And yet if you zoomed in on your face, you’ll find little critters like face mites and eyelash mites who have made themselves at home as permanent residents, while dozens more may visit us during our lifetime. Chances are you have hundreds or even thousands of their tiny faces burrowed in your face right now. Pretty neat huh.

If you have young children, there’s one in particular you’re likely to have in your household at one point or another. Some 6-12 million young children in the U.S. alone end up encountering it each year, more than there are kids with peanut allergies. Their scientific name is Pediculus humanus capitis — which, if I were representing this species, I’d probably stick with, since their common name has one of the worst reputations in the animal kingdom: head lice!

Even the word itself is jarring to hear, although the singular term “louse” sounds a little better to me for some resson. But really what’s in a name anyways? Would a louse by any other name be just as gross? Yeah, probably. But we’ll give them a fair shot, and from here on out I’m calling them capitis, at least for the head lice variety. There happen to be almost 5,000 other kinds of lice too, all part of the Phthiraptera order of animals which includes both chewing and sucking varieties. We’ll call those rapteras for now, just cuz it’s catchier than Phthirapteras.

Also I don’t really want to keep writing the word lice. Gross. (that’s the last one I promise). So capitis and rapteras it is.

My whole family had them just last week. Publishing such a thing is a great way to make everyone you meet run away, and borderline taboo, but luckily I’m an introvert. And for whatever reason I like to overshare things while hiding behind a monkey avatar.

Also, animals fascinate me. Really all of them. And the idea of a species that can only survive on a habitat known as Homo Sapiens — also an animal — is pretty interesting. And here it was, right on my head. I didn’t even need to go outside like I did for viper hunting and birdwatching in Costa Rica. How wonderful. So I guess let’s go capitis watching.

Why we’re wimps

To be fair to us sensitive weirdos of the animal kingdom, we’re not just the animal’s habitat, but also their food considering our blood is their only food source. And most animals don’t like being eaten by other animals.

But there’s a disgust that’s so visceral that anyone with capitis might even be embarrassed or ashamed to admit it to anyone. If your kids get them, you dread the chain of texts you need to send out to other parents of kids they’ve been around, like someone notifying recent intimate partners they have an STD (I’m sure it’s the exact same thing but fortunately I’m only guessing). If you mention it at a dinner party, faces will shriek and shrivel.

Some theorize this feeling of disgust towards capitis and other bugs has been with us for thousands of years as a mechanism that evolved to protect us from dangerous plagues and such. In its extreme form, you get a phobia towards bugs called entomophobia that stems from that same origin, causing not just disgust but a primal fear in millions of people. Many feel it just from seeing an image of bugs. And for some unlucky folks, there’s even a related phobia called trypophobia that can trigger panic and nausea by the mere sight of clusters of holes resembling parasite nests or diseased skin. Something as innocuous as honeycombs or bubblewrap can suddenly become a subtle danger cue at a primal level.

How interesting.

As a fellow weird animal, I’m also pretty disgusted by capitis. But let’s see if we can let fascination override ick and put on our curiosity hats (hoping they don’t have capitis in them). In the animal kingdom we’re all pretty much doing the same things to survive anyways — which basically boils down to eating, pooping, finding shelter, and making babies. And who knows, maybe you are to the Earth what a capitis is to you.

Aw, you and capitis have the same hobbies. How cute.

Capitis, and their habitat

Unlike humans, capitis can’t really walk all that well, or jump or fly like other insects can. But they do have some unique body parts to get where they need (and here’s where it gets gnarly). Let’s zoom in on the main ones:

Specialized Latching Claws: They shimmy down your hair strands using hook-like claws that can grip each strand like a wrench on a bolt.

Scalp Anchor: Once they reach the skin they unfold their hidden mouthparts and anchor onto your scalp with tiny hook-teeth that grip the skin like Velcro.

The Blood Tap: Saw-like stylets slice into the skin and form a feeding tube that pumps saliva so your blood flows easier, then suck the blood out to eat drink and be merry.

They cannot survive for more than 48 hours anywhere that’s not a human head, so everything about them and their life cycle is adapted to staying put on this cranial island. That means they mate, lay eggs, and grow up all in the jungle of someone’s hair as a mostly self-contained ecosystem, except for those brave explorers who venture off to other heads or get stranded on pillows and hair brushes. A single head can host several hundred capitis in severe cases, but populations are usually much smaller and in most cases don’t even surpass 10.

Humans have it quite a bit easier, being adapted to pretty much every environment on Earth with an appetite for all kinds of things as we gorge on pigs, cows, chickens, or all three ground up and stuffed into a tube we call hot dogs. But capitis just drink our blood and leave it at that. How clean and sterile of them, almost like a hospital operation. I honestly didn’t even notice them on my head, and their famous itchiness isn’t as universal as most think and often only starts after a few weeks — although maybe that’s more horrifying. They could be on you, right now. And you might not even notice.

Their bodies have a translucent quality, so I was able to get a glimpse of this one’s last meal through my son’s little National Geographic microscope. Pretty wild seeing a blob of your own blood in its belly.

With such a basic diet, their poop looks like miniscule flecks and will never stink up a room like some species can. In fact you will never smell a capitis, but they will certainly smell you with their microscopic sensory organs on antennae that detect odors. Meanwhile they breathe through tiny holes along their sides that connect directly to internal air tubes. There’s no mucous production like humans have, and you will never hear a capitis hack out a loogey.

To mate, males wander around until they find a female to hook up with, literally clinging to her with tiny abdominal hooks and alternating between drinking blood and sleeping around to do their part in growing the population. Not too different from our own rituals, although human mating is apparently so disgusting that it’s best kept behind closed doors.

Eggs (or nits, as they’re often called) are then laid within 24 hours, just one or two per hair shaft at a time, and each is covered in a substance that basically cements it to the hair. Scrub your hair with shampoo all you want, but they’re not going anywhere and you’ll need a specialized comb and a chemical concoction to exterminate them. Heat from blow dryers can help too. She’ll keep producing 6-10 eggs every day for weeks, and they hatch after another week or so. It’s quite a bit cleaner than the messy process of mammal birth that humans will even describe as “beautiful” with a straight face (cuz bringing new life into the world is pretty rad like that).

Here’s how one of the eggs from our heads looked. Nothing like becoming an involuntary nursery.

Here’s how they look under a more powerful microscope:

After roughly another week and a few molts, they become full-grown adults about the size of a sesame seed.

Just days later they die at the ripe old age of ~30 days. They leave behind the surviving population who quietly perpetuate the cycle, and for the most part your “habitat” as a human looks the same as before, aside from small marks they can leave on the scalp. If they treated our heads like we treat our habitat you’d probably have whole patches of hair missing, overheated blood, and tiny smokestacks puffing smog at everyone.

Animals all the way down

Some people reading this might be throwing up in their mouths right now (a thought that gives me a visceral sense of disgust). Sorry for that.

Maybe an even closer look will help. Zoom in far enough and you and capitis start to look almost the same — built from the same cellular machinery like membranes and nuclei and mitochondria running the factory of life itself. How interesting is it that we’re all mostly just different arrangements of the same tiny life bubbles.

It could be worse too. Each of the planet’s raptera species is specialized to live on a specific bird or mammal (reptiles, amphibians, and fish are somehow spared), and some birds can host dozens of species at once. There’s one kind that spends its whole life inside the pouch of pelicans (Piagetiella peralis), which must really suck. Another kind sucks the blood of pigs and can cause anemia and transmit swine pox to them (Haematopinus suis). Yet another (Bovicola bovis) lives on cows and causes “cattle pediculosis,” which comes with weight loss, lower milk production, and so much itchiness they often damage their hides from all the scratching.

But for the most part, humans just have to deal with capitis, which can be itchy, but won’t ever spread any diseases to you. I could also get into the other two raptera species that can visit us — one of them you probably know by its common name, crabs, and another evolved more recently to live in clothing seams — but how about we leave that for another time.

Meanwhile the rest of the animal kingdom needs to deal with us and our snotty noses, devouring appetites, and messy reproduction processes that multiply our numbers to dominate every habitat on Earth while quivering at thought of anyone visiting our own.

Ultimately, it’s just more head-habitats for the capitis, so they must be thrilled.

And so our lineages live on, tangled together for millions of years in one of the oldest human–parasite relationships on Earth — going all the way back to the time our ancestors split from the chimps, just thriving away on a speck in the cosmos, like bffs.

Precious isn’t it?

Anyways, sweet dreams you filthy animals.

Doug

Instead we ended up somewhere completely unplanned that kinda felt like winning a sweepstakes, at a house that looked like no place I had ever been.

Perhaps better suited for a FOMO-inducing Instagram post — which I swear is half the reason people travel anywhere — but instead I will share it with my three whole subscribers here.

