on the next leg of my trip, a lot of people were entering the park at 11:30 a.m. when I joined my guided tour.  But there wasn't any wait to p...

I wanted to think I had arrived in an Eden, an unspoiled wilderness, untouched by the hand of man or by any other unworthy fate.  Wasn't that what Costa Rica promised me in the firsthand accounts of all my friends' trips there?  Of course they rattled on about the ziplining, the whitewater rafting, the surfing, and the biking, all things not interesting to me.  But I was hearing something else in these stories: the forests, the waterfalls, the nature trails, and the extraordinary wildlife.  Indeed I soon discovered my bucket list awaiting me in Arenal National Park.  But my experience there also taught me that the reality of Costa Rica's natural history owed a lot to acts of God, and often to human drama. The first hotel I booked on my Costa Rica trip was the Arenal Observatory Lodge.  Unlike on my trip's four other legs, the demand was so high that I needed a reservation six months in advance.  The hotel billed itself as the only one within Arenal Vol...

After witnessing six new hummingbirds in the course of just a few minutes, I would have normally been happy to call it a good birding day and gone home.  But I wasn't just anywhere; I was near the entrance to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve in Costa Rica, at a shop that hung several sugar water feeders on its patio.  Violet sabrewings, green-crowned brilliants, and lesser violetears were among the scintillating birds competing for dominance at the hanging stations.  The misty rain didn't deter any of us awed tourists from snapping photos and risking ruining our cameras.  However I was actually visiting this park in search of a completely different bird, the resplendent quetzal.  It wasn't surprising that the variety and sheer numbers of wildlife I was finding in Costa Rica after barely four days in the country was mind-blowing.  Over the two previous days in Arenal National Park, I had counted close to forty species of birds alone.  In ...

Eight nights in Costa Rica didn't sound like a lot.  Neither did the five different hotels and many locations I'd be visiting.  The distances between these places didn't sound like much either: only one hundred kilometers from Arenal Volcano to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, two consecutive highlights.  Sixty miles wouldn't take long, right?  Well that's when the math started defying my North American logic.   The ride took over three hours, not counting a stop for lunch.  First I had to drive around Lake Arenal, the body of water whose hydroelectric dam provides Costa Rica with twelve percent of its electricity. (Passing below towering wind turbines reminded me that ninety-nine percent of the country's total electrical energy is generated by renewable sources.)  But then the pavement started disappearing from the roads along the last thirty-five kilometers or so.   Initially it looked like there was a resurfacing project underway, but the...

I've written quite a bit about my snorkel adventures in Cabo San Lucas.  Even beating out whale watching and beachcombing, snorkeling is indeed my favorite activity in this resort city at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula.  As a cruise passenger, the easiest site to visit for underwater exploration may be Pelican Rock, a fast ride in a water taxi from the municipal dock.  I even wondered if it might be Cabo's best snorkeling spot when I wrote about it just over two years ago. (See  Pelican Rock .)  But I was recently reminded on a November cruise that there are two additional sites that are also both excellent for snorkeling and almost as easy to reach: Chileno Bay and Santa Maria Bay. I've actually visited those beaches before, on excursions while on other cruises.  Cruise lines sell tours that sail vacationers from Cabo's harbor to both bays in the Sea of Cortez.  Usually from a catamaran, I've snorkeled in the pristine water shelteri...