When my rod loaded with 20-pound test bends in half and an enormous fish erupts out of the water behind the boat, I believe. Several times the 100-plus-pound tarpon jumps clear of the earthy brown water, trying to shake the hook. And at least 10 times I reel him near the boat, only to have him muscle away and run 30 or 40 or 50 yards down-current. After 45 minutes, I'm finally able to get him close enough so Eddy's brother, Roberto, can reach into a mouth big enough to swallow a football, remove the lure, pat the still-feisty tarpon on its huge, coppery head and release him. Our last look at the great fish is as he's swimming south, which is also where we're headed.
Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge
The road to Tortuguero may be beaten up, but the one to Puerto Viejo has apparently been carpet bombed. By the time we arrive at Almonds and Corals Hotel - in the Gandoca Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge just north of the Panamanian border - I'm so used to zigzagging to avoid potholes that I have a tough time staying on the catwalks that connect the lodge and its 24 cabins. Called Almonds and Corals because the property stretches from the rainforest to a beach, staying here is like being on the world's most comfortable camping trip.
Each room is built atop posts under a large tent surrounded by trees loaded with mosses, vines, orchids and other air plants. The 360 degrees of screening allows 100 percent of the jungle atmosphere - including the de rigueur howler monkey wake-up calls - to waft in with the humid air while guests luxuriate in hammocks, canopied queen beds or even in-room Jacuzzis.
This southern part of the Caribbean coast is the beachiest, but the beaches here are - like much of the country - wild, with rainforest often reaching right to the shoreline. Some, like Playa Negra, are hot, black volcanic sand, and others have a warm golden hue. During the Costa Rican dry season (December through April), the sea is clear, blue and often calm, but now, in late November, the water is brown from river runoff. Big waves have the hang-loose set doing the happy dance, so we head back to Puerto Viejo, a reggae-vibed surf town that's Costa Rica's capital of Caribbean cool.
Puerto Viejo is a backpacker's heaven. Along with the surfing, the town is central to several national parks, Indian reservations and activities like canopy tours. Quiet upscale lodges such as Almonds and Corals lie just outside town, but the young and restless gravitate to the village and its funky collection of inexpensive beach hotels and jungle cabins which sit within staggering distance of the town's lively bar scene.
To see Costa Rica's largest swaths of virgin old-growth rainforest, we next head northwest to the Caribbean lowlands known as La Selva, "the jungle." Sueño Azul is a sprawling, horse-happy resort with stables for 100 mounts, including trail-riders for guests and paso finos that star in the weekly rodeo show on barbecue night. It's here that we literally get a bird's-eye view of Selva's rainforest.
As we're standing on a three-story platform about to hook onto a zip line for a high-speed canopy tour that gives my dad flashbacks to his paratrooper days, a fiery-billed aracari, cousin to the toucan, lands a few feet away and begins to feed with his Fruit Loop-colored canoe of a bill.
After zip lining, hiking Sueño's waterfalls and bumping across forest trails in a tank of a Land Cruiser, we collapse for a few minutes on the patio behind our room. A few yards away, a caiman slips into the water beneath a tree being climbed by an iguana that's almost as large as the laughing falcon that's cackling at us from across the pond. Between this and the nonstop sightings at Tortuguero, I realize that Costa Rica's Caribbean side offers some of the world's most laid-back yet rewarding wildlife watching.
That observation is further reinforced at Selva Verde, a nearby jungle lodge born 27 years ago when owner Giovanna Holbrook put herself deep into hock in order to save 500 acres of pristine rainforest on the Sarapiqui River. Talk about soft adventurers: We meet entire flocks of bird watchers who've planted themselves in rockers on the lodge's terrace to studiously tick off species after species while occasionally calling for drinks from the bar. We resist our inner sloths, though, and head across the lodge's swaying suspension bridge, over the Sarapiqui and into the fabulously vibrant jungle. Each step on these trails is a lesson in the magic of the rainforest.
Immense trees stand in meager, soggy soil, supporting themselves only via a wondrous array of buttresses, props and elaborate root systems that vein the jungle floor like a vast circulatory system. Testament to both Holbrook's conservation and the forest's exuberance is a colossal 180-foot-tall almond tree estimated to be 600 years old. What would have been the logger's grand prize lives on as Selva's ancient celebrity, its bat-adorned hollow - straight out of a dark forest fairytale - large enough to hold six people or 54 gnomes.
A flash of red amongst the mottled brown leaf litter catches my eye. It's a frog the size of my thumbnail, a strawberry poison dart frog. I'd been dying to see this famous Costa Rican amphibian, and it turns out that Selva is silly with them. We spot a male out in the open and calling for mates during the daytime - suicide for any normal frog in a place with so many snakes and birds.
But these candy-colored critters have no reason to hide since they're one of the most toxic animals on the planet. As soon as our eyes are tuned in to looking for them, we find dozens, some with cobalt blue butts and legs, others electric green and black - and, to give them that extra adventure-travel tingle, all potentially lethal.
Halfway through our hike, Abelardo, our Selva Verde guide, holds up his hand. "You don't want to step there," he says.
"Where?" I ask.
"That snake is a hog-nose viper, deadly poisonous," he says pointing at a log a few feet from my dad's boot.
We stare down and slowly, like a Magic Eye picture, the coiled snake comes into view. Wild. No fences, no lawyers and not a Disney character in sight.
**Courtesy of Caribbean Travel & Life Magazine
Travel to Costa Rica 
