Most Western visitors to Costa Rica cluster in the North West part of the country, predominantly in an area known as the Nicoya Peninsula. The area offers an ever increasing array of adventure sports in the jungle, coupled with pristine beaches, surfing and a high level of personal safety that is quite rare in Central America. A subset of these visitors also make their way over to the region increasingly known as La Fortuna (in fact, La Fortuna de San Carlos, to distinguish it from the thousands of other La Fortunas in Latin America).
Central America is legendary for its steep, childlike vistas of active conical volcanoes coated in sweeping rainforest. La Fortuna offers much of this landscape but, since the arrest of the near permanent eruptions from its impressive volcano in 2010, the region has been forced to entertain its tourists with a similarly multiplying range of ziplines, rafting and hanging bridges. This is all great for the visitors and brings a wealth of money into local businesses.
But if you want to see more of Costa Rica, away from the proverbial madding crowd, you have to make an effort to get away from these two hotspots in particular, amazing as they are. A (for now) lesser visited and certainly more authentic region is the mountainous backcountry in the far north of the country, adjacent to the border with Nicaragua and spanning a series of impressive volcanoes - namely Miravalles, Tenorio and, further afield, Rincon de la Vieja.
Tourist arrivals are certainly on the uptick in these areas, and the Tenorio Volcano National Park itself is gathering a lot of visitors these days for it incredible sapphire blue Rio Celeste and accompanying waterfall, but outside of the National Park itself the area remains relatively underappreciated, essentially a daytrip stop-over for groups ditching the Interamericana and taking the back road from the beaches of Guanacaste to the Arenal region around La Fortuna.
On the backside of Tenorio, the sleeping erstwhile farming town of Bijagua and its surrounding villages is quiet home to a collection of small and private ventures seeing cattle ranches and other farmland turned back to volcanic rainforest and high country wetlands, with incredible return of wildlife and spectacular opportunities for any burgeoning photographer of tropical wonders.
As May rolls around, Costa Rica, and indeed most of Central and Northern South America, becomes engulfed in progressively severe rainfall, washing away parts of the landscape, triggering mudslides and creating a very wet environment. It seems obvious that it rains in the rainforest, but the intensity can be hard to imagine during one of these deluges. Fortunately the tropical heat and inevitability of the situation largely mean you have to quite literally go with the flow.
Volcan Tenorio is subject to its own personal weather patterns, as many such severe peaks are. The rainforests on its slopes, and particularly those of the adjacent Miravalles formation, are dense and difficult to traverse away from the areas cut for visitors in the National Park. Exploring these areas requires a certain level of gall and assistance from some of the many fantastic wildlife guides found across Costa Rica.
Our intention was a little easier to get to grips with in many respects, though still required the fine quality of specialist knowledge from Bijagua locals. We were on the search for the Red-eyed Tree Frog - one of (if not the) - most representative animals of Costa Rica's jungle tourism industry, but one which can be notoriously difficult to find.
Broadly these surprisingly large frogs come in two flavours - Pacific and Atlantic variants. These have blue and brown lateral stripes respectively but are largely otherwise identical. One's relevant watershed isn't always obvious when you're up in the mountains away from the coast - the Pacific watershed is narrower than the Atlantic, traversing up to the Continental Divide and over into the Atlantic-species dominated zones surprisingly far west. The cut off can be really quite stark in places, especially in the cloud forests further south.
The coronavirus outbreak notwithstanding, Costa Rica's economy is diversified but the country has found a way to turn the rainforest to its advantage, and previously farming communities with their associated agro runoff and deforestation have reverted back to nature to try and entice sloth watchers and aficionados of bugs and reptiles literally into their backyards in some cases.
So it is around Tenorio where countless fincas (small farmsteads), many of which still produce fruits, vegetables and spices, or cocoa plantations that have found value in the many species that live around this particularly wonderful tree. The name of the game is crops that do well growing in, rather than instead of, the rainforest. Outside Bijagua a number of fincas have rapidly returned to secondary jungle growth (it is astonishing how quickly the land reclaims its jungles in this part of the world).
We arrived at the farm gate in the pouring rain, only to quickly find ourselves deep in steep sided, slippery mud microvalleys with streams and riverlets flowing all around. The enormous leaves shuddered as each giant raindrop struck them. Our local knowledge base, a young sabonero name Hector, marched on through the sheets of water as if it wasn't happening.
The clomping of solid gumboots was the only other sound apart from the rain - aside from the mud, reverted fincas are a hotbed of highly venomous snakes such as the terciopelo and palm vipers, so one much watch your toes with great care. Higher up the trees, the casts of the deafening Emerald Cicadas could be found on many branches - a brown, ghostly relic of their much more flamboyant creator.