I love dwellings like this that mold into the Earth. Maybe my ancient DNA just misses cave life and this is the modern form of it. The house is carved out of the actual mountainside on one end with a full wall of glass sliding doors on the other, a deck wrapping around the back side facing an infinity pool and tub that were both fed thermal waters from volcanic springs.

This region was all about its volcanoes — four of them could be seen from the mirador (lookout point) just in front of the house: Miravalles, Rincón de la Vieja, Tenorio, and also Arenal on the clearest days.

Less thrilling than previous adventures — viper hunting, sea turtle nesting, getting chased by a motorcycle — but perfect for a “total escape from it all,” and it was just an hour from Liberia airport where we would fly out in three days.

Here are five glimpses of our time there. Buckle up, I kinda got carried away and went on some tangents. But in the spirit of detours, let’s get into it.

1. Meeting Lorenzo (Homo sapiens)

Usually I’d scroll right past a place like this when exploring lodging options, like walking past a Ferrari shop on my way to buy a Honda, but the owner named Lorenzo (name changed for privacy, not that this is a big exposé or anything) — an Italian guy from Miami building out his apparent dream project on 400 hectares of land outside Rincón de la Vieja Volcano National Park — cut us a deal we couldn't resist after we reached out about a promotion and booked directly instead of on the listing website.

Most parts of the wider property weren’t complete yet — the reception, and the clubhouse, and bocce ball courts, and a lazy river with thermal waters he said would be built. And pretty much everything else. And the drive up was extremely rugged for a luxurious housing project. So maybe that explains the discount.

Works for me. My inner caveman will take a little slice of paradise that looks like this no matter what surrounds it, except maybe an oil field or nuclear site or something.

Lorenzo was an interesting fellow. I’m always fascinated by the wide variety of ways humans live and survive, and the idea of someone somehow landing in a place like this where they are carving a bunch of houses out of a mountain is a pretty unique one.

It was easy to get to know him. He had a big personality with a thick Italian accent and talked a lot (he made a point of mentioning that he’s Italian and that he talks a lot a few times within minutes of meeting him). It felt like I could ask him anything and he’d respond with a sentence that wouldn’t end until you said something, which is fun for someone who enjoys brain-picking as a hobby. For things to do, he listed off a bunch of recommendations to explore in the area, following each with “why not?” I pulled out my phone at one point to jot them down, and he gestured for me to look at him and goes, “Oh I’m going to need your full attention. I talk a lot.”

He told us how he owns a construction company in Miami and designed most of the property himself. Raised in Italy by a family of hotel owners, you could tell he’s a perfectionist by how he talks with pride about each detail and thought that went into it like it was an art piece. After showing us the ground coffee — which he said he’d harvested himself on the property, he told us “it’s not quite up to my Italian standards, but let me know how you like it.”

When we told him we’d be spending our last night at a hotel by the Liberia airport he chuckled and said as if it was a total no-brainer, “ha, oh definitely cancel it. We have an apartment unit I can move you over to that’s still available that day that you’ll love.”

When I asked if it had a similar design, he assured me, “of course — it’s beautiful,” and quips, “cuz I designed it.”

Sure why not?

He also mentioned the word “humility” at least three times — saying “humility is everything for me” and “humility is power” — with the same conviction he had in his design skills, because humans are fascinating like that (and his design skills seemed pretty good so I’ll believe him).

2. Our Pura Vida Day

The next morning I looked over Lorenzo’s list of suggested activities: the river hike on the property, a waterfall about an hour away, a restaurant that we “simply have to go to” next to a puma rescue center, mud baths, natural springs, and more.

But we had already done so much exploring, and what better place to kick back and get that R&R?

Our only outing was dropping by the cute little town of La Fortuna (in Guanacaste province, not to be confused with the ‘La Fortuna’ near Arenal Volcano we’d visited earlier in the trip) about 10 minutes away. The town was just a little bigger than Sámara, and it looked and felt like the pura vida everyone talks about, slow-paced and calm, but still with sparks of life as you’d see at least a few people just sitting outside chatting on most blocks in the town center. The holas were warm and welcoming. A fruit market sold the juiciest dragon fruit I’ve ever tasted along with a bunch of fruits I had never seen. The next-door meat market sold “bistec” — the go-to basic cut of beef that came with pretty much every traditional Costa Rican meal and the workers explained how to make it like they do.

At least that’s the glimpse I got. Totally possible for someone else to have the opposite experience and meet the nicest people in Sámara, then come to La Fortuna and get chased by a motorcycle.

For us it was all good vibes, and for the rest of the afternoon, we kicked back and hung out in the pool and lounged without a plan, then capped it off with a barbecue in the evening.

The contrast from our experience in Sámara was almost comical. Pura vida at its best.

And by “pura vida,” I of course just mean what I think pura vida is. It’s one of those phrases that every tourist learns and loves when visiting Costa Rica. Look around and you’ll see it plastered on items at every souvenir shop, and you can hear it in the air at every tourist spot. I’ve been trying to unpack its meaning throughout the trip.

Of course it literally translates as “pure life,” but it can’t just be that simple. When was the last time you were in a situation and just uttered “pure life”?

What even is pura vida and why does it show up so much in Costa Rica?

They say it has lots of meanings, and we heard it all over the place. The most common use that I noticed was after you tell someone thank you. Pura vida is the response. A waitress described it almost like a blessing, saying it’s “something good, and you say it for pretty much everything. When you say good morning, thank you, goodbye … it’s pura vida.” A grounds worker told me they just love life, so they express it through saying pura vida. I asked if it can mean “thanks” as well, and he said it’s more of a response to being thanked, like a “phrase for giving” as he put it (“una frase para dar”).

Here’s how I saw it defined on a t-shirt:

I’m fascinated by words and phrases like this that are more prevalent in a certain place, or in some cases don’t even have an English translation. It’s like words are little slices of a culture, with all kinds of layers that are only truly understood within that culture. So I’m not sure if it’s even possible for you or me to fully understand pura vida.

This extends across many languages. Why do the Germans have Schadenfreude? Why do Brazilians say there’s no word for saudade in English? Why do the Dutch have gezellig (literally translated as “cozy” but they will say it’s just not the same)? Is their gezellig cozier than our cozy?

On the flip side, I’ve heard the idea of hustle in American English can be tough to convey in non-English languages, a term so closely tied to the chase for the American Dream and our flavor of entrepreneurial ambition.

So yay we get to hustle and Costa Rica gets pure life.

My favorite use of pura vida is when you greet someone, like a cashier, with “hola, cómo estás”, and they respond with a light shrug and “pura vida.” I just love the idea of answering “how are you” with “pure life.” What a sweet, sweet phrase.

Whatever it means, I dig it.

3. Our Detour Day

One diversion we took from our R&R time was an impromptu tour of the property with Lorenzo between the pool time and BBQ, a “quick” tour that extended about three hours and led to being invited to their son’s school and lunch the next day.

Why not? Moments like these can peel away layers of a place hidden from the guidebooks and give a peek into everyday life from a person who has lived in both the U.S. and Costa Rica.

Lorenzo wasn’t able to join us, but we met up with his wife (we’ll call her Sarah), an American who grew up in Florida and their two young kids. Her tour of the school took about 10 minutes and I thought about how long it might have gone had Lorenzo come. Their 5-year-old son kept tapping on us to tell us random facts and stories, like how they had a hamster at school but his leg got stuck in the hamster wheel and he mysteriously died the next day.

“Always talking like his daddy,” Sarah laughed.

We dropped by a couple restaurants — which looked more like residences, each on a beautiful finca (ranch) with bright green rolling pastures that looked like a dream — but both were unexpectedly closed, so we drove 45 minutes to the restaurant Lorenzo said we "must" try and the nearby puma rescue center.

When I had first looked up these spots, the map routed us along the main highways on the flatlands, but Sarah took us down a backroad with absolutely stunning and expansive views — even rivaling breathtaking Monteverde — full of vibrant green hills and volcanic backdrops as we wound around them on the mountainside road. It reminded me of some areas of Switzerland.

What a detour. Also like Monteverde, no pic can come close to capturing the depth of the scene and it’s almost not even worth sharing one. But I can’t help myself so here’s a glimpse, with a beautiful power line crossing the scene.

At the restaurant — an open-air setup at an ecolodge, roofed but with sides mostly open — we got to chat with Sarah all about their life in Costa Rica over delicious traditional Costa Rican dishes while surrounded by Costa Rican wildlife like agouti, deer, and iguanas doing their thing just outside (and the food was as good as Lorenzo made it sound). In that short time we got a snapshot of what schools are like for them, their schedules, additional homeschooling, how she spends her time, how it’s been getting to know locals, whether she ever gets bored or lonely or misses the States. She was slow to answer the last one, but said she has a harder time with that in the States than here, and when she’s there it’s here that she misses.

