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Adventure is out there -- and in here

Visiting a place in my childhood imagination

Asha Dornfest

Dec 20

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Arriving at San Pedrillo Station in Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica

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WHEN I WAS A KID I spent hours sprawled on the floor of my bedroom surrounded by tattered picture books. I read and re-read those books so often their bindings came loose and their pages were velveted by wear.

I spent entire afternoons deep in the jungle with wild things and Lost Boys and all manner of talking animals. My mom worried I didn’t play with my friends enough, but I was with friends. I wanted to be with Mowgli or Wendy or even naughty Max so I could go to those enchanted places myself.

That’s the feeling that came over me when I climbed onto the dock in Drake Bay, Costa Rica a couple weeks ago. It was as if I were no longer a globetrotting empty nester, but a wide-eyed kid stepping into a place that had only existed in my imagination.

We chose Drake Bay on the Osa Peninsula because it’s a particularly wild and biodiverse part of the country and our hope was to see birds and wildlife. To give you a sense of scale, the Osa was dubbed by National Geographic “the most biologically intense place on Earth.”

It’s not easy to get there. We took a propeller plane from San Jose to the local airstrip, then a 20-minute van ride down pitted dirt roads to a motorboat that ferried us to our lodge.

This wasn’t Indiana Jones nor were we roughing it; a travel agent set up the logistics and all we had to do was show up on time. Even so, the process of getting to Drake Bay woke up something in me that felt less like adventure travel and more like being lost in those old storybooks.

I took all these photos with my iPhone. Seriously.

We spent a week at the lodge hiking, birding and snorkeling. We floated through mangrove forests in search of wildlife. We went on a night tour with a genius guide who could locate animals in the pitch dark. Among other creatures, he spotted trapdoor spiders, tiny frogs and a sleeping butterfly.

Did you know scorpions fluoresce under UV light? That was the only photo I got on the night tour. It was smaller and less creepy than it looks here.

In the evenings, we listened to the monkeys, scarlet macaws, fruit bats and a hundred other creatures we couldn’t identify. More than once we were awakened by their calls.

We’re back in Portland now and recovered from whatever travel virus we brought home with us. (Not serious and not COVID, thank goodness.) Pebbles of rain are pelting my office window and I can hardly believe I was ever in the Costa Rican rainforest among these magnificent creatures. And that the long-forgotten adventures in my childhood imagination still live in me. ❖