Our first ten days in Costa Rica were fairly packed with activity — from spending time with lots of family to zip lining to snorkeling to seeing lots of creatures in the wild. So we were due for a little break. We got just that in Playa Hermosa.

This was our first stop on the Nicoya Peninsula in northeastern Costa Rica. We’ll probably spend a couple weeks exploring the peninsula, which is chock full of beaches, surf spots, and a laid back tourist scene.

We made a three-day stop in Playa Hermosa. It’s a quiet place with a lovely curve of a beach between jungled headlands. Not a lot to do here, but we caught up on reading, caught up on sun, and had a couple exceptionally good meals. From here we’ll head down the coast a bit to the more lively surfer town of Tamarindo, where we look forward to spending Thanksgiving with some of our old neighbors and friends from Cambridge.

After five days in Manuel Antonio, we headed for the Osa Peninsula in the far Southwest of Costa Rica to get a taste of remoteness and wildlife. The peninsula is one of the hardest places in the country to get around, so we opted for the easy route — two surprisingly quick and easy flights. After landing in Puerto Jimenez, it took almost an hour to travel by car the 22 km to our lodge on some pretty rocky roads.

The Bosque del Cabo lodge sits right on a corner of the peninsula, high on a bluff with two beaches down below. On one side you can hike an hour through the jungle to some calm, lovely beaches of the Golfo Dulce. Heading the other direction, you can hike down a steep set of hundreds of steps to some more dramatic beaches right on the Pacific ocean.

But we were really here to see some of the incredible diversity of wildlife that Costa Rica has to offer, and the area did not disappoint. Just sitting around the lodge we’d encounter the continuous drama of traffic coming and going at different parts of the day. Toucans, macaws, hawks, and hummingbirds rustle in the trees and flowers. Spider monkeys prowl the trees, while howler moneys occasionally startle with their deep groans in the distance.

But we really got to appreciate the cycle of life through a couple incredible tours with Philip, an English-born biologist who has lived here at the lodge for 15 years. We were quite captivated by his passion for the primary rain forest, with all its intricate relationships between plants, animals, insects, and reptiles.

Just ants alone are fascinating! I’ve seen leaf-cutter ants carrying their leaves in long processions quite a few times. But here we learned about the unbelievably complex operation they are running. Their home is a massive hill housing five to eight million leaf-cutter ants.

They are all the offspring of a single queen. She lays massive batches of eggs every day to create legions of workers of different castes — those who cut and transport leaves into the nest, soldiers who protect them from enemies, workers who cultivate the leaves, etc. The leaves are composted to create and environment to grow a fungus that is the staple diet of the colony.

We also did a night tour with Philip to get a glimpse of some of the creepier, crawlier residents of the forest. We saved this for the last night so that we didn’t have to think about all these characters quite as much while sleeping among them! We saw bats, a tree snake, a scorpion, a worrisome variety of spiders, and some truly fascinating frogs.

This is an incredible place, and it’s been fascinating to scratch the surface of what goes on in nature. Far too many of these forests are being destroyed in the world, and we feel deep gratitude to those who fight to protect all of this.

Before we started this adventure some 18-plus months ago, we had at various times, been in all seven Central American countries. Oddly, though, the country we’d spent the least time in was Costa Rica, which many people say is one of the great tourist destinations in the world. So with a few weeks before joining family in San Diego for the Holidays, we figured Costa Rica was a perfect destination. And with our first stop under our belt, it sure looks as though it was a good choice.

To be honest, we have to thank my nephew Carl and his wife Hannah for the suggestion. A few months ago they decided to take their eight kids (yes, you read that right) to Costa Rica for a month and asked if we were going to be anywhere in the area. My first question was “What parents take their kids to such a cool place for a whole month, to say nothing of eight kids?” My second question was “How is that my nephew and his wife became those cool parents?”

At any rate, much of their trip was going to overlap with our time in Mexico that we’d already booked, but we realized that if we hurried down from San Miguel de Allende we could get there for the last three days of their stay. And to our delight there was a nice resort right next to the house they’d rented near the park so it worked perfectly.

Carl & Hannah live up in Fairbanks, Alaska, so we don’t get to spend a lot of time with them. And while three days at the end of the month-long trip isn’t a lot we packed a lot in, including one day zip lining with Carl, the two oldest boys, and Hannah’s sister who was along, too, and another day trip on a boat for snorkeling and assorted water merriment.

The most fun, though, was just hanging out with the family. Some people might think eight kids (ages eight months to 12 years) is a lot, but it was really fun. Particularly amusing was not note that Carl & Hannah are really not hovering, helicopter parents; presumably with eight kids that’s just not possible. So the kids take care of themselves and each other when the parents are busy with other things. Of course, being both adorable as all get out and well behaved doesn’t hurt.

After the zip lining and boat trip, we took Carl & Hannah out to dinner for their last night in Costa Rica while Hannah’s sister Chelsea stayed with the kids. I’m not sure how much they enjoyed the quiet time for adult conversations but I sure did. At one point during our visit I’d noticed how odd it was to notice that your little nephew was starting to turn gray. After that dinner I noted how nice it was to actually get to know your nephew and his wife. All in all a wonderful visit.

Then we had a couple days on our own, so we actually went into the Park itself. It’s a tiny national park – at under 5,000 acres it’s the smallest national park in Costa Rica – but spectacularly beautiful, occasionally making lists of the best parks in the world; as Lonely Planet puts it, “…a stunning destination worthy of the tourist destination.” And stunning it was, as beautiful and perfect a beach as any we’ve seen, which is saying something.

But now we’re done with Manuel Antonio and headed south to Corcovado National Park on the Osa peninsula, a more isolated location for some hiking, maybe white water rafting, and whatever else you do in a remote jungle. We think there’s no Internet there, so we may not be back here for a while.