The drives, in writing

Costa Rica is smaller than West Virginia

Which is exactly the problem. Every traveler looks at the map, sees a country you could drive across in an afternoon, and plans accordingly. Then they get here. The airport to La Fortuna is 125 kilometers and it takes three to three and a half hours — about forty kilometers an hour, and it isn’t traffic. It’s mountains, switchbacks, and a truck in front of you doing thirty. Almost every Costa Rica trip that goes wrong goes wrong right here, and it’s never bad luck: it’s that nobody said the number out loud before it was too late to plan around.

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.

Private van or shared shuttle?

Both are transfers, both are included, and what changes is the shape of the day: whether you leave when you’re ready and go door to door, or fit into a departure window somebody else set. The money runs the way you’d expect — a shuttle charges per seat, a van charges for the van — so the more of you there are, the sooner private wins. On the airport run it flips at about four travelers.

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.

Why nothing is scheduled on a travel day

Because the day you move is the day something slips. Weather on the lake, a slow truck on the mountain, a family that needs twenty minutes and a bathroom. An itinerary with a guided walk booked for four in the afternoon on a travel day isn’t a fuller trip — it’s a trip with a tripwire in it, and you’re the one who trips. So on the two days you move, moving is the plan.

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.