Costa Rica (travel)

If you go to Tamarindo, CR… make sure your accommodation is central enough so that you don’t have to drive to either the restaurants and shops in town or the beach. IF YOU TRY TO PARK ANYWHERE IN TOWN AS A GRINGO- you will be harassed by scammers in yellow vests demanding you pay them to “watch your car and keep it safe”. Others will box you in with multiple vehicles and then demand you pay them to get out. Also, watch EVERY charge on your card. They will randomly add 5-10 dollars to EVERY charge just because you’re a gringo. We stayed in La Fortuna and LOVED it. I wish we’d skipped Tamarindo altogether and gone anywhere else. And this thread is rabidly pro CR so I expect the downvotes to come raining down- but seriously, if you’re white, just skip Tamarindo unless you loveeeeeee being scammed constantly.

Hey,

my girlfriend and I just came back from a 4-week-trip to Costa Rica (and a little Panama). Our experience was a bit mixed to be honest.

Costa Rica is a beautiful country with incredible nature. We have seen lots of fascinating animals, I have experienced tropical rainforest for the first time ever and we have met some really nice, wonderful people.

That being said, we also had some negative experiences and for us they were just a few too many to gloss over.

It's very hard to disguise the fact that you're a tourist, especially when you come from a country that gets almost no sunlight and you have the complexion of a ghost. We often felt like people just saw two big bags of money when they looked at us and they would do everything they could to get the money out - except actually offer anything worthwhile in return. We were never robbed and we lost one or two things but we don't think they were stolen. But no matter where we went, people were relentlessly trying to trick us in a million different ways.

We've both travelled before, also to less wealthy countries (Guatemala, Peru, Namibia, Botswana...) so we were familiar with most of the typical tourist scams. But what we experienced in CR was on another level. Whenever we let down our guard just a little bit and decided to take advice or accept help from a local person, we had just fallen for another scam.

It really sucks to travel that way, permanently paranoid, hoping that the person you just paid will actually give you the change and the product, instead of running off with both. One time we were on our way to a national park when we came past a parking lot with someone waving a little red flag and gesturing us to park there. We were still a long way from where google maps was sending us, so we thought it was yet another scam and kept driving. Ten kilometers later, we realized that google maps had sent us to the wrong place, turned around and went back to the parking lot which turned out to be the official entrance to the park and they knew that google maps was wrong, so they set up people to help tourists like us find the way.

There was a constant stream of lies from almost everyone, everywhere. Before we bought SIM cards for our phones, we asked the cashier if he could activate them for us. He said yes of course, we bought them and then he had no idea how to activate them. We wanted to cross a small stretch of water, so we asked the boat taxi guy if he had change for a $20 bill. He said of course, and once we had crossed he only had $3 change for a $4 trip. If he had told the truth, we just would have bought a bottle of water at the nearby supermarket and come back with change, but no, he just had to lie.

Costa Rica is expensive. We knew that before we went, but we always understood it in a "premium prices for a premium experience" way. That's not the case. You just pay more (a LOT more) for very simple and barebones trips without any specials. We paid $60 each for a snorkeling trip with a large group. The boat took us a few hundred meters to one mediocre but easy to reach part of the reef, gave us really old and cheap snorkeling equipment and brought us back after an hour. That was it. Other experiences were similar or worse, it seems you just don't get what you pay for.

We almost constantly had the feeling that local people were looking down on tourists, especially those who were working in tourism. Yes, we had some trouble with Spanish but we were trying our best. I can't count the number of eye rolls we got when we were stuttering or looking for a word. In most countries we went to, people were delighted and very helpful when we made an attempt to speak the local language, even when it was much worse than our Spanish.

For us, the whole ecotourism thing was also mostly a hoax. There are little airstrips everywhere and they heavily advocate for flying, even to places where perfectly fine road connections exist. CR is a small country! Official national park guides would use high-power laser pointers and shine them directly onto wildlife to point them out to tourists. They would pick up fleeing snakes with sticks to show them around and make loud noises to provoke a reaction from monkeys or birds. Sinks and sometimes even toilets would often drain directly into the environment, within national parks.

In the end, the stunning nature mostly made up for the shitty people we met, so the trip still registers as a net positive experience for me. But I wouldn't do it again and I wouldn't advise anyone to go there, unless there's something very specific you want to see or do that only exists in Costa Rica.

We had a better experience in Panama, but we also spent a lot less time there, so maybe we were just lucky.

tl;dr: No recommendation for Costa Rica from me.