How to see Costa Rica’s true colours

If you’re going to visit Costa Rica, my advice is to steer clear of all the stuff that looks most exciting in the brochure: the zip-wires, the thermal springs and the white-water rafting. I’m not saying you won’t enjoy it. Nor realistically – especially if you’ve kids in tow – are you likely to be able to avoid it. Just be aware, though, that the best bits, as always, are the ones most tourists don’t see. Corcovado National Park in the remote south-west, for example.

Well, I say ‘remote’. But actually, oddly enough for a country swathed in rainforest, hardly anywhere is truly inaccessible because of the remarkably good roads and the even more impressive local airline. There are reasonably priced, regular flights in not-scary propeller-driven aircraft from the pleasant but dull capital San Jose to all corners of the country: the palm-fringed, turtle-teeming beaches of the Caribbean coast; the cool surf hangouts on the Pacific coast; the gorgeously lush bit in the middle which takes you up to the Cloud Forest and the Arenal volcano; and – my particular recommendation – the much more rarely visited Osa Peninsula near the southern border with Panama.

We stayed at an idyll called Kunken Lodge, sleeping in comfortable chalets overlooking a private beach, fringed with palms bustling at dawn and dusk with the scarlet macaws you only get to see in this part of the country. They sound like strangled cats but they look so impossibly paradisiacal it’s hard to believe that such creatures actually exist away from pet shops and pirates’ shoulders. The sea is brownish but deliciously lukewarm and probably safe to swim in because the bull sharks and crocodiles don’t come to this part of Golfo Dulce. At least you hope…

Definitely take the hotel’s jet-ski excursion into the further reaches of the gulf, where you’re pretty much guaranteed to see huge schools of dolphins arcing and diving in your bow wave. You might spot the odd tourist group having the same experience in more crowded, less agile boats and you’ll feel unbearably smug.

Another key thing to do when you’re down here is to get in your sloth experience. Everyone who comes to Costa Rica wants to see a sloth (which most mistakenly pronounce to rhyme with ‘moth’: no, that’s American. The correct way is to rhyme it with ‘oath’), both the two-toed and three-toed kinds. You may kid yourself that you’ll spot them all on your own, without needing to book a tour, but you won’t because they look like barely visible greenish-grey blobs high up in trees: you need the trained eye of a guide like the one in the nearby sanctuary, a delightful family-run business, where the boss won brownie points by helping us spot a rare Agami heron.

Obviously if you’re not a birder, that species will mean nothing to you. Nor will you be remotely impressed by my having seen a resplendent quetzal in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, nor by the sun bittern (not to mention the montezuma oropendola, sundry varieties of toucan, tanager, motmot, trogon, parrots and parakeets) at the absolute must-visit birdwatching hotel The Observatory in the forest next to the volcano up at Arenal. But trust me, if you aren’t an ornithological obsessive when you arrive in Costa Rica you will be by the end, so you may as well surrender pre-emptively and stock up on bird books and binoculars before you go.

The nature of the rainforest – lots of foliage, dim light – means it’s often quite hard to see all that teeming biodiversity. But sometimes you get lucky, as we did in Corcovado, after an arduous five-hour pre-dawn journey by road and boat through the crashing surf and on to the beach entrance. As the bedraggled, nauseous salt-drenched parties waited to be collected by their guides, a dark creature about the size of a pig with a trunk-like snout wandered casually among us. A tapir! We all naturally assumed that it was just some tame pet belonging to the park rangers and that this happened all the time. Then we saw our guides’ astonishment. ‘This never happens!’ exclaimed one. ‘Normally they hide deep in the forest. You might as well go home now!’

Also recommended: the Cloud Forest in Monteverde (we enjoyed the very friendly Koora hotel, with its private reserve swarming with agoutis and coatimundis; definitely take the night tour to see pit vipers and other nocturnal creatures, and the zip-wire or canopy walks are fun too); and, for a complete change of scenery, the shabby chic millionaires’ surf resort at Nosara, where we stayed at the achingly cool Gilded Iguana. The Observatory in Arenal is a world-class bird-spotting resort with its own terrifyingly high observation tower, where you can stand on a wind-swaying platform above the forest canopy and spot spider monkeys, parakeets and toucans.