holy week

It’s Semana Santa, the holy week that ends with Easter Sunday. The kids are off from school, friends we made a small lifetime ago while serving in Moldova have come to Costa Rica for a visit, and we’re back on the road.

Many years ago, when we served in Kenya and welcomed more visitors than we could count, the archetypical vacation paired a few days of safari with some beach time. In Costa Rica, we follow a similar pattern, usually combining beach with tropical rainforest to give our guests a taste of the country’s amazing biodiversity. Frequently, we take advantage of such visits to explore new destinations. Costa Rica is small but has a seemingly limitless array of great options for nature-based tourism, so although we have been all over the country, there are still numerous places we have not checked off our bucket list. At the same time, we keep a competing list of our favorite locations, a number of which we have visited more than once.

This time around, we decided to combine two places we’ve visited previously and enjoyed immensely, spending most of Semana Santa on the beach in Uvita before heading to the cold, enchanting forests of Dota for a few nights of birdwatching. We first visited Uvita with S’s parents a couple of months after moving to Costa Rica. In addition to the beauty of this beach, which is a protected national park, what struck us most was the absence of the crowds we had experienced at other coastal destinations closer to the capital. Dota we have visited on two separate occasions, most recently sneaking away for a night without the kids a couple of weeks ago. In addition to the resplendent quetzal that makes its home there, Dota’s appeal lies in its proximity to San Jose. On arrival, we spirited our guests straight from the airport to the beach. We’ll do the same on the back end, driving straight from the forest to the airport to avoid wasting vacation time in the capital.

We did not have much of an agenda when we arrived in Uvita other than relaxing and revisiting familiar haunts. We went swimming and boogie-boarding and played frisbee on the beach; we grabbed empanadas and alfajores from the small Argentinian cafe whose fare is so good it gets rave reviews in all the guidebooks; and we went birding on a small family-owned patch of tropical forest. While rains typically pound Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast during the spring months, the Pacific coast is seared by sunshine. The ocean water was warm beyond belief, and to avoid burning to a crisp we only visited the beach early in the mornings and late in the afternoons. During the hottest part of the day, we played a ton of board games and cooled off in the pool.

We also expanded our horizons a bit, visiting a new beach in addition to the Uvita National Park, driving down to Sierpe for a mangrove wildlife viewing boat tour, and checking out the artisanal works in the far-flung indigenous community of Boruca. The latter has now been added to our list of places to revisit: apparently, the New Year’s festivities in Boruca, which last three days, are a sight to behold.