4. Our Time With Jaguars

Next we wandered the puma rescue center where all the animals on site were species native to Costa Rica that had been rescued.

The rescue center gave a nice overview of the country’s wildlife all in one spot, covering species we weren’t likely to see in the wild, but were certainly around us along the way. Like pumas and jaguars.

They also had monkeys, which we surprisingly had seen very few of across the trip, aside from a few howlers in Tortuguero seen from a distance. A Belgian guy I had talked to told me he had probably seen 200 monkeys in his two weeks in Costa Rica, and his route was almost the same as ours. Wildlife is interesting like that. On the flip side, coatis are one species we saw dozens of on various occasions, when some other tourists we ran into weren’t seeing almost any.

Here are some of them we saw near Arenal:

Compared to some other “animal rescue” centers/zoos I’d been to where the animals look sad in their cramped cages, the vibe at this one felt nice and the enclosures were spacious and thick with lush vegetation. Visitors were also accompanied by a guide who shared more about the animals and rescue work.

Each habitat also had a plaque telling the story of the animal and how it got there. A couple monkeys were brought there as babies after their mother was “electrocuted” which I hadn’t considered as a major threat, but of course makes sense with power lines crisscrossing the wild lands.

Birds like toucans and great green macaws (the latter which has 200-400 individuals left in Costa Rica and 7,000 in the world) were confiscated from animal traffickers trying to make a buck.  I felt lucky to have seen these colorful macaws back at Tortuguero when we first arrived in Costa Rica, not realizing at the time just how few were left.

Here’s one, with a power line crossing the photo.

5. Hallmark End to a Journey

Ah that part of the journey. The end part. The return part. The part where I get all sad and whiny cuz I don’t wanna go back.

But this time it didn’t really happen. This just felt like the perfect bookend to our time here, after all the thrills of finding wildlife, cloud forest hikes, and 4x4 drives through lush jungles. We even hit the classic oh-shit-moment in Joseph Campbell's “Hero’s Journey” with the motorcycle maniac that led us off-path to delve (shut up, I like the word delve; this isn’t AI) into a place that wasn’t even part of the plan to see new layers of Costa Rica. All I could do was savor it.

For another diversion, cuz my mind is always delving all over the place into the delves, let’s go crazy and see if we can map the trip to the Hero’s Journey, just at a high level:

Something like:

1. 9-to-5 life in USA

2. Holy shit you have a month off to go anywhere in the world.

3. Overthink your options and postpone it another year.

4. Honestly not sure for this one. Actually, probably AI. Narrowing down options, putting a plan together for three weeks in Costa Rica, researching the animals.

5. Wow this place is great.

6. Ugh we’re leaving our favorite place.

7. Ugh this new place doesn’t feel right.

8. Ugh this new place sucks and someone is chasing us.

9. Wow this new place is amazing, especially after that last place.

10. Back home we go. Life is good.

On our last evening, we laid in our thermal tub overlooking volcanoes and reflected on the past few weeks — and on how much more there is to still explore in Costa Rica. The kids didn’t even want to go back, and of course I didn’t either. It just hits all the boxes for me: lush and beautiful landscapes, mountains, beaches, cloud forests, tons of biodiversity, the pura vida lifestyle.

But I also felt a palpable conviction that we will return, which feels better than saying goodbye to a good place forever. It’s not goodbye. It’s see you soon. Wow I just came up with that. I should be a Substack writer.

As if this whole scene weren’t already a classic end-of-a-movie cliche, a massive rainbow arched across the horizon, framing the mountains and volcanoes in the distance.

Which I’ll take as a good sign.

With love from Planet Earth,

Doug

But so far Sámara has been our biggest letdown of the trip. Maybe it’s just fine and I’m being hasty to judge without exploring enough. After all we just got here a few hours ago. But first impressions are that it’s not all that pretty (coming from Monteverde, which to be fair set a very high bar), not all that friendly (compared to everywhere else we’ve been in Costa Rica), and not all that slow-paced or relaxing (also compared to everywhere else). It also feels more overrun by tourists, overshadowing its local character.

Or maybe I just miss Monteverde and its magical cloud forests and the cool breezy air at night, the layered mountainous terrain sitting a mile above the sea with some of the most expansive views I’ve ever seen. It was a small town, but sprawling with little nooks that make it feel bigger than it actually is.

The mix of cultures was also interesting in Monteverde. With a noticeable expat presence I was worried it might feel like rich gringos had taken over, or come with tensions between locals and foreigners that you see in lots of places around the world, but everyone we talked to claimed they all get along pretty well (i.e. all four or five of them we asked, which is a pretty hefty sample size if you ask me — also, you can kinda sniff out these vibes in a place to a degree). One person did say that if there’s any tension it’s more between some locals and tourists than locals and expats.

Perhaps it's due to the early Quaker roots from the U.S. since they settled there in the 1950s when it was almost entirely undeveloped, eventually partnering with Costa Ricans to protect the cloud forest. So in a way the locals and foreigners cultivated this place together.

Anyway, I miss it and am even tempted to say screw it and abandon ship and go back to Monteverde for our last five nights. Otherwise we’re just falling for the ol’ sunk-cost fallacy —doubling down on something we’re not that into — when we should just do what we want, no matter the choices that got us here, like booking a nonrefundable Airbnb in a beach town when we want to be in the cloud forests.

But I also want to give it a fair shot, so let’s see what happens.

Here’s the route we’ve taken so far:

Two Days Later

It hasn’t gotten better. This is strangely the least pura-vida-vibing place we’ve visited yet, I guess not what I expected for a tiny beach town. Probably doesn’t help that we’re staying a bit outside of the town center and beach, which means we’ve had to rely on the car more than I’d like. Off-road motorbikes seem to dominate the roads, and if you’re going any less than twice the speed limit they’ll ride right behind you and rev their engine and zoom around you. One guy passed us while going around a tight curve at night where it was impossible to see if anyone was coming — just totally rolling the dice on life or death and trusting that the odds were in his favor.

Today we had our worst encounter yet. We were driving through the town center where roads are a bit tighter and lined with parked cars, so it’s hard to see around corners. I’d inch up to each corner to see whether we could go, and at one corner I saw a motorcyclist coming from the left almost a block away. It looked like plenty of space so I started pulling forward to turn, but I guess the guy was going like 240 miles per hour and I was already halfway through my turn so there was no turning back. So of course he had to brake to avoid hitting me and seemed pretty upset by it judging by him yelling “PUTA!” and shaking a fist at me.

Yikes, take a chill pill dude.

We drove for a couple more blocks when I saw another motorcyclist in my rearview mirror about a block behind me in a pink shirt, which kinda looked like the guy. It kept speeding up and getting closer to us, finally removing all doubt when he tried to come around the car and yelling at me.

I sped up to get him off my butt.

And so did he. And we both zoomed down the main strip of Sámara for a couple blocks as he kept following us. I took a turn on a faster road and gunned it for a short stretch that didn’t have intersections.

And so did he. I turned right again back into the town to try to make it to the police station that I knew sat right by the beach.

And so did he. I could also see in my rearview mirror that he kept reaching back into a bag hooked to his bike whenever he'd get close to us. I didn’t want to find out if it was a weapon or something to smash my window, or — I’ll give him the benefit of doubt — maybe he was just hungry and grabbing for an apple. Hangriness can get pretty crazy sometimes. So I zoomed around the final corner leading to the police station, just a block away, just as another car was approaching the corner coming at us and there must have been just inches to spare for us to both fit, meaning the motorcycle dude certainly could not.

We made it to the police station and pulled into what appeared to be a driveway reserved only for the police cars as the one officer standing guard motioned me not to go that way. Meanwhile a police truck started backing out and almost hit us.

Yay pura vida.

We rolled down the window and explained we were being chased, pointing to the pink-shirted dude who was already a block away at this point and just turning a corner.

The officers drove just ahead of us as we drove to our Airbnb and we slammed that gate closed and stayed home for the evening, cuz shit, that was scary.

Onward

We messaged the Airbnb host just to let him know what happened, and he had his older brother come out to chat with us since he also lives on the property and was home. He apologized profusely and said this really is a safe town, but there is one guy that’s a little off and has a temper and has done this kinda thing before, but it never resulted in violence. So it was probably him. But he asked for more of a description of what he was wearing and such cuz it’s a super small town and he could figure it out. He said they’d make some calls to calm the guy down and we have nothing to worry about.

