It’s the morning of our last full day and we’re 10 miles off the mainland, snorkeling and freediving the waters around Cano Island. “It’s the second-best reef in Costa Rica,” Mariela Olmos, a passionate freediver and Ballena Tour guide says. Dipping beneath the surface, we swim amongst stingrays, a Hawksbill turtle, and slender, white-tipped reef sharks.
Chatting to Mariela about the chalky white coral says she’s watched it fade over a decade. But she and her friends do what they can to protect it, as I discover when she takes us to Playa Hermosa beach.
Pulsing house music leads us to a crowd surrounding DJ decks on the sand and in the middle is Angela Delgado, the founder of ocean conservation charity AmbiciOsas. “We’re here to make noise,” she says. Every other week they gather a crowd with megaphones, a resident DJ, and social media posts for a beach clean-up party.
“We had enough of the rubbish and turtles tied up in plastic,” Angela tells me. In 2002, she and her friends began clearing 70 kilos of washed-up trash twice a month. Now there’s only 12 kilos each time. Since then, AmbiciOsas has opened the first research and recycling center in Costa Rica’s South Pacific, and started running ocean conservation workshops for businesses and kids.
It’s our final morning, and instead of preparing for our 132-mile drive to the capital’s airport, we take it easy. It’s the perfect time to get a ‘pura vida’ tattoo on my arm, a permanent reminder to take things as they come and lean into the good life. It proves helpful when we realize there’s not enough car battery to get us to the airport. But we make it there, in the end, an hour before departure.
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The writer was hosted on a personalized, 14-day self-drive Costa Rica tour with Green Circle Experience which includes an electric rental car, eco-lodge stays, and free EV charging at partnered hotels.
