Caribbean Coast & Arenal: Tortuguero, Puerto Viejo & La Fortuna

Private pick-up in San José or at the airport (SJO) and three hours across the Central Valley and down through Braulio Carrillo to the La Pavona dock, with a breakfast stop on the way. From there it is an hour to an hour and a half by boat along the canals — the first sloths and caimans usually appear before you reach the lodge. Afternoon walk through the village and along the black-sand beach, which is beautiful and unswimmable: the currents here are serious. Tortuguero lodges are full board, so lunch and dinner are at the lodge.

Out at six in a canoe, while the canals are still glass: no engine, just a paddle and a naturalist guide, which is the only way into the narrowest channels and the reason you see so much. Back for breakfast, then a guided walk on the national park trail behind the beach, or the short climb up Cerro Tortuguero for the view over canals, forest and sea. After dinner, from July to October, a licensed guide takes a small group onto the beach to watch a green turtle nest — no lights, no phones, a lot of waiting and then something you will not forget. Outside nesting season the evening is a guided night walk instead.

Boat back out through the canals and a private van south along the coast, through Limón and down Route 36 to Puerto Viejo — five to six hours door to door with a lunch stop, and the one long travel day on this side of the country. The mood changes as soon as you arrive: bicycles instead of cars, reggae and calypso from the sodas, and the forest coming right down to the beach. Check in and walk into town for dinner.

Cahuita is a national park you walk along the sand: a flat trail between the forest and a reef-sheltered beach, where the guide spends as much time pointing up — sloths, howler monkeys, toucans — as ahead. It is one of the easiest and most rewarding walks in the country. Lunch afterwards is Afro-Caribbean home cooking in Cahuita village: rice and beans in coconut milk, rondón if it is on, and patí to take away. The afternoon is free on Playa Negra.

In the morning, a Bribri family in the Talamanca foothills shows you how cacao is grown, fermented, roasted and ground by hand — and what it has meant to the Bribri for centuries — before you drink it. Lunch is with them. In the afternoon, a guided visit to the Jaguar Rescue Center at Playa Chiquita, which takes in injured and orphaned sloths, monkeys and birds and returns as many as it can to the wild. Visits are by guided tour only, and we book the time for you.

A free day. The lodge lends bicycles, and the thirteen-kilometre road south from Puerto Viejo runs past Cocles, Playa Chiquita and Punta Uva to Manzanillo — pick a beach and stop. Punta Uva is the calmest water on the coast. If you want a guide, the Gandoca-Manzanillo refuge at the end of the road has a forest trail over the headland to a lookout, and we can arrange it the day before.

The longest drive of the trip, and the reason we send a private van for it: about six hours, back up the coast and west through the northern lowlands, with a lunch stop in Sarapiquí. You arrive in La Fortuna in the late afternoon with Arenal Volcano in front of the windscreen, and the day ends where it should after that much road — in hot water heated by the volcano.

Morning on Arenal Volcano with one of our guides: the trail across the lava fields to a lookout between the cone and Lake Arenal, with the forest that has grown back since the eruptions. In the afternoon, La Fortuna Waterfall — seventy metres into a green pool, down about five hundred steps; swim at the bottom if you want to. Evening free in town, or back in the hot springs.

The Arenal hanging bridges in the morning: a loop through primary forest where the bridges put you level with the canopy — toucans, monkeys, orchids — and the volcano appears between the trees. The afternoon is yours. We finish with a farewell dinner in La Fortuna, and after the Caribbean the hot springs are the one thing nobody wants to skip twice.

Private transfer to San José airport, about three hours, or to Liberia (LIR) if your flight leaves from there. We schedule the pick-up around your flight, not the other way round.