He also got talking about all the growth and change their town has seen in his lifetime, and how there was no development at all in the blocks surrounding the house where we were staying. The house apparently shares a plot of land with various members of the extended family who have owned the land for generations as it was once their “finca” (ranch) that has since been parceled into smaller properties and a gravel road cut through it.

Unlike Monteverde’s early Quaker-Tico collaboration, here the story felt more Tico-first — family land rapidly sliced up as tourism and growth slammed the tiny town in the last couple decades.

I guess a lot of people love it here. I kept looking around, kinda baffled and wondering what it was about it that makes expats and others flock here. It’s like we weren’t even experiencing the same place.

As silly as it sounds, what even is a place? If you lined up just the right experiences like a wonderful dinner at a cute restaurant on one of the side streets, friendly encounters with locals at the Friday farmer’s market, and caught some waves surfing, did you really visit the same “place” as me? How much of a place is the place itself, and how much of it is the experiences you have there?

For me Sámara felt way too rushed, the weather too hot and sticky, and there’s an overall weird vibe of agitation in the air and less friendly hellos.

Also getting chased by a maniac on a motorcycle.

To be fair — we did have fun frolicking on the beach with the kids, diving through the waves, playing in the sand, all that classic beach day with the fam stuff. We also spotted a few little bits of wildlife that you could easily miss, but if you looked closely little shells moved around like little pill bugs at the shore, which were tiny olive snails that scoot around in the swash. You could also see quarter-sized holes from ghost crabs digging the night before. And more birds. Also I watched an ant-mimicking spider make a web on my water bottle one evening which was kinda neat.

I can find pockets of my kinda place really anywhere on Earth. But as a whole, Sámara just wasn’t my place. And it’s crazy how a couple bad experiences layered on top of sub-par first impressions can really ruin a spot.

So we’re out, two days early, and I feel pretty great about it, sunk costs and all. And even better about where we’re headed next (more on that soon — I’m posting this a few days late).

Chances are you’ll never visit Sámara, but if you happen to be someone who lives here and loves it, I’m not knocking your town. In fact in a way, I’ve never even been to the same town you have. So no hate towards Sámara, but fuck whatever the place is that I visited. I hated it.

With love from Planet Earth,

Doug

Unlike birders and their birds, I’m pretty terrible at finding my favorite animal, snakes, so I’ve been dabbling in birding cuz birds are pretty much everywhere. Around 11,000 bird species live around the Earth, and wherever you are you can usually find some of them.

Especially at a place like this.

What makes Curi-Cancha so special is that the climate is just right for 200+ species of birds to call it home, and the habitats are a mix of forests and open pastures that make it more accessible to find them compared to some other forests that are too dense to see what’s lurking in there (like the Santa Elena Cloud Forest we visited the other day).

One of its residents includes the Resplendent Quetzal that is one of the most beautiful and sought-after birds on Earth to find. We hoped to find one too, although our guide managed expectations and said he’d only seen three in the last month — and this was coming from someone who regularly visits the reserve for hours as a professional birding guide. But hey, you never know.

Quite the place to “dabble” in birding.

I also told him I’d love to find a side-striped palm pit viper, at least to put it on his radar in case there was a chance of an encounter. In the Arenal/La Fortuna area a few days ago my target was the eyelash viper, but side-striped palm pit vipers thrive more at higher elevations like the cloud forests, so this was the spot to find them. But he said that would also be a pretty uncommon sighting here, at least during the day like this. I said I’d gladly take any snake. But snakes really are more of a night thing to find here.

I was still excited to find birds though.

Slow Birding

It took us a good 15 minutes just to get from the parking lot to the entrance as we kept finding things, like the keel-billed toucan that our guide pointed out through his spotting scope. We had seen the yellow-throated toucan, but this one is even prettier in my opinion.

We also saw a Golden-olive Woodpecker (Colaptes rubiginosus) that seemed special from the guide’s reaction and a few others whose names I don’t recall. Marcos kept a log of each encounter in the eBird app from Cornell University which provides data for ornithologists to understand distribution ranges, seasonality of encounters, migratory patterns and more.

The reserve limits visitors to just 50 people per day, and it seemed that most of them were accompanied by a guide. Many of them had fancy cameras with huge telephoto lenses and tripods they lugged around.

What other animal on Earth goes out of its way to simply observe other animals for the sheer joy of it like this? Humans are such weirdos.

Marcos could seemingly make dozens of bird calls as he whistled different sounds throughout our 3-hour walk to call out for different species. We would occasionally hear his same whistle sound repeated back to us and we’d follow the sound to (try) find the bird.

At one point we followed the bird whistle response over a hill where we saw another group of visitors with their guide, who was making the same whistle sound.

There we were, two humans paid by other humans to find birds, just making bird sounds at each other. If I were an alien observing human behavior (which I might be and you’d never know it cuz we camouflage really well), I’d be taking some notes on this.

What a fascinating species.

Exciting Early Finds

Just as I’d experienced with our night walk guide and the snake guides, Marcos had various moments of sheer excitement as there was always something unique to discover for him too. The most exciting find for him was a Tinamou, which is a small primitive bird species related to ostriches and emus that someone unfamiliar might mistake for a weird pigeon crossed with a chicken, except its lineage goes quite a bit further back, extending to around 80-90 million years ago. Fun fact: in this species, the males incubate the eggs and care for the chicks after they hatch.

“Primitive birds, but modern parents,” the guide joked. It ran right across the path in front of us, making it an even rarer sight as they are usually quite hidden in the brush.

There were plenty of others too with all kinds of names that were totally unfamiliar to me. Many weren’t all that pretty, but just as it goes with pretty much every other hobby that involves collecting or finding things — Pokémon, antiquing, treasure hunting — scarcity makes something more special. And if there’s a plain little brown bird that you rarely find, that’s quite a bit more special than a glimmering bird you see every day.

The most exciting for me so far wasn’t a bird, but an animal he said we likely wouldn’t find: a snake! This was a snail sucker, similar to what I’d seen a few nights ago near La Fortuna, but a different species from the genus.

A tiny little dude and such an interesting shape with their super skinny body and oddly large-shaped head in comparison. There it was just chilling in the daytime, way past its bed time. Lucky me.

I asked Marcos what bird would excite him most to find and he said that if we found an Umbrellabird we could pack our things up and go home cuz it just doesn’t get more special than that for him. He sees one of these guys once every three years or so.

I’d settle for my snail sucker. But in the world of birds I still thought a quetzal would be pretty special to find. So onward we kept looking.

Quetzal Trees

It was fascinating how well Marcos knew the different microhabitats within the forest, and he took us to a couple areas that he knew had a tree that produced fruit that quetzals like to eat.

As we approached one of these spots, we saw about 10 people huddled around two or three other guides with their scopes and binoculars pointed towards the trees. One of them played quetzal sounds from their phone as we all waited for a response in total silence.

Nothing.

Our guide joined in with his acoustic quetzal whistles and this went on for maybe 10-15 minutes (it felt like time stood still) as hope seemed to fade.

But things took a turn when the actual quetzal finally called back, and the entire group jolted back to life. You could feel a surge of adrenaline in the air. Apparently a few of them could even see the actual quetzal way in the distance through their $700 binoculars (at least Marcos’s pair were that much, but some pairs range in the thousands), but it was barely a glimpse and not much of a sighting to do this beauty justice. I kept scanning the trees as well and counted myself lucky when I eventually caught the brief flash of its bright red belly when the quetzal flew away.

A couple minutes later someone a bit further down the trail exclaimed that they spotted it, and our entire group scurried over, massive telephoto lenses and scopes and bulky camera bags and all.

And then back once again to the original spot when we heard it in that direction again.

I just watched the humans scurry and watch for the bird and thought it was the most interesting thing ever. What a striking human characteristic it is to act in such a way. Do dolphins do this with starfish? Or maybe elephants go people-spotting just for the hell of it? Who else in the animal kingdom has mastered survival to a degree where they’ve even got that kind of time and energy anyways?

Back at the original spot, our moment finally came when the brilliant resplendent quetzal perched for us to get a better look — a bit in the distance and best viewed with the scopes yet — but still just a stunning bird glimmering in green and yellow with a fuzzy head that didn’t even look real. It didn’t stick around long enough to get photos, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was something special.

It Gets Better

As if the quetzal weren’t special enough, later in our walk — after playing in a labyrinth made of bushes where my 4-year-old daughter tripped and cried for my help and I ran after her but kept running into dead ends as I had to solve the maze myself to find her even though she was only a couple feet from me at one point just behind some thick bushes, and when I did find her I accidentally bopped her in the face with the heavy binoculars that my guide let me borrow just to make the situation more absurd ... modern parenting at its best —the guide told me he’d found something for me.

“Bothriechis lateralis,” he said to me with a grin.

