The first time I hiked into the dry tropical forest along the Tamarindo Estuary, I found a narrow trail and a sign warning of crocodiles. Although I searched, unfortunately, I never found any crocodiles. I did find many reptiles, colorful birds, and unique plants, along with trash, lots and lots of trash. Costa Rica’s lush landscape contains 5% of the Earth’s biodiversity, and nearly one-quarter of its land base is protected in some kind of park.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Officially, this forest along Estero Tamarindo is part of Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas de Guanacaste, a national park designed to protect the Pacific Coast’s largest nesting colony of threatened leatherback sea turtles. It’s also the end of a watershed which carries refuse and agricultural chemicals from Costa Rica’s rural Guanacaste province and the high-traffic tourist town of Tamarindo. Of course, trash gets washed downstream.
The park was only established in 1991, and this estuary section doesn’t seem to get cleaned too often. Between the estuary and the ocean stands a commercial development named Palm Beach Estates, in an area often referred to as its beach name, Playa Grande. My family vacationed here this January for the first time. The area combines high-end residential homes with smaller rentals, hotels, bars, restaurants, and surf shops. As the place becomes more upscale and experiences increasing visitation, the remaining jungle lots get turned into houses, and more tourists like us come. We hike. We fish. We take scenic trips on flat-bottom boats with local bilingual guides, and we leave trash. Locals do, too, when they come here to fish.
The trash contains all the usual suspects: Plastic water bottles, plastic soda bottles, beer cans, glass jars, foil snack wrappers from crackers and cookies, empty bags of chips, and plastic packaging from fishing lines and lures. There’s also construction material that workers have dumped from the adjacent residential lots, turning this narrow national park into a landfill. Things decay slowly in the Central American jungle, and these cut palm fronds, Tyvek bags, and piles of rock weren’t going anywhere unless people moved them, so I decided to.
I was an ecotourist. This incredible country has designed itself to attract ecotourists to help drive the local economy, while protecting the country’s unique renewable resources. While Costa Rica monetizes and celebrates its natural wonders, though, ecotourism comes at a cost: foot traffic, car traffic, roadkill, airplane exhaust, noise pollution, residential development, increased cost of living for Ticos in towns like Tamarindo and Liberia. The other cost was strewn among the spiny trunk trees and in the shallow water.
On this January morning, after feeding my daughter and her cousins breakfast, I went to the forest looking for critters. I’d seen the estuary on the map. To me, the green protected block resembled an opportunity to hike my first jungle and mangrove habitats. Costa Rica was already hot at 9am: 80% humidity, with a high in the low 80s. Having grown up in southern Arizona, I liked the heat. It invigorated me. The cold in my adopted home of Oregon made me sluggish.
By the muddy boat dock at the estuary, I veered into the dry forest by the “Precaución Cocodilos” sign. The neighboring hotels and rentals were quiet. No one walked this narrow path. The thin trail cut through the many tangled vines and trees. As dry leaves crunched underfoot, lizards scurried at my approach. Birds sang overhead, and one flew past with wispy plant material in its beak, which it used to build its nest.
A huge iguana sunned itself in a tree branch over the water and watched me cautiously as I passed, nervous about getting trapped. Crabs darted across the mud flats—hundreds of tiny crabs on some open places, their movements becoming blurs as their size and number made it impossible to focus. The tiny mangrove roots poked from the mud, just like I’d seen in photos. I’d always wanted to see a real jungle and a real mangrove, and here they were, side-by-side on the estuary. It wasn’t long after that the trash started appearing.
An Alpina agua purificada bottle by a coconut shell. Bright blue Tyvek poking through the mud. A red and green Bohemia beer can wedged between tree roots. Once you start noticing trash, the trash appears everywhere, and your perspective shifts from your nature experience to your actual experience. The illusion of a seemingly natural wild forest in natural Costa Rica changes, and you see the land for the beautiful, inhabited, impacted one that it is. Just because no houses or roads have penetrated a preserve doesn’t mean human beings haven’t altered it. Trees create a buzzing habitat for animals to live in, but the forest’s health could still improve.
A square Gatorlyte bottle, a tall Fanta Kolita bottle, a crushed clear plastic cup—after I put a few empties in my pockets, I realized I needed bigger equipment to haul this out. Then I found a plastic grocery bag on the ground. This is a Catholic nation, and in the kind of irony that only God’s great script could write, the letters on the bag said “Reduce, reuse, recycle” in green, around a chasing arrow symbol. The arrows meant nothing. The cycle of reuse had clearly ended here in the forest, instead of a landfill. I started piling single-use plastic bottles into the bag until it filled up. Then I found another bag and filled that too—trying to give these wasteful bags one more life to do good rather than harm.
