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.