Costa Rica, the Other Coast

The Costa Rica most American travelers come home having seen is the country with the service economy installed for them. The country itself is six hours east. On Route 256 at four-thirty in the afternoon, late dry season, the light comes in horizontal through the palms and the volunteer with the hand-lettered sign waves you to a stop. A three-toed sloth is crossing the road. He has been at it for thirty minutes. Behind him the Caribbean coast runs nine more kilometers to Manzanillo, past beach bars that close on Mondays and a national park whose entrance fee is whatever you feel like leaving in the basket. The road is two lanes; the cellphone signal is not.

This is the load-bearing claim of the seven- and ten-day variants, and it is not a claim against the Pacific side. The Pacific side is real and worth its three days. Arenal is a real volcano, and the 1968 lava trail at sunset, less crowded than the main park entrance, still smells faintly of the eruption when the dust kicks up. Monteverde's cloud forest at six in the morning, before the buses arrive, is the hour the resplendent quetzal sometimes shows. Tabacon hot springs after the day-passers leave at six are the version of Tabacon worth paying for. The five-day variant of this trip is a Pacific trip plus one San Jose night. It is honest about what it does not include.

What changes east of Limon is not the country's beauty but its grammar. The forest is wetter and noisier. The reggae stays on past midnight in Puerto Viejo. The road narrows to one lane near Punta Uva and the cellphone signal goes. The sloth-crossing volunteer is not a tourist attraction; she is a neighbor managing traffic on her own street. The grocery store sells coconut bread and the rum shop next door has been there since the 1970s. The country speaks an English-Creole here, eats rice cooked in coconut milk, and the Afro-Caribbean community has lived on this coast for two centuries.

Cahuita National Park runs on donation entry and has since the 1990s, when the community fought to keep the gate open after the government tried to monetize it. The coastal trail is flat and shaded. Howler monkeys complain in the canopy and the reef offshore is the only one in Costa Rica you can snorkel from the beach. North of there, Tortuguero is reachable only by boat, and on the right week between July and October a green turtle the size of a coffee table will haul itself out of the surf at midnight to lay eggs in the sand. South of Puerto Viejo, the Bribri cooperative at Yorkin runs a cacao day from their territory, and the money stays in their territory.

The ten-day variant gives the coast the weight it deserves. Most American travelers do not realize that the Caribbean side runs on a different rain calendar from the Pacific. September and October, the wettest stretch on the Pacific, are the driest on the Caribbean. If you are traveling in green season, the coast east of Limon is where to be. The seven-day variant compresses to a Caribbean coda, three nights in Puerto Viejo and a Route 256 afternoon, and even that is enough to know.

What the Pacific does not tell you about Costa Rica is that the country has a second story, and the second story is the one with the slower clock. Five days is enough to do the first trip well. Ten days is enough to come home talking about Manzanillo at four-thirty instead.