Wait, “Bothriechis” — isn’t that a snake? But I’m not great at Latin names and asked him what the common name was.

“Side-striped palm pit viper.”

My heart raced as we walked down the path, but he wasn’t too hurried — these guys tend to just sit perched in the same spot for a while, sometimes even for an entire day or two as they wait to ambush little animals like rodents, frogs, and birds.

And there it was, perfectly perched on a plant to show off those bright green keeled scales, white stripes on the side, and a badass look in the eyes. Larger than any of the eyelash vipers we’d seen the other day, maybe around 3 feet I’d say. A true beauty.

Another small group of visitors passed by us, and one of them ran up to get a closer look as well. “Oh my god, I love snakes,” she said. A kid perhaps in his 20s also stopped to look and called back to his parents. “Eine Schlange!” — German for “a snake!”

What weirdos. All of us. For some it’s the birds. For others it’s the snakes. And for me it’s the birds, the snakes, the humans, and the rest of it. We just like to watch other living things do their thing. And who knows, maybe somewhere out there, aliens are watching us do ours.

From Planet Earth,

Doug

We got here yesterday after driving about 3.5 hours from La Fortuna, following paved roads that slowly degraded into semi-paved roads and eventually fully unpaved roads with potholes that we dodged like landmines as we got closer and closer to the cloud forests of Monteverde. Everyone warned us about the roads in these parts, but honestly I’d take them any day over the roads of San Jose where I believe we were honked at three times within 15 minutes of leaving the airport, and a motorcyclist smacked my review mirror.

The views got more and more expansive as well, and I see why some call Costa Rica the “Switzerland of Latin America.” I pulled over a couple of times to take a snapshot, but the results were rather pathetic compared to what my eyes saw so I won’t be sharing any of that.

Here’s a glimpse of the ride:

Monteverde’s Roots

The area was actually settled by a group of just 50 Quakers from the U.S. who were fleeing the draft for the Korean War in 1951. The Costa Rican government granted them refuge in one of the least accessible places in the country to let them clear the land for their cows and crops to produce milk, butter, and cheese. This area sat atop the Tilaran Mountain Range at the continental divide — about 4,600 feet about sea level — where “moist winds from the Caribbean” flow in to create the “lush, rich cloud forests”. On the clearest days you can see both the Pacific Ocean to the west and Caribbean Sea to the east.

But being cloud forests, it’s usually quite cloudy.

Along with all that settling came lots of deforestation, which was quite the bummer considering the area’s incredible biodiversity, accounting for 2.5% of the planet’s biodiversity in an area that adds up to just ~0.03% of the planet’s land. Fortunately a biologist named George Powell convinced the Quakers to create a ~2,000 acre reserve in the 70s to protect all plants and animals. This is now called the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and has since expanded to 26,000 acres.

Today there are three main reserves, which now also include the Santa Elena Reserve at 765 acres and the Curi-cancha reserve at ~200 acres. There is also the Children’s Eternal Rainforest covering 56,000 acres, which is the result of a group of passionate Swedish children who campaigned to buy a bunch of land to help save the rainforest through a global fundraiser that seems to have worked out pretty well for them.

Anyways, I meant to simply write about how magical of a hike I took today, but suddenly landed tangled up in layers of history.

Why does everything on this planet need to be so interconnected?

Let’s get to it.

Trillions of Heartbeats

This is the least popular of the three reserves and we probably encountered no more than a dozen other people the entire time we were there.

It’s also probably the slowest I’ve ever walked a trail. Just within the first minute I saw what looked like a weird shaped raindrop on a leaf that turned out to be the tiniest frog I’ve ever seen upon a closer look. As I was taking pics, a couple came from the other direction and did what everyone does when there’s someone stopped alongside a trail taking pictures and got out their camera to do the same.

They had just finished the longest trail, which is almost 5 kilometers and said they saw some birds and monkeys but not much else for wildlife. So the frog seemed like quite the treat.

But after observing that tiny frog for a few minutes, my vision shifted to focusing on the tiny world of microfauna and I could barely take a few steps without finding another cool animal — mostly insects — that made what was supposed to be a “1.5-hour walk” start to look like a full-day excursion after an hour had passed and we had barely gotten a fourth of the way into it.

The vibe was magical. There was a surreal juxtaposition between cool air hitting the skin and tropical rainforest hitting the eyes that I usually don’t picture together. A gentle thunder rumbled throughout most of the hike as the weather seemed to shift by the minute from slightly sunny to slightly cloudy to completely cloudy with spurts of mist and heavy rain, and then back to sun again.

The foliage was so dense that there were parts where you’d hear the rain falling but not feel a single drop hit the ground as the towering trees served as giant umbrellas.

Each tree seemed to have an entire planet of microhabitats layered with all kinds of plants growing on the trunks themselves and vines tangling between them with drooping mosses.

Aside from insects, we didn’t actually see much for wildlife.

But I kept hearing bird sounds I’d never heard before and would pull out the Merlin app to see what it could ID from the sounds. I heard many more than I ended up actually seeing. But their presence was clear at every step.

We also didn’t end up seeing any mammals, but at the reception lobby had seen cam recordings of pumas, wild peccaries (i.e. a kind of pig), coatis, and others. So I knew they were around us too.

Up a few feet ahead of us at one point a large flying insect crossed the path that I swear looked like a fairy (it was probably a moth of some sort) and I wondered if old tales of fairies were actually referring to something like that. Whatever it was, it looked like magic, and might as well have been a fairy. What’s in a word anyways?

We have all kinds of words for the natural world and the life it contains, but they just don’t seem to capture the magic of the trillions of heartbeats that make up a cloud forest like this one. The place is full of magic, whether you see it or not. That’s the Santa Elena Cloud Forest.

With love from Planet Earth,

Doug

I even paid money to do it. And it’s easily the highlight of our trip to Costa Rica so far.

This was a tour that’s been in the works for at least a year and one of the reasons I’ve wanted to visit Costa Rica in the first place. By “in the works” I mean I reached out to a company who offers “herping” tours in the area to find reptiles and amphibians. My dream is still do one of their lengthier expeditions like the 15-day “Viper Herping Tour” across different regions to try maximize the probability of finding “21 of the 23 vipers and coral snakes” of Costa Rica, but that wouldn’t overlap too well with a family trip so I opted for a night walk instead.

Unlike other nature tours we’ve done throughout the trip (like the sea turtle nesting and jungle night walk), the guides for this one were actual biologists and herpetologists. Victor was the main guide, a tropical biologist who studies snake venom and says he has found more than 18,000 snakes in his life, starting at the age of 3 when he’d go out with his father who has been a biologist for over 40 years now.

Victor says his dad (also named ‘Victor’) knows pretty much everything about every animal out there and he’ll often call him up while on a walk to help identify some random bug, spider, frog, or anything else he’s not sure about. Lucky for me, he also tagged along for the walk to help find some our target species. For me that was the eyelash viper, fer-de-lance, and pretty much any other snake. But especially those.

We drove our 4x4s down a windy road not too far from La Fortuna and pulled up to a barbed wire fence hiding behind an overgrown path on the edge of some farmland dotted with huge trees, logs, and cow pies. I didn’t see any cows though. They throw the farmer $15 to get access, and in return he leaves the snakes alone instead of killing them and lets the Victors roam the property. Win-win-win for the farmer, biologists, and snakes. And me of course.

The Most Feared Snake in Costa Rica

Already within five minutes of arriving, Victor Sr. yelled that he’d found something.

It was a Terciopelo — also known as the fer-de-lance. This one was a juvenile crawling at the base of a tree just outside the fence, perhaps two feet or so in length with a skin pattern that would easily blend in with dead leaves. Some get up to 8 feet in length. When I had asked our turtle nesting guide a few days back what animal he feared the most he said it was this one.

Victor agreed. He said he personally knows at least three people who took a bite, and each of them happened when stepping over a log, their favorite place to hang out and ambush prey. A bite will often send you to the hospital for weeks. Around 650 occur each year in Costa Rica, and it’s usually farmers. Less than 1% are fatal, but it’s still a terrible bite to take.

Just look at that head. They just look like they mean business.

For Victor, the Fer-de-lance is one of the more commonplace snakes to find and less interesting than some others since there isn’t much variation in how they look.

Eyelash vipers on the other hand — while also pretty common — have all kinds of variations in skin color, patterns, and even eye color, which make them one of Victor’s favorite snakes to find despite how common they are. Most of them are a greenish-grayish color with shaded blotches, but Victor said he finds the iconic bright yellow variation, aka the “golden eyelash viper” about every 3 out of 10 walks he does. About 30 minutes to the south of us he said there’s an entire isolated population that doesn’t have any pattern at all. The most unique he’s ever found was completely black with gold-colored eyes.

