La Fortuna Loops and Vipers
When I was originally looking into Costa Rica as a destination for us to visit, I watched some Youtube videos and started to get this weird feeling after a few of them. Like, when I think about Costa Rica — or really any country for that matter — I think of a place with endless layers to explore that gets the explorer in me just yearning to delve into it all (they say “delve” has become a tell-tale sign that something is written by AI, but — for the record — I’ve been delving into the word ‘delve’ way before AI got here. I also love em dashes).
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