Curubanda Lodge, near Quebrada Grande in the hills of Guanacaste

“Don’t be afraid,” our guide tells us. “It’s a little steep and slippery on the way to the waterfall, but the horses know the way.”

We’ve already come up a trail so muddy the horses sank in past their knees. There were stretches so steep I’d been hugging my horse’s neck to keep upright.

But I wasn’t complaining—yet. We were riding through a dramatic landscape that few would associate with Guanacaste or even Costa Rica. Swaths of dense forest alternated with green hills that might be called rolling if what they were doing wasn’t a lot more dramatic–let’s call them rock-and-rolling hills.  The air was fresco – cool and fresh.  Cacao Volcano lay before us, with Rincon de la Vieja Volcano at our back.

David and I and the guide had started out from Curubanda Lodge, four comfortable cabins on the Finca Nueva Zealandia (New Zealand farm, for the area’s resemblance to that country). We were just over an hour from the baking-hot town of Liberia (the hottest in all of Costa Rica), where there’s an international airport and more banks per square meter than anywhere else in Costa Rica, and two hours from the party beach town of Tamarindo.

If you’re not crazy about extreme heat or spring-break style revelry, then Curubanda is a breath of fresh and cool air. At well over 2000 feet, it lies in a perpetually green valley between two volcanoes, and is sandwiched between two national parks—Rincon de la Vieja and the Guanacaste Protected Area.

The path to the waterfall at Curubanda Lodge

We’re riding through what they call bosque seco (dry forest), though you wouldn’t know it from the rain squalls and the clouds scudding through. “The clouds here haul ass,” says a local expat rancher from California who’s been here a decade and says that the area’s microclimates are so very micro that it can be raining out his back door when the sun is shining on his front yard.

This morning we’re riding 3 of the farm’s 22 horses, trying to catch of glimpse of the volcanoes’ steeply sloping cones, and marveling at the view from the ridges—we can see over multiple ridges in myriad shades of green, all the way to the where the Pacific would be if the haze of the lowlands wasn’t obscuring it today.

We’re well-fortified with a farmhand’s breakfast—eggs, gallo pinto (rice and beans), toast, a plate of fresh pineapple, papaya, apple, and watermelon, and a dollop of delicious fresh cheese (the farm is primarily a dairy, with 80 Holstein, Jersey, and Pardo cows).

Still, I’m not feeling too good about the steep and slippery descent to the waterfall. I guess I could dismount and do it on foot, but one of the reasons they encourage exploring the area on horseback is that hay culebras (there are snakes, including terciopelos (fer-de-lances) and matahueyes (literally “ox-killers,” aka bushmasters). The lodge has loaned us tall rubber boots, but still, I guess I’ll take my chances on horseback.

Our guide is William (lots of people around here have anglicized names, though they may speak no English and have no English heritage). He’s from Nicaragua originally –we’re not far from the border here, and the clouds we see probably formed over Lake Nicaragua. He carries a machete to whack away some of the branches encroaching on the trail, and to have a weapon against culebras.

I take a deep breath and give my horse, Palomo, a gentle kick so he’ll follow the other two, which have begun to slip and slide down the narrow, root-encrusted trail. It’s not my first time on horseback but it’s the first time I’ve seen how horses can slide stiff-legged for yards and then right themselves. The horses nimbly pick their way over fallen trees, rocks, and through mud bogs.

We’re almost to the bottom of this steep stretch when the guide’s horse loses his footing. The rear feet slide out from under him and he goes down, sliding on his rump for several yards.

I pull my horse up short as I watch the spectacle. But William doesn’t bat an eye, just pulls up on the reins until his horse regains all four feet.

I turn to David. “I thought you said these horses couldn’t lose their footing.”

David laughs. “I guess I must have meant mules.”

Soon we dismount, clamber on foot down an even steeper stretch (No hay muchas culebras aqui, says William—There aren’t so many snakes right here), cross a small river, and round a bend to see a small waterfall cascading into a round pool. The mist from the falls drifts over to us, and we breathe it in, watching a blue morpho butterfly ride the currents of air produced by the falling water.

All photos by David W. Smith

The trail to the waterfall was steep and muddy, but it was worth the trip.

Treehouses Hotel in Costa Rica; photo by David Webster Smith

“There’s still enough light to walk down to the waterfall, says Mark, who, with his wife Lucy, manages the Treehouses Hotel in Costa Rica’s evergreen-and-wet Arenal area.

We’d arrived at 4 in the afternoon on a misty afternoon, and the sun sets here promptly at 6pm. “Look for the arrow made of sticks. It points to the tree where we saw a sloth yesterday.”

