How to escape Costa Rica’s exclusivity
Getting an Airbnb offers affordable way to enjoy playground for the rich
Some nights on Peninsula Papagayo, on the northern Pacific side of Costa Rica, the moon shone so bright, with so little evidence of human life, that I felt like an interloper just for bearing witness, for breathing through its stillness. Then I would remember how much it cost to be able to look at that moon from this particular part of the world and the poetry was quickly shattered.
If this bio-diverse Central American country has branded itself as a playground for rich North Americans — 40 per cent of its tourists come from the United States — then Peninsula Papagayo in the Guanacaste province is where the ultra-rich go to avoid having to interact with the regular rich.
The 1,400-acre luxury resort area is in a tropical dry forest, 70 per cent of which is conserved as open green space. Guard stations and miles of cliffside roads separate its dwellings from any public byway.
A night in a basic room at the Four Seasons, which is part of a development group that controls most properties on the peninsula, would set me back more than $1,445 (U.S.), with taxes and resort fees. A night at its most expensive estate home goes for $34,500 in peak season.
Beyond the Four Seasons, one can stay in private condos (more expensive), properties managed by Exclusive Resorts (more expensive), and the Andaz, the “budget” option, where the cheapest room I could find for a single night came in at $735 (resort fee and tax included).
Extreme beauty does come with those price tags. I checked in for my one-night stay at the Andaz in an open-air reception area perched on a cliff above the ocean.
Soon, though, I began to feel trapped. A laundry mix-up left me without pants and after an hour of waiting for help from a bellman, to no avail, I was forced to wrap a towel around my waist and wrest new pants from the trunk of my car myself. (The laundry bill was $34 for five items.)
Fellow cheap people: There is hope. I got three nights of terrific sleep gently rocking away on a $245-a-night yacht I’d found through some miracle of Airbnb, docked at Marina Papagayo. Low-key and just a 10minute walk (and, weirdly, a 30minute drive) from the Andaz, the marina has a dive bar called The Dive Bar and it offers hotel rooms starting at $169 a night. Bonus: laundry is $2 a load.
The yacht also had a surprise that became the best part of Costa Rica for me. I knew from my communications with the owner that Alvaro Alvarez, a 21-year-old sailor, would be letting me onto the boat. I didn’t know that he’d speak no English and he’d be my roommate the whole time, sleeping on a pad on the floor of the upstairs helm.
Confusion turned to delight as I came to rely on him for his funny observations of the area’s extreme wealth, for the way he’d shout out “Dime!” (“Tell me!”) whenever I’d call out his name. He told me about his life in the coastal city of Puntarenas, where he has a new wife and a 6-month-old son. I told him why I was in Costa Rica, and he was eager to guide me.
With his help, I found out how to enter the peninsula through adinner reservation at Poro Poro restaurant, run by Exclusive Resorts. (Marina employees told me they do the same thing with lunch reservations at the Four Seasons’ trio of restaurants.) A short beach hike from the marina allowed me to spend a whole day at one of the Andaz’s outdoor restaurants using its fast Wi-Fi. The only hitch was when I stayed after dark and had to ask the hotel staff to drive me back because the walk had become “muy pe- ligroso” (very dangerous).
Every beach in Costa Rica is, by law, a public beach. But in two years of working in the marina, Alvarez told me he’d only seen the beaches on the Four Seasons property once — and the trek had been so arduous he didn’t think he’d ever do it again.
The Costa Rica I’ll treasure is the one Alvarez and I visited on our road trips. One took us 45 minutes south to Playas del Coco, a populist beach filled with soccer-playing construction workers and fishermen just returning with their catch. On our way to another free beach, Playa Hermosa, Alvarez jumped a fence to gather green mangoes that he sliced up and served with lime and salt for dinner.
On my last day, we made an epic drive across the island. He needed to go home to see his wife and child — he’d normally hitchhike, then take two multihour bus rides — and I needed his help navigating a civic festival in Guanacaste’s capital city, Liberia, in which everyone rides their horses through the streets, and then to a bar where they don’t have to dismount to grab a beer.