For the rest of my trip, before the heat peaked, this became my routine: I hiked the Estuary in the morning and removed trash. After three hikes, I hauled out five bags of garbage and mostly cleared a large section of the forests along the estuary. As I stepped over downed trees and watched for snakes, I wondered: What is our responsibility to a place as a visitor? Do we have a moral obligation to leave a travel destination in better condition than we found it?
Human beings leave an impact everywhere we go, and back in the U.S., the so-called conscientious consumers reduce that impact at home by supporting responsible businesses, using canvas tote bags instead of single use shopping bags, using refillable bottles instead of plastic bottles and paper cups, biking instead of driving, and avoiding unnecessary waste like plastic straws. But what about tourists? As campers we pack out our trash with “leave no trace” ethics, so why shouldn’t we as first world tourists of privilege do the same as hikers in another country?
Trash is just the way of the world. Litter is everywhere back home, too. But it still made me mad to see so much trash in nature. Costa Rica’s landscape had enchanted my family and I and helped us make irreplaceable memories. The local people’s time and labor had facilitated that—not to mention how they laughed and chatted with us gringos everywhere we went.
I had the time, energy, and the desire to clean this little piece of protected Costa Rica, so I decided to. I hauled all the stuff out for people like her and me and the residents, so they could have a different experience in Costa Rican nature. I did it for the people of Costa Rica—all our cashiers, cooks, tour guides, and hosts who have to live long after we tourists left. And I did it for Costa Rica’s plants and animals, because they can’t help themselves, and it’s the right thing to do.
We tourists can have our memorable experiences. We can drink our fancy cocktails, we can see our wild animals and buy our tourist trinkets while also keeping the Costa Rican landscape clean by repairing it ourselves. Would you go to dinner at a friend’s house and not offer to at least carry the dirty dishes into the kitchen? Pura Vida, right?
A little flat bottom tour boat drifted through the water one morning, carrying tourists who wanted to see the estuary’s natural wonders. They looked for caymans and monkeys while I gathered trash. They watched me through the mangrove roots, and I waved. In the Pacific Northwest where my family lives, logging companies leave trees standing along the roads and highways where they grow tall and thick, and behind that green wall, they would keep clearcutting forests. This is a trick.
The dense forest along the roadside are thick enough that you cant always see through it, and it gave the average citizen the illusion that the land around them are healthy. Look, passersby think, the forest is thick and green here! Never mind that behind it was an apocalyptic landscape of stumps and denuded slopes. This mangrove swamp provides a similar experience. As tourists boat by in the Estuary, they see the green wall of roots and vines. Hopefully they see critters and monkeys jumping through the canopy and vultures circling overhead. But behind the green wall, among the tangled roots, was reality. Once you get close to the landscape on foot, you see all of its imperfections.
On my Friday hike, I stepped through the vines and searched for snakes. As I looked down at the desiccated wings of a dead vulture on the ground, an owl flew over my head and landed in a branch close enough that I could get a good look at it. I watched a heron hunt fish from just feet away. The sound of monkeys drew me deeper into the forest, and I found a large family of them high in a spiny cedar tree. I watched them till my shoulders hurt, and I couldn’t stop smiling. Nearby, an entire plastic takeout container covered with dust and leaves stood in the shade of a tree, unable to decay like the leaves beneath it. Based on the volume of trash on dry land, surely a lot was in the water too.
The next morning, our family took a boat tour of the estuary. Our guide, Iban, grew up in a small town 10 minutes outside of Tamarindo, named Santa Rosa. Before grocery stores gave his family access to chicken, pork, and beef, his family ate wild game, including armadillo, crabs, and iguana, and he offered us interesting facts about nearly every animal. He showed us crocodiles among the dense roots, racoons hunting crabs. In a narrow channel, Iban pointed to a huge, round termite colony suspended in a tree. “I have eaten termites as a child,” he said. “Tastes like carrots, not chicken!” When we docked to hike a forest, he showed us epiphytic cactus that grew on coiled acacia trunks and monkeys snoozing overheard. “I can’t believe we saw an actual crocodile!” my daughter told me. Me either. The view from the water was an incredible complement to my experience on the trail.
While my daughter studied the scenery, quietly, Iban leaned in and told her, “I’m very impressed with you senorita, because you love a lot of nature things. A lot of the kids like her think about other things, like playing and games. But she likes nature things.” She looked proud. I certainly was.
As we left a narrow back channel, the view opened onto wide open water, and we saw a heron fishing and a soaring black hawk. Then our guide pointed to a white bird in the distance, perched in a tree. Everyone’s head pivoted that way. “I was gonna say white Ibis,” said Iban, “but it’s a bag, a plastic bag.” Someone had tied it to a tree branch and stuffed their plastic fishing line package and potato chips in it. The following morning, I fetched that bag and threw it away.
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