Costa Rica

Costa Rica hit differently from the moment we drove up into the highlands. The air gets cooler fast, the roads narrow, and suddenly you're looking at a volcano poking through the clouds like it owns the whole sky. Irazú was the first big one — 3,432 metres, ash-grey slopes, and that eerie turquoise crater lake sitting at the bottom like something from another planet. I stood at the rim and the wind was cold enough to sting, nothing growing nearby, just rock and silence.

Arenal was the softer side of the same story. The jungle there is thick and loud — constant dripping, bird calls, the smell of wet earth. The hot springs near the volcano are fed by actual geothermal heat, and lying in that warm water while steam drifted through the palm fronds above felt almost surreal after days of cold crater hikes. We also found a small waterfall tucked inside the forest, the kind you hear before you see it, the black rock completely carpeted in moss.

San José surprised me. From a rooftop bar in the city you could see the whole valley spread out below with a mountain wall running along the horizon — low buildings, red rooftops, that tropical haze hanging over everything. Then there was the coffee belt: rows of coffee plants on a misty hillside, and a sign explaining the whole lifecycle of the fruit from bud to ripe bean. As someone from Nepal where tea gardens look similar from a distance, it felt oddly familiar and completely new at the same time.