Tag Archives: Costa Rica Overlanding

Overlanding Costa Rica isn’t cheap. Most of the country is pretty touristy… but there’s a good reason for that. So much to see and do in such a small space. And the wild-life is phenomenal. Searching for the elusive quetzal in the jungle, panning for gold, marvelling at spectacular frogs. And there’s the odd volcano too! Definitely worth a few weeks to look around…

Back to Main Home Page. Back to Central America home page.

Costa Rica – The Pura Vida Thing

Costa Rica’s ubiquitous mantra – Pura Vida (‘pure life’) is on everything here: t-shirts, hats, cuddly toys, hair-clips, flip-flops, wooden turtles, plastic dolphins, pots & pans… you name it, it’s got a bit of ‘pura vida’ scrawled somewhere across it. It works too. The tourists lap it up, so we can’t blame the Ticos for flogging it. But it can give a rather cheesy impression of the country. So far, we’ve toured the south/west of Costa Rica which is just a bit less popular with the ‘pura vida set’ than some other parts of the country. As we head now into a more touristy part of the country, we find some extraordinary wildlife, but still ponder whether this cheesy image of Costa Rica, generated partly by the ‘pura vida thing’, is otherwise justified.
sloth Continue reading →

Costa Rica – Jungle, Wildlife and Beaches

Costa Rica generates mixed reviews from travellers: jungle, wildlife, beaches… but two words crop-up with some regularity: ‘touristy’ and ‘expensive’. Not the most enticing adjectives. But even if it were possible to avoid the country on our way through Central America, which it isn’t, we still wouldn’t want to miss checking it out for ourselves. So here we are… just checking it out…jungle, wildlife, beaches Continue reading →