Suddenly Hector stopped and tapped the base of a tall plant with his foot. Here, he told us, was prime habitat to find Tree Frogs, but they could be extremely well camouflaged. Very often when you walk through the rainforest, you may be surprised how few animals and signs of wildlife you see simply by looking around. Jungle creatures live in constant fear of ambush, and so their concealment strategies are incredible.
Most guides survey the jungle by sound, smell and probability; vision is a distant fourth. Drooping leaves are all around, but lift them up to check on their undersides and you will be astonished at the treasures you find. Hector carefully inverted several leaves finding enormous beetles, grasshoppers and myriad bugs and small lizards that we didn't even recognise.
Finally, we got lucky and found a particularly large-leaved tree. On the underside of these leaves was a solid green oval structure. A closer look revealed curled up arms and legs and the appearance of a snout - it was a tightly bundled up Red-eyed Tree Frog, sleeping out the exposure of the daytime and waiting for the night to begin its own jungle adventures.
Later, the frogs began to stir and we could make out the most incredible, vibrant red eyes and slow, deliberate movements of glistening green. Some were sited near patches of frothy frogspawn, stuck unceremoniously to the underside of a leaf, hidden from predators purely by luck. Males guard this spawn and attempt to ward off any interlopers.
A cautious wander along the cloud forests in the late evening reveal thousands of frogs in far more animated form than their daytime personas would have you believe. Sitting, poised on branches and spying the air for insect treats to eat. A multitude of species about in Central America, and many more are likely to be found in the years to come if they aren't wiped out by the twin perils of climate change and deforestation beforehand.
Central America's frogs are in fact, like many amphibians the world over, facing an existential crisis that is little-documented in the popular press but well known to zoologists, biologists and National Parks authorities across the globe. The devastating red-leg disease, an opportunistic Aeromonas bacterial infection, has wiped out entire species in the tropics without stopping.
The global panzootic is seemingly unstoppable and certain species have only been stopped from extinction by aggressively proactive biologists literally scooping them off the forest floor and safeguarding them in captive (and hermetically sealed) environments. Nowhere has this devastation been more obvious than in the twin tainted frog paradises of Costa Rica and Panama. Dart frogs, mantellas, tree frogs and many species in between have simply vanished - many are some of the most beautiful examples of these species.
There is hope for recover amongst those working hard to safeguard these species, but even if it were possible to engage the media in reporting the realities of climate change and its associated problems, frogs suffer from a lack of impact compared to other iconic mammalian and bird species. The red-eyed tree frog may counteract that somewhat on account of their near-global recognition factor.
Engagement swings both ways however, and the area surrounding Tenorio - as many high altitude jungle environments - is full of surprises even in the modern world. At the low-key, stunningly beautiful Tapir Valley wildlife reserve near Bijagua only this year a brand new species of frog was discovered and documented, apparently living only in the wetland area of the reserve itself.
Clearly this has implications for the conservation status of such a highly localised species, but it is a reminder of the enduringly fractal beauty of nature. Nowhere is this aspect of wildlife discovery more evident than in rainforest and wetland areas; simply put, the closer you look the more you see.
Many jungle animals - and especially frogs - are identified purely by the sound they make. In the blackness below the canopy, even in the day, it can be extremely difficult to spot wildlife. Savvy guides and rangers learn to listen, smell and feel their surrounds. In the claustrophobic thunderstorms of the high mountain jungles, identifying the source of such sounds is even more challenging.
Coming down from the higher regions of the Tenorio area into the finca below where we were staying, the immensity of Lake Nicaragua over the border to the north glittered on the horizon. Seeing definitive, massive geography from a distance is always an astonishing thing. The nearly unbroken line of forest heading to the border itself a marvel of nature.
The thunders rolled again and we steered down typically challenging, waterlogged and crumbling shale roads. Costa Rican driving away from the main highways is not for the faint of heart, exacerbated only by the darkness of night and the unpredictable risk of animal related collisions and dangerous unmarked ditches waiting to pull in stray vehicles.
We drove steadily, the windows down listening for the faintest sounds on the road - just as in amongst the trees, all senses are needed for driving these roads in the dark; and just as in amongst the trees the ever-present croaking of the multitude of frogs can be heard as an endless refrain. This essential component of the background to Costa Rican life is under threat of disappearing forever - and the many that never even notice it may not understand what they will miss.
All photography © Chris Milligan Photo. All views are my own. Seek local recommendations before photographing or approaching any wildlife.
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