Mark, on sabbatical from his job as copy editor at the Honolulu Advertiser, is checking us in. His shorts reveal a tattoo on his calf: Dennis the Menace wielding a tennis racquet. “I played tennis in college,”” he explains. His wife Lucy, who quit her social worker job in Hawaii to make the move to Costa Rica, went to the same college I did in California.

“Are you a slug?” she asks me. I’m  not sure what to make of her query until  I remember that UC Santa Cruz’s mascot is the yellow banana slug.

Bejuca, the lab/Rottweiler mix, and Little B, a Chihuahua meets miniature schnauzer, weave between our legs as Mark tells us breakfast is served between 8 and 9 and that yes, the treehouses do move. “But don’t worry,’ he says.  “They’re secure.”

Treehouse Number 1

I’ll take him at his word. And later, as we climb the 25 steps to tonight’s lodging, each step a piece of a small tree sawed in half lengthwise, it does feel secure. In fact it reminds me of a fire lookout tower bolted to one tree and surrounded by dozens more. It feels secure, yes, but when I later try to put lipstick on before we go out for dinner, the intermittent swaying makes me wonder if I’m going to smear it across my face. Until I get used to the movement I feel a little seasick up in our treetop boat.

We’re in Treehouse 1, the highest off the ground at about 25 feet and also the most compact, with the main room dominated by a full-sized bed made up with clean white sheets that set off a bouquet of pink and red heliconia. Good thing we’re slim, because we have to squeeze by each other to get to the toilet, a little room off to the side with screens for windows and a pint-sized sink. A room off to the other side houses what’s known in Costa Rica as a suicide shower, with wires sprouting from the showerhead, which warms the water as it comes out. It’s tricky—you need to have just the right flow coming for the apparatus for the heating element to kick in. (We get hot water, but in the morning the water gives out. But hey, we’re in a treehouse. In Costa Rica.)

There’s also a loft, up a ladder, with a thin foam full-sized mattress. Kids would love it up there. The treehouses have a/c (which we didn’t need), a fan, a mini-fridge, a coffeemaker (with coffee), a small place to hang clothes, and framed photos on the hardwood paneled walls of local fauna—sloths, howler monkeys, butterflies.

The hotel has three treehouses. Number 3 is closest to the road (you can’t see it but sometimes you can hear the trucks changing gears), but it’s bigger than number 1 and has a wraparound deck. If I return I’ll ask for Treehouse #3, further from the road than #2, bigger that our ‘honeymoon suite” unit and with floor-to-ceiling windows that make you feel  like you’re in the open air but still protected from bugs. There’s also a family of fruit bats that hang out by day on the front porch overhang (they don’t come inside unless you invite them). The lofts in Treehouses 2 and 3 are also more spacious and have two twin mattresses instead of the thin piece of foam in Treehouse 1.

Sloth sighting

The walk down to waterfall is just 3 km round-trip, on a wide path that would accommodate a 4 x 4—the usual Costa Rica backcountry road—two concrete strips for the tires, nearly overwhelmed by the growth around and between them. Grey skies, with late afternoon sun edging some of the clouds with orange and gold.

We spot the stick arrow and follow where it’s pointing to a cecropia tree. And yes, there’s the sloth! A big ball of fur with a strange little face.  We watch it for a while but it doesn’t oblige with any tricks. Now don’t get me wrong– sloths are very cool little creatures, but watching one is like studying a mangy fur rug on a plank floor.

Further on, the path swings by a stand of giant bamboo, the hollow trucks arcing over the path a good thirty feet above us. Soon we could hear the rush of a river swollen with rain, and then we see it:  a  muddy torrent that doesn’t invite a swim but instead a gasp of appreciation for the force of nature that water is in this zona.

Up the hill from the river are a series of small waterfalls, cascading into man-made pools that might have invited soaking had they been a little clearer (rainy season makes all the waterways cloud up) and if either the air or the water had been warmer.

Mural at Treehouses Hotel; photo by David Webster Smith

Breakfast with the birds

The next morning, there’s a full Tico breakfast: egg, gallo pinto (rice & beans), a tortilla, yucca fried up in a delicious latticework, juice, fruit, and cup after cup of coffee. We sit outside under the overhang of the common building (not a treehouse) and are entertained by a fiesta of birdlife that has come to feed on the sugar water and platanos.

We see brilliantly colored hummingbirds, red-headed woodpeckers, wren-like birds with bright blue feathers, regal mot-mots (“No one messes with the mot-mot,” says David after watching bird interactions for a while), and the dun-colored robin, which is, ironically, Costa Rica’s national bird.