We wouldn’t find one that rare, but turned out our luck was pretty good.

Our First Eyelash

About 20 minutes after the fer-de-lance Victor Sr. yelled back again that he’d found another snake. His flashlight was pointed about 8 feet up the trunk of a tree covered in mosses, lichens, and winding vines where an eyelash viper perched in a bark’s crevices and blended in perfectly. About two feet long, it was mostly green but also had some pinkish blotches, which Victor described as a “Christmas morph.”

What a stunning creature.

It only took another 10 minutes until we found our next eyelash. Again, it was Victor Sr. This time he didn’t point out where it was but just said to come closer and look around. A good 15 feet up the trunk of a towering tree wrapped in plants and vines growing out of it, there it was. In fact, you really couldn’t miss this one. Cuz we had found the golden eyelash viper, and boy does that yellow pop.

What an incredible freak of nature:

Even if we found nothing else the rest of the walk, I’d go home feeling incredibly happy.

And yet, we kept finding stuff.

We found a coffee snake, which are one of the more common nonvenomous snakes in the area, a tiny guy at the base of a tree that I actually spotted (pretty sure it was the only snake I found on my own of the night).

We found a ringed snail sucker (Sibon annulatus) which was another snake I’d hoped we’d find. These guys slurp up snails by hooking them with their teeth and slowly walking their upper and lower jaws over the body bit by bit until the soft part is pulled from the shell. Super cool snake.

The helmeted iguana was another cool one. It’s the only basilisk that can’t run on water, and I think they’re the coolest looking ones too, like mini-dinosaurs.

And we found a bunch of frogs, including the South American Bullfrog (Leptodactylus pentadactylus) that can get to be the size of a football, although the one we saw was quite a bit smaller. There was also a rain frog, glass frog, red-eyed tree frogs, and some others — I don’t know my frogs as well as snakes though.

Also lots of neat insects, spiders, and millipedes, including a “wandering spider” which has a neurotoxic venom that Victor says can send you to the hospital.

I don’t recall the name of all of these, but here are a few:

Annnd even another eyelash viper ... but it still wouldn’t be our last.

Lifey Chats and Big Picture Stuff

We eventually worked up an appetite and drove to Victor’s home town of El Castillo about 20 minutes away to stop by a soda (i.e. traditional Costa Rica restaurant) for some food before heading to our last spot. It was around 10pm and the soda was usually closed at this hour, but they often stay open late for Victor and his guests and seemed to run a pretty casual operation.

The conversations were at least as interesting as the snakes we found, and even that alone would have made the night worth it.

Victor told me about what it’s like trying to get by as a biologist, saying he actually earns more with his tours than his academic work. Patching together different income streams seems common in the field, unless you find some breakthrough or practical application, like a new venom treatment or snake repellent for the market. One of his colleagues is even a full-time programmer at AT&T and just does his snake stuff on the side.

Meanwhile AI is starting to gobble up the programming jobs, so who knows how long that will be safe.

“The biggest lie anyone ever told was that you are secure.” Victor said about this. After all, species are adapted to environments, and if the environment changes or another species takes your place, you either adapt or die. It’s the classic “Survival of the fittest” and natural selection all the way down.

The Victors also used to have a zoo of their own with more than 400 animals, including lots of snakes and other animals that were rescued from authorities who had confiscated them. But after the pandemic they had to shut down and were never able to get the permits to start it back up again. Victor said it was a really hard time for them, as lots of other things seemed to compound at the time and life took a turn.

It seemed like a sore topic and a bit of a vibe shift bringing it up. But we talked about a bunch of other stuff too.

Like new species discoveries and how there’s so much more to be found in the insect world than vertebrates like snakes, largely due to their rapid lifecycle that allows for genetic mutations to spread through populations faster than animals like snakes that live much longer. Each short generation is another roll of the dice genetically speaking, which means more chances to change and ultimately a greater variety of species. Just look at the animal kingdom: insects account for at least 75% percent of all of the 1.5 million animal species, and some estimates say there are more than 10 million yet to be discovered.

What a fascinating and mostly-undiscovered world it is out there, always changing, adapting, evolving.

Final Stroll (we’re almost there, I promise)

By now it was getting late and they still wanted to try one more spot, and I was down to go for as long as they were. For this one we drove up a bumpy, narrow mountainside road and then walked back down it to scan trees on both sides for snakes. Our snake count for the night was already at 6, including that golden eyelash that they usually don’t see, which felt pretty good already. Could we squeeze in another one or two?

As it turned out, we could. Victor and I were scanning the thick brush of trees on the right side of the road for a few minutes, when Victor Sr. caught up with us and suggested we look at the left side instead — even though the vegetation was quite a bit less dense.

Within no more than 30 seconds, we saw our second golden eyelash viper shining from a tree branch. This time it was even closer to us.

“The old man knows!” Victor laughed.

Our final snake turned out to be the same as the first, yet another of the “commonplace” fer-de-lances, except this one was in an extremely uncommon place: high up in the branches of a tree. Victor Sr. said he had only seen this species in a tree just three times in his entire 40+ year career as a biologist.

I get why these guys still get excited searching for snakes each night, even after 18,000+ finds. You just never know what you’ll see.

And what a fascinating way to make a living. Most humans — and all species for that matter — do the things they do merely as a means of survival and don’t necessarily enjoy it all that much. But Victor says he loves his work as a guide, and in some ways he also believes it may have even more impact than his formal biology work, as it spreads knowledge and care for the living world.

A small dent, perhaps — but lots of small dents can add up to something pretty incredible. Just look at those million-plus insect species.

Anyways that was a lot of words to say: I saw a bunch of snakes and it was awesome.

Tomorrow we head to Monteverde, where I hope to spot a snake that thrives more in that region: the side-striped palm pit viper. Let’s see how my odds play out.

From Planet Earth,

Doug

But when you compress all of that into a 10-minute video and a bunch of other people do the same thing, you start to see the same stuff. It almost feels like following a loop through an amusement park or something, just a cookie cutter experience of people hopping from one ride to the next. In La Fortuna that includes the Místico Hanging Bridges, Fortuna Waterfall, hot springs, and maybe a coffee or chocolate tour.

And that’s where we were headed next, arguably the most touristy place in the entire country. Would it have the same magic we’ve experienced so far in the trip?

First Impressions of La Fortuna

Compared to Tortuguero’s vibe as a simple (and tiny) beach village centered around turtles as the main attraction, La Fortuna seems more developed and centered around more adventurous activities, at least based on billboards all over the area promoting things like zip-lining, rappelling, white water rafting, ATVs and jet ski rentals.

And then of course, there’s also that loop of “must-visit” sights that I mentioned earlier.

One observation is that in Tortuguero almost all of the tourists seemed to be from somewhere in Europe, at least based on languages spoken around us. But in our 4 days there, I don’t think I heard any Americans. Not the case in La Fortuna though. Within a few minutes of visiting the grocery store I heard at least a couple groups of Americans talking. Who knows, maybe they were expats. Lots of those live here too.

We booked a couple stays here, first at a place called Wellness Park, filled with nature and biodiversity and miles of trails that take you to waterfalls and water holes. After that we’ll go to a more proper hotel called Los Lagos that has thermal hot springs on site and pools with waterslides for the kids to play. Should be fun.

Vipers (and much more) Be Here

Two days in and the highlight so far has been a night walk with a guide who happened to have a focus on snakes and other reptiles and amphibians. These night walks are a pretty common tourist activity that I noticed were offered by many of the hotels and parks we looked at before the trip.

It was also just the right vibe for me — no one but us and the guide with our ponchos and flashlights scanning each plant around us in the pitch-black jungle. All I wanted was to find eyelash vipers, as I was mentioning earlier. I also hoped to find the iconic red-eyed tree frog, and if we were lucky, poison dart frogs.

And of course, literally any snake species at all. Okay or anything alive at all for that matter. Especially with a guide to teach us all about it all.

But especially eyelash vipers.

So far the app iNaturalist has been my go-to guide for learning about animals living around me on the trip. And zooming to the area around La Fortuna, I thought my odds for an eyelash viper encounter might be pretty good, which I saw accounted for almost half of all snake observations submitted in iNaturalist around the area (“area” meaning within a couple hours of the town or so) — around 1,300 total sightings. Terciopelo (aka Fer-de-lance) comes in second with around 200 observations. And the list just goes on as frequency of observations for each species continues to drop as you scroll down.

Roughly 80 of Costa Rica’s 148 snake species have been spotted in this area — close to the total number found across all of Texas, which is roughly 13 times larger than the entire country of Costa Rica, and many times more than the area around La Fortuna.

