Getting around
Two drives, one boat, nine days
Nobody tells you this part until you’re already in the van. So we’ll tell you first.
The map lies
Costa Rica is smaller than West Virginia, so every traveler looks at it and plans a country you could cross in an afternoon. Then they land, and the run from the airport to the volcano takes three and a half hours to cover 125 kilometers, and the arrival day they pictured as a swim and a sunset turns into a windshield.
Ask what goes wrong on Costa Rica trips and the answer isn’t the guides and isn’t the rain. It’s the driving, every time, and it’s always a number nobody handed over in advance. So we hand it over first: every drive on your route, in writing, before you pay. On this one there are only two worth the name — and one of them isn’t a drive at all.
The one you’ll photograph
There is a boat in the middle of your trip
On day five, the leg from the volcano to the cloud forest is the one most itineraries treat as three and a half hours to be endured. Ours isn’t. A short van ride down to the water, a boat straight across Lake Arenal with the volcano standing behind you, and a climb up the far side into the cloud.
Breakfast at the foot of a volcano, lunch inside a cloud, and in between you watch the country change from the middle of a lake. It’s the only leg of this trip that ends up in the photo album.
Weather is the one thing nobody here controls, so we wrote down in advance what happens when it wins. There’s a land route, you still sleep in the cloud forest that night, and you are not the one making phone calls about it. That’s if you let us drive. You don’t have to.
Three ways to travel it
You don’t have to be driven everywhere
Let us drive
Transfers both ways from the airport and between all three regions, inside one price. You never touch a wheel, and the lake crossing happens the good way.
Drive it yourself
Collect the car at the volcano and leave it at the airport at the end, in a different city. Total independence — and you trade the boat for the long road around the lake.
Do both
Transfers and the boat for the first half, then a car from the cloud forest down to the coast. You keep the best hour of the route and get the freedom where it actually counts.
Private van or shared shuttle?
Whichever of the three you choose, the next question is the same one: who else is in the van?
Both kinds are included, and which one you want depends on how many of you there are. A shuttle sells seats; a van sells the whole vehicle. So the bigger your group, the sooner the private one stops costing more — and it tips at a different number on every leg, which is why nobody should sell you one rule for the whole trip. The airport guide does that arithmetic in full.
For scale: bought on their own, the four transfers that carry you in from the airport, across the lake, down to the coast and back start at about $238 a person. On our trips they’re not a line you settle separately — they’re inside the price, along with your stay, your guides and every activity. There are three things we can’t do for you, though, and you should hear them now rather than later.
What we won’t pretend
Our trips are built around San José. If Liberia is on your shortlist, say so before the flights are booked rather than after, and we’ll be straight with you about what it changes.
There is a small domestic flight that turns that three-hour drive into half an hour. It isn’t ours to sell, so if you want it, raise it early and we’ll go and find out for you.
And if your flight home leaves before early afternoon, the run back to the airport starts in the dark. We’ll say so while you can still change the flight, which is the only time that information is worth anything. Everything else is already written down. Here is where.
Read before you book
The three guides that answer the rest
Travel Guide
The drives, in writing
Every transfer on the route with honest times — and how to check any drive time in this country yourself, including the ones we don´t sell.
Travel Guide
Getting to La Fortuna from SJO
Four ways in from the airport, what each one really costs you in time and patience, and the group size where the answer flips.
Travel Guide
Do you need a rental car?
An honest answer, including the trips where we´d tell you to rent — and the insurance surprise that catches almost everyone at the counter.
Tell us your flights and we’ll map the whole thing
Send your dates and arrival time. Marco will walk you through every drive on your route and which way of traveling it suits the people you’re traveling with.
Worth timing: December through April is when this route fills, and flights get booked long before anyone thinks about the driving. If those are your dates, this conversation is worth having now rather than after the tickets stop being refundable.