Adventure Tours from Costa Rica to Panama

by William Burr

Now that travel is once again becoming more normal after the long hiatus from the pandemic, a visit to Costa Rica to look at the country as a potential expat home looms large on many people’s agenda. The agonizing postponement gave some of us time to research numerous websites extolling the country’s favorable climate, location, and diversity, its political stability, excellent medical care, and breathtaking scenery. For many, the fact that Costa Rica has no standing army is also a plus. Costa Rica takes that money and invests it in education, infrastructure, conservation, and health, making the country rank high in job opportunities, technology, and international wealth. Unlike the poverty that plagues much of Central and South America, Costa Rica’s population has one of the highest levels of literacy in the world and a stable middle class.

But research only goes so far. Almost every world traveler advises that a personal visit to any country you might think of moving to is not only necessary, but essential. There is nothing that can replace the gut feeling that this is right for you. A visit is invaluable to determine the country’s ambiance, how it feels, how it fits your style, and how it is when you have your eyes and hands on its very core.

To this end, many Costa Rican communities offer inexpensive tours where a prospective expat can spend a few days in their development’s sumptuous lodging. Visitors can investigate the homes offered, the neighborhood and even have time for some travel within the country to get a feel for moving around and visiting other cities, tourist sites, medical facilities, and exploring specific interests.

20 Years of Guided Adventures

To give our readers an idea of how this works, Steve Linder of Pacific Lots in southern Costa Rica (Pacificlots.com) has been running tours for 20 years and responded with information on his tours.

The company offers four-day and ten-day country tours of 10 to 15 people of either Costa Rica or Costa Rica/Panama. These tours focus 90% on tourism and 10% on real estate options for retirees, investors, or those looking to own a second home. Transporting them in a custom Mercedes van, they visit the most popular tourist destinations.

A favorite of everyone is the La Paz Waterfall Garden, located on the back side of the Poas Volcano, where you descend 1,000 steps through and near five tumbling waterfalls and mist-covered land bridges. Some people don’t think they will make it, but they always do. Fortunately, a bus brings them back up. It is a magical place with feeders everywhere, attracting some 50 species of hummingbirds. On the preserve, visitors can view an aviary, a trout farm, an old traditional home, and a butterfly farm. A sumptuous buffet is provided for a welcome rest in between. It is an example of Costa Rican food that emphasizes inexpensively priced organic, natural, and native products from free-range chickens with eggs with orange-colored yokes, to less fatty pigs, and never genetically modi- fied foods. Costa Ricans are unusually healthy, the elderly often living past 100 years.

On the tours, prospects visit a mangrove estuary, something most Americans never get to see. Among the dazzling maze of otherworldly mangroves are nests of hummingbirds and black hawks soaring above. Then there is a visit to Manuel Antonio Park and the Costa Verde Hotel that boasts more monkeys than people. Tours of a zoo, a coffee plantation, a private reserve in Dominical, and a river tour in Sierpe are included.

After crossing the border on the extended Panama tour, tour participants spend an afternoon in the funky little town of Boquete, a night in Santiago de Veraquez, a visit to the Miraflores Locks on the Panama Canal, as well as the Canal Zone museum, and Casco Viejo, the oldest section of Panama City.

The tours are composed of around a dozen people from all over, but mostly from the United States and Canada. Friendships are made and photos are shared with each other. No matter their age or nationality, no one wants to skip a single activity. In fact, some people take the tour more than once.

Pacific Lots is just one example of the kind of tours that go a long way toward answering the many questions a prospective expat has in an essential onsite visit to see if the country meets their specific needs. Tours are not only educational and fun, they can often be a deciding factor.