For the night walk we started at the “frog sanctuary” which is an entirely natural area of small ponds and lush (there’s that word again) plants with huge leaves and the mist of rain in the air. It didn’t take long to spot our first red-eyed tree frog, and what a cool species it was. Red eyes with huge pupils and a glimmering green body fading to a white belly with blue streaks. Just gorgeous.

We continued onward to the jungle trail that would wind around the mountainous terrain for another hour or so. This is where we were most likely to find eyelash vipers.

The guide walked ahead of us to keep an eye out for deadly snakes on the path that the kids would surely miss if they led the way. It rained most of the time, almost to downpour levels that I thought would repel any snakes, but the guide said only a true downpour would make the vipers go into hiding.

Having an expert at our fingertips that wasn’t just an AI bot or database for animals was the best. I loved how he had this infectious excitement about so many of the species we would find, from the littlest bugs to mushrooms releasing micro-clouds of spores to frogs and more. You could point to just about anything, and he would tell you all about it.

Even as a guide who’s been doing this for years, things kept surprising him. For example, we saw two or three insects that he said were the largest he’d ever seen of that species. There was another insect called the Tailless Whipscorpion (Phrynus) that is rarely seen but we found on the side of a tree.

But the coolest was something I actually found. It was about 45 minutes into the hike or so, when I spotted something moving just a few feet from me in the branches. It was long and lanky, my favorite shape in the animal kingdom: finally, a snake!

It wasn’t a viper, but from the guide’s reaction, something much more special. It was around 5 feet long, a mix of orange-ish saddles outlined in black lines over a light brown body. What a gorgeous snake. I wasn’t even sure what it was — it definitely wasn’t in the top 10 most observed snakes in iNaturalist I’d been researching. In fact, it wasn’t even in the top 20.

It was an Annulated Boa (Corallus annulatus), which the guide said he had only seen 5 or 6 times in his entire life, usually from a distance through binoculars. This was coming from someone who had been a guide for 15 years and does walks almost every day.

And here we had one just inches away from us.

Later on I jumped back to the map for the area in iNaturalist, and I kept scrolling down the list of snake species from most to least observed until I went past about 40 snakes and there it was: the “Ringed tree boa,” aka the Annulated boa; 9 total observations submitted.

The guide said he’d be telling all his colleagues about this one. My heart was full.

Back Onto the Loop

The next day we hopped onto that loop of “must-visit” attractions to explore the Místico Arenal Hanging Bridges. It was utterly gorgeous with a well-paved path taking us through more rainforests and vast views from hanging bridges of valleys and waterfalls and the huge Arenal Volcano in the background.

Crazy enough, I also ran into our same guide from the night before. He looked excited and pulled up some photos of an eyelash viper he had just seen on the trail. He explained in detail where to find it: 6 handrail posts before the 5th hanging bridge on the right side; just follow the large branch up until it splits into a couple small branches and twigs from there ... and honestly the detail was more than I could remember. These guides speak in a detailed language when describing where to look for something that I’m still figuring out.

On our way there we spotted another guide and a small group of people huddled around pointing at some branches. It looked barely bigger than the size of a worm, and you could only see its silhouette from under a leaf. I asked one of the guys in the group if it was a viper. “Nah just a little snake” he told me.

Hm, eyelash vipers are pretty small, I thought to myself. As the group moved on, I climbed up the handrail and stood on my tip toes to get a view. And there it was: an eyelash viper.

What a stunning little guy.

I could have stared for a while, but the trail was getting clogged up and we kept going. Until we got to that fifth bridge where another small group was huddled around yet another guide and pointing their phones at the branches. That must have been the one our guide told us about. And sure enough, there sat another eyelash viper just feet away from us.

Again a group of people gathered around and clogged the trail. I kinda felt rushed again. We were on that “amusement park” loop after all. And it was someone else’s turn to get on that ride.

As cool as the vipers were, I gotta say, that boa from the night before was just another level of special I wouldn’t have ever expected to see, and I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced it in such an intimate setting.

Anyways, it’s late again, and tomorrow night I have the tour I’ve been looking forward to most: a night walk with a couple biologists who actually study the snakes of Costa Rica.

Off the loop and into the wild we will go.

With love from Planet Earth,

Doug

Costa Rica’s signature phrase comes to mind: pura vida. It literally means “pure life” but is apparently used constantly as a kind of slogan for being laid back, alive, and just grateful to be around. Maybe I’m off on that one, but I hope to unpack it more throughout the trip. For now I’ll just take it literally, for pure life was all around me.

One of the first moments that brought that feeling to life came on our very first morning at our jungle bungalow. It was a basic A-frame house covered in windows embedded in a jungle property that felt a tad sketch getting to as there wasn’t really an entrance from the road or anything — just a metal sliding gate that was held together with a bike lock — but the property was pure magic and had its own private trail leading to a stream with light rapids in some parts and then a perfect swimming hole in another part with little offshoots pretty much designed by nature for boogie boarding.

So we hopped in and frolicked and boogie boarded and basked in the joy of the jungle beauty all around us — blue butterflies swooping down towards us, toucans croaking from somewhere in the trees, a constant chorus of insects, and I even saw a green basilisk, which is a lizard with a pointy crown on its head and a fascinating ability to run across water, earning it the nickname the Jesus Christ Lizard. Jesus, what a cool creature.

It’s moments like these that you just want to bottle up and save forever.

And we were just getting started.

Life All Around Us

The Airbnb was only a pit stop on our way to Pavona where we would take a boat the next day to Tortuguero National Park, a car-free area around 100 square miles renowned for its turtle nesting season which happened to overlap with our trip. While we had already been in the jungle, stepping onto a boat that would take us an hour away from any roads felt like stepping into the true wilderness. Some say Tortuguero is Costa Rica’s own “mini Amazon” with its rivers and canals slithering through tropical jungles teeming with all kinds of creatures. Besides sea turtles, it’s particularly known for its jaguar population, although they are rarely spotted. But they’re out there. And that just made me giddy to think about. One guide I talked to who grew up in the area and spends pretty much every day in the rainforest said he’s seen them about a dozen times in his entire life.

To get a grasp on what else is out there, I leaned on the iNaturalist app quite a bit. You can search for any species, genus, family, etc. for any given area and see observations that people have submitted, which are then vetted by expert community members who validate them as “research grade” sightings funneled into a database for scientists to do their fancy studies and such. When you sort them by most frequently observed you can get a pretty quick idea of some species you might encounter. I did this for each of the areas where we’ll be staying across some of the main groups, like snakes, lizards, frogs, birds, and mammals. Here’s what we were in for in Tortuguero:

Of course, animals generally don’t like being seen by scary humans so we would only see a handful of these, but again, they’re out there. And knowing that this was the closest I had ever come to wild eyelash vipers and strawberry poison dart frogs already had me stoked.

Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been another amazing tool specifically for learning about birds around us. You can hit a button to start recording and it matches bird sounds around you with thousands of bird sounds in its database. I just left it on throughout the day to discover birds like great green macaws, toucans, hummingbirds, Montezuma oropendolas, and others were right by us, and then we’d pull out the binoculars and start searching.

One neat thing about Costa Rica is that the whole tourism industry is basically centered around their biodiversity, possibly more so than any other country on Earth. Its vibe is basically like if Rainforest Cafe was a country.

It wasn’t always like this though. In fact it used to have one of the worst deforestation rates in the world, but by 1980s they took aggressive measures to reverse this by establishing national parks and protected areas (over a fourth of the entire country’s land), creating biological corridors to connect fragmented ecosystems, and investing heavily in environmental incentives to pay landowners to conserve or reforest their land, in part funded through a gasoline tax. Beyond this, they leaned into branding as an “eco-paradise” to attract nature nuts like me, along with certification systems to rank hotels and businesses on sustainability.

You see the impacts of this everywhere. On the plane I saw at least a couple people with guidebooks for birds and other animals, and I was of course among them with my book on Reptiles of Costa Rica. Walking around our hotel of Tortuguero, it was common to see people walking off the paths to poke around a tree or bush for some lizard or other creature they spotted, or pointing their eyes up towards the trees where a macaw or toucan had landed. Usually I feel like a total weirdo walking around a hotel property at night with a flashlight looking for snakes, but here there’s nothing weird about it as lots of tourists are eager to see the nocturnal animals and roam around even in the darkness. Many hotels offer guided “night walks” specifically for this purpose.

Another example was when we were driving towards La Fortuna after Tortuguero and saw a line of five cars and a small bus pulled over with a dozen people or so pointing up at something in a tree. Of course, we pulled over to see what the fuss was about and someone told us there was a “perezoso,” one of Costa Rica’s most beloved animals: the sloth. I frantically got everyone out of the car and ran over when it hit me that there really wasn’t a rush. This was a sloth after all and it wasn’t going anywhere, too quickly at least. And what a cool creature it was.

