Costa Rica: pura vida, jungle and volcanoes

There's a phrase you hear in Costa Rica before you've even dropped your bag: pura vida. Pure life. It's a greeting, a goodbye, a way of saying « all good », a shrug, a smile. By my third day I'd stopped translating it and started living it — slower, barefoot, with mud on my ankles and absolutely no idea what time it was.

I came alone, the way I usually travel, with a loose plan held together by bus times and the kindness of strangers. The country fits a backpacker's logic: small enough to cross in a long day, wild enough that you never quite feel you've seen it all. From San José I pointed myself north, toward a volcano I'd been daydreaming about for months.

Arenal, the volcano that watches you

Arenal is the kind of shape a child draws when you say « volcano » — a near-perfect cone, often wearing a hat of cloud. I based myself in La Fortuna, the little town at its feet, where every café terrace seems angled toward the summit like sunflowers. I hiked old lava trails through reforested slopes, soaked in hot springs fed by the mountain, and one evening simply sat still while the clouds peeled back to reveal the whole thing, green and enormous and quiet.

In town, connectivity was honestly fine — I messaged a hostel up north to hold a bed, uploaded a few photos, checked the next bus. The thing about Costa Rica is that the towns are well covered, and then you walk twenty minutes into the forest and the bars on your phone melt away. I learned fast: do the online things in town, then let the jungle have you.

Monteverde, walking inside a cloud

Getting to Monteverde is half the story — a bumpy ride up into the mountains that locals call, with a grin, the « jeep-boat-jeep ». And then you arrive somewhere that feels invented: a cloud forest, where the mist doesn't sit above the trees, it moves through them. I walked suspended bridges level with the canopy, water dripping off every leaf, the whole forest breathing around me.

This is where the sloths and the toucans live, though « live » undersells how hidden they are. I'd have walked straight past my first sloth if a guide hadn't stopped, pointed at what looked like a clump of moss thirty metres up, and waited. It moved one arm. I gasped like I'd seen a comet. Up here the signal is thin to nonexistent, and that's exactly right — you don't want a notification buzzing while a toucan is deciding whether to show you its profile.

« The forest doesn't perform for you. It rewards you for being patient enough to notice. »

Back at the lodge that night, with a bar of signal recovered, I sent my sister a blurry photo of the sloth and a message that just said « I cried a little ». She understood. Some moments you can't stream live, so you carry them down the mountain and share them when the world reconnects.

Two coasts, two moods

Costa Rica has the rare luck of touching two oceans, and they feel like different countries. On the Pacific side I learned — badly, joyfully — to surf, swallowing my share of saltwater on the beach breaks near the Nicoya coast, cheered on by strangers who became dinner companions by sunset. The Pacific is golden, sociable, a little showy with its sunsets.

The Caribbean side, over near Puerto Viejo, is another rhythm entirely — reggae drifting from open doors, coconut in the cooking, calmer days, darker sand in places. I rented a bicycle and pedalled between beaches with no plan at all, stopping wherever the water looked best. Mobile coverage held up reasonably well along both coasts in and near the towns; it's the long green stretches between them where you should expect to go dark, and plan accordingly.

What I take away

Costa Rica taught me that being unreachable isn't a loss — it's the whole point of going somewhere this alive. I kept just enough connection to book the next bed, find the next bus, and tell the people I love when something cracked my heart open. The rest of the time, I let the signal go and let the forest fill the silence. Pura vida turned out to be less a phrase than an instruction. I'm still following it.

— Inès, somewhere between a volcano and the sea.