Essay: Can we really leave no trace when we travel?

I was one of those visitors who planned to spend a lot of time at the beach, but I should have taken the waterfalls more seriously. Our hosts took us to Nauyaca Waterfalls, some of the biggest and most stunning cataratas in this part of the country. A Tico family has owned the property for many years, and you can rent horses from them or do the hike by yourself. We walked the hike on foot, and I’m glad we all wore good water shoes. It’s almost 2 miles each way, but the hike — and the waterfalls at the end — were absolutely beautiful.

We brought lunch and sat in amazement at the flow of water coming off the falls. Mid-June is the rainy season, so the daily afternoon downpours meant the waterfalls were flowing at twice the rate as in the dry season, which is December to March.

Hotel Cristal Ballena in Ojochal offered a beautiful view of the sunset after the rain. Addie Broyles photo

After a few days of afternoon rain, we didn’t mind the gray skies that gathered each afternoon. By that point in the day, we’d often spent all of our energy out in the wilderness somewhere, so we would find a cozy spot to enjoy a cocktail or an Imperial and watch the sunset. (La Cusinga and Hotel Cristal Ballena are my top picks for a drink with a view in Ojochol, and don’t miss Ronny’s Place in Quepos.)

Our last adventure of the trip took us (almost) to the Osa Peninsula, which is home to Costa Rica’s largest and most ecologically diverse park: Parque Corcovado.

We didn’t go into Corcovado on this trip — the park is really only accessible by boat and you have to hire a guide to hike on many of the trails — but we did experience our first zipline at Osa Canopy Tours, which took us up to the top of a mountain that overlooked the peninsula.

Just when I thought I’d had enough Zooming this year, I found myself zipping through the canopy, high above this little corner of paradise. I could see the wide mouth of a river emptying into the ocean and the famed Isla del Caño visible in the distance.

One of the ziplines was longer than a kilometer, a unit of measure I was now familiar with (again) after a week in this tourist-friendly vacation destination.

I knew how long the zipline was because of our guide, Emmanuel, who grew up on the mountain we were traipsing around. As a kid, he saw the zipline truck driving tourists up the steep roads each day. When he was a young teen, he asked his dad if he could try to get a job with the tour company.

“My dad gave me a good recommendation,” he told me in Spanish while we were driving up the hill ourselves.

I try to visit a Spanish-speaking country at least once a year, ostensibly so I can keep up my second language, but it’s more than that, obviously. I want to put myself in situations like this one, where I’m standing on a platform in a tree with a guide who has told me about how his love of making things with tools led him to want to work for a zipline company, where he’s always building and fixing the course and taking travelers like me on once-in-a-lifetime adventures.

Emmanuel is, in many ways, living his own dream.

He learned English by working these zipline tours and is a provider for his family. He works close to home doing something out of the ordinary for many Ticos. He’s good with people, knowing exactly how to calm a new zipliner’s nerves when they are facing their fear of height or speed.

He welcomes visitors from all over the world who bring their money, their masks and their culturally influenced mindsets about what constitutes “fun,” “hard” and “vacation.”

Costa Rica is not a hard country to visit, but it can bring up hard questions.

Why is so little known about pre-colonization cultures in Costa Rica? Why is Costa Rica a haven for Nicaraguans and El Salvadorans? Why haven’t they received more vaccines? Does the tourism and expat industry do more harm than good?

Like so many countries in Central American, colonization shaped and continues to shape Tican life, even those who benefit from the industry. More than two million people visit Costa Rica each year, and tourism contributes 8 percent to the country’s economy.

I didn’t hear or see any evidence of tension between locals and tourists, but when Emmanuel told me he hadn’t visited the Caribbean Coast of his own country nor the national park at the bottom of the mountain, I started to wonder who all this tourism was for.

We’d like to think that tourism is designed to serve all travelers, including nationals exploring their own country, but this isn’t always the case.

Many parts of the travel industry today, including resorts, chain hotels and even AirBnB, are designed to keep travelers in a bubble where they feel like they are interacting with locals and getting an “authentic” experience at all times. I found a new Instagram account called @decolonizingtravel, which brings up some important questions about how people with power and privilege contribute to the exploitation of people, culture and environmental resources for travel purposes.

How can we travel with ultimate respect for the people who call these places home? How can we have respect for the environment and culture when we go into spaces that are not ours? What travel practices have upheld institutional power structures that hurt low economic workers? What ways has/hasn’t travel evolved to more equitably distribute money and power among historically marginalized groups?

I don’t have many answers, but as we confront these issues of injustice at home, it’s important to think about them as we decide how (and if and where) to take ourselves on the road.

Follow local regulations and practices. Listen to what folks are saying when they tell you about their lives. Tip generously. Treat people with utmost respect, especially if they are drawing a boundary that you don’t like. Keep your ego in check. Allow yourself to be humbled. Take that humility with you when you go back home.

And wear a mask and wash your hands.

I don’t know if it’s possible to truly leave no trace anywhere we go, but we can try.

Read more of Addie Broyles’ work at https://thefeministkitchen.substack.com.