But the highlight so far was something I wasn’t really expecting.

Life Against All Odds

I’ll be honest -- as much as I’m into my biodiversity and especially reptiles and amphibians, I figured most people were probably exaggerating a bit when they’d describe seeing the sea turtles do their nesting as a “moving” experience.

Well, I was way wrong about that. To be fair, I’m rather easily moved, but still, I was caught off guard when we saw it for ourselves our first night at Tortuguero. It was around 10pm on a beach just minutes away from our lodge under a moonless sky that was just glimmering with stars, and we huddled in groups of eight people per guide as required by law, all in dark clothes, no lights, no cameras or phones aside from a red flashlight the guides used. And for the first 30 minutes or so we just waited.

“She’s almost ready” the guide kept telling us. The humidity was absolutely sweltering and we were all pretty uncomfortable, but apparently just 50 feet or so away from us was a green sea turtle digging in the sand, getting ready to lay her eggs, and that’s what we had all paid to see. The turtles are what make Tortuguero such a special place after all as one of the biggest turtle nesting sights on earth and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Between the months of July and October tens of thousands of turtles swim across thousands of miles to this 22-mile stretch of land where the sand and climate are just right for incubating millions of little turtle eggs. Our guide said around 1000 mother turtles will lay their eggs within that stretch of land on some nights.

We would see just one of them.

I think most of us have heard about the poor baby turtles that rarely end up surviving past their first few minutes of life — gobbled up by birds, crabs, ants, and other predators just waiting for the buffet to hatch — but the numbers were even more staggering than I’d realized.

“One in a thousand will survive” the guide told us. And each mother turtle may lay 100-150 eggs up to five or six times throughout the season, which — if my math is right — means a mother turtle will be lucky to have even one of her hundreds of babies survive each year.

The odds of reaching adulthood are even lower, with some estimates showing that 1 in 10,000 will live that long.

At one point the guide pointed his light to the shore where he spotted another turtle swimming back into the ocean. He explained that she had picked a spot where the beach was too steep to get out — as a small cliff of sand stood in her way. But he said she’d be back later to try again.

We finally lined up to have a turn observing the mamma turtle lay her eggs. We would each have 3 or 4 turns, and each would be less than a minute long. And wow, I’m not sure how large I thought sea turtles were, but it was so much larger than I expected, about 4 or 5 feet long and 3 feet wide. The guide pulled up one of her back flaps (or feet?) to give a view of where dozens of ping-pong ball-sized eggs were piled in a large hole in the sand. Every 10 seconds or so another one or two more would drop.

She was in a complete trance state the guide told us, which is fascinating to think about, just the fact that nature spawns beings such as this one that essentially follow a script provided by nature herself to spawn more beings. And eventually those beings hatch and run towards the water without any clue of the reason or what the hell this place even is.

Just run little guys, run. That’s what nature is telling you to do.

Once the eggs are all laid, the mamma turtle spends the next hour or so covering it up and just as much time camouflaging the area to keep it inconspicuous and safe from predators. I thought about the barn swallows we have back home where we’ve seen a mamma bird over the last few months first build the nest, then lay on her eggs, feed the chicks, and eventually move on once they fly out of that nest a few weeks later. And for an even greater contrast there are humans, which are probably the most extreme example in the animal kingdom, keeping our babies in our “nest” until the age of 18, give or take.

But once that mamma turtle walks back to the ocean, that’s the last interaction she will ever have with her babies.

Maybe that’s what made it feel so moving — just all that goes into bringing life into the world, all those miles travelled and all that time and effort crammed into this short window of time on this short stretch of land that I got to witness under a glimmering sky in the cosmos, all for just one little turtle to hopefully make it.

Or maybe I’m just an easily-moved ape spawned from a single sperm and egg that were paired together against staggering odds back in the day and eventually found its way to a place like this.

Maybe it’s that.

Anyways, I had a bunch more to share, but in the spirit of pura vida, let’s get back to living and save the rest for another one as I keep peeling back what this whole pura vida thing is all about.

With love from Planet Earth,

Doug

But now we’re back. Fun times.

This time I’m flying out from Austin, TX with my wife and two kids to a place that’s always been a dream destination: Costa Rica. I’m up for “recharge” at my company, which means I’ve been there long enough to earn a full 4 consecutive weeks off, and we’ll be spending 3 of them on this trip, renting a 4x4, and trekking through landscapes that span jungles and turtle-nesting beaches, volcanoes, cloud forests, waterfalls, and more. As a wide-eyed, curious wanderer and wonderer with a lust for life in the literal sense of holy-shit-there-are-living-things-all-around-me, I couldn’t be more excited.

Here are a few of those living things:

1. Eyelash vipers: This one is first on the list and one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to check out Costa Rica. These are some of the prettiest snakes out there, coming in vibrant yellows and greens and oranges, and they pack a venomous punch that makes them even cooler. I once met a guy who owned a few in Texas and would milk their venom, which he would then dilute and inject into his veins to build immunity (anti-venom is tough to come by for such a species in Texas). He told me that even at a hundredth of the potency it felt like injecting lava into his veins. Yikes. I don’t know what lava pumped into the veins feels like, but it’s probably not great. But I also gotta say, being able to inject lava into people is a pretty neat superpower, and I want to see one in the wild. Lucky for me, it turns out Costa Rica is one of the best places in the world to spot these guys, so that’s exactly what I plan on doing. I’ll be doing a couple herpetological tours with professional guides who can bring me to the hot spots. So you’ll surely be hearing more about that.

2. Other snakes: eyelash vipers deserved their own category, but there are so many other cool snake species in Costa Rica, the deadly Fer-de-lance, tropical coral snakes only found in Latin America, boas, snail-eating snakes, vine snakes, and a bunch of others.

3. Poison arrow dart frogs. Also a bunch of other neat frogs, like the red-eyed tree frog. So cool.

4. Sea turtle nesting: Our first stop will be in Tortuguero National Park, and we happen to be visiting during turtle nesting season, so I’m excited to get a glimpse at this ancient ritual in the sands of an area that is only accessible by boat with a guide. You’ll surely be hearing more about that too.

5. Birds: If you’ve spent more than a few minutes with me or my writings you’ll learn that I really like snakes (the first two points of this list may have been a dead giveaway), and I’m usually looking for them wherever I go. You’ll also know I usually don’t find any snakes. They’re sneaky little fellas and generally try to avoid scary animals like humans. Meanwhile looking beyond snakes, you can find a bird just about anywhere. So I’ve started dabbling in birding which has been pretty rewarding as you learn more and more about what’s around you. There are also some 11,000 species globally and many flow from one region to the next along their migratory pathways, and Costa Rica is a huge hot spots for all kinds of birds I may never have the chance to see again: toucans, macaws, unique hummingbirds, and if we’re lucky, the beautiful quetzal. Hopefully you’ll hear about that too.

6. Monkeys: Costa Rica has four species of monkeys, and the most common is the howler monkey. I just think it’s so cool that we have close relatives coexisting in the same area like that -- perhaps something locals eventually take for granted, but what an opportunity for someone like me. These guys have some gnarly tribal behaviors I hope to share more about as well.

7. Jaguars: I don’t expect to see any. In fact I hope we don’t see any in close proximity. But they’re around, especially in Tortuguero National Park where we go tomorrow. And that’s just badass to think about.

8. Sea life of all kinds: we’ll be ending our trip in Samara beach and plan to do some snorkeling and get a glimpse of … honestly I’m not sure. I’m not too well-versed in what sea life is around the area, but to me the ocean is basically like outer space and full of alien life everywhere you look, so I’ll be learning all about it along the way and will share more.

I think there may be another one or two hundred others worth mentioning, but this chair in the sky is approaching final descent into San Jose, and I’m going to pull the publish trigger before I go into a spiral of overthinking this post. Also I’m looking out the window and wow, I love Costa Rica and haven’t even landed yet. So much green and lushness that just feels nourishing at some deep level.

[side note: whew we did it. I officially posted something again after all these years, and it feels nice, even if there is another voice inside me screaming about how terrible each sentence is and how I wasn’t able to convey even 1% of all I wanted to say, but that’s just a silly way to keep living. This whole thing basically started as a public diary in the first place; there doesn’t need to be some fancy polished product or something. Just write cuz it’s fun, ya know?

In my original Life On a Planet blog, I ended each post with “Love always from planet earth” which for some reason feels far cheesier now than it did 10 years ago, perhaps cuz I’m 10 years older now, and at a material level most of my cells have been swapped out by now so I’m pretty much an entire new person with different words and phrases. But fuck it, keeping with tradition.]

Love always from planet Earth,

Doug