Four minutes to read.
Dear Travel Journal,
Until Costa Rica, I thought bears and I were transcendentally related. Bears and I are hard-wired to rest and relax, hibernate and hammock. Grizzlies and grizzled, middle-aged men seem to have a thing about conserving calories.
Thanks to Costa Rica, I now know that my true spirit animal is the sloth. A sloth is a whole other level of lazy.
Sloths sleep an awe-inspiring twenty hours a day. In common, sloths and I can be unpleasantly stressed out by humans. Like me when I leave the house to run routine errands, a sloth is disheveled, unsightly, oddly shaped.
Sloths are the animal kingdom’s Zen meditation masters. Waiting for a sloth to crawl along on a tree limb suspends time. Sloths are motivated to move only by the need to eat or shit.
Costa Rica is rich with them. Five million sloths. Roughly calculated, one sloth for every Costa Rican making it the unofficial national animal—a symbol of the good life.
A quarter of the country’s land mass is protected jungle. From my rope hammock suspended over my bungalow patio at the posh Lapa Rios Rainforest Eco-Lodge on the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica’s biodiversity unfolds like a romcom on an IMAX screen.
Costa Rica is home to more animal and plant species than Canada and America combined. For a lazy view of the copious flora and fauna, instead of a sweaty nature walk, I opt for a slow-paced, verdant version of a ski gondola ride Gliding among and through the lush foliage is peaceful, almost comforting—until the insects discover me.
My well-practiced survival instinct is avoiding hikes in the hinterlands, running white water rapids or bicycling backroads in search of picturesque pastures. Better to sleep late and devour an obscenely large room service breakfast in my cozy bungalow.
In the trees canopied above me, there’s a lot of monkey business going on. Spider monkeys swing from limb to limb, chase each other, chomp on ripened fruit, frolic with Cirque du Soleil-like precision.
A mother tapir and her baby are on the gravel path just twenty feet from my patio deck. I make a mental plan to joke with my kids about not noticing any candle wicks.
A bird of prey fishing for its next meal—perhaps a falcon or turkey vulture--hovers over the azure waters of Pavon Bay. My guidebook says nothing about its religion. Another groaner to tell Ben and Brittany.
A lizard squirms along an invisible freeway. Iridescent blue butterflies flit among the bushes. A flock of rainbow-colored macaws squawk.
A black ant the size of an eraser struts militantly along my patio railing. Nicknamed "the bullet ant," the threatening vibe is Clint Eastwood in the movie Dirty Harry.
The rainforest is so thick I feel like I’m under a colossal beach umbrella. Green leaves, green vines, green on green. Here and there, accents and undertones of brown like the piping on a soldier’s dress uniform.
Even with the blazing sun eclipsed, I know it’s there from the heat soaking into my pores. Fully committed to lazing through the day, I sink into the swaying of my hammock.
Slothfully speaking, there’s no reason to move.