If your looking to plan a trip for a warm winter getaway that will offer more than Piña Coladas and white sand beaches, you may want to think about Costa Rica. You can still get beautiful beaches, high-end resorts and all the pampering that you feel that you deserve but it can also come with an added bonus, and that is adventure.

Costa Rica offers the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean and in between both, there is paradise. During our recent trip, we had six days to come back with stories and images that in the end only glazed the surface of what is offered there. The wildlife is amazing. It really is a photographers dream because you always have something to shoot that most people only see in a zoo. There are cloud forests that are home to birds that are seldom seen and only in this small part of the world, they call home. Having said that, the adventure does not always come easily.

Fortunately, we had a driver and a tour guide with us for the duration of our trip. Getting from place to place was not always easy, to say the least. There were times when we had literally a four- hour ride along dirt paths that were etched out of the side of mountains that had pot holes that would rattle the fillings out of most teeth. It always amazed me that we would travel for an hour and see nothing but wilderness and then all of a sudden, a small village would appear with a handful of houses and in a blink of an eye, it was like it never existed. It’s all part of the adventure to get to experience a modern day dinosaur, a volcano.

I have been around volcanoes on other shoots in the past but this one was very different. This is a very active volcano that always seemed to let you know that being dormant was the last thing on its mind. From the red ember glow coming from the craters edge at night to the deep rumble of what sounds like a distant roll of thunder, you quickly realize that you are witnessing something that very few people rarely see. Even though it has become a major tourist attraction for Costa Rica, the destructive power of this volcano is very real and always respected.

If that is not enough to get your heart going, you can always strap yourself onto a cable and fly from tree to tree on a zip line. For anyone that has never witnessed this, it is one big adrenalin rush. Most times, you are hundreds of feet above the treetops and moving at a very high rate of speed. At the time we were shooting this, it was our first full day in Costa Rica, with five more to go. The concept of me holding onto a strap with one hand and a forty thousand dollar camera in the other was not going to happen. It was suggested by the zip line crew that I should go first and then they would send the camera along by itself so I could get the arrival shots of Anthony as he approached the landing spots. As much fun as this may have been, nothing was worth taking the chance of having a H.D. camera dropped two hundred feet into a tree and ending the shoot. The only thing worse than watching your camera get destroyed is the fact that I would have to call Channel 5 to let them know it was my idea.
As much fun as this trip was, it was also an incredible amount of work for all of us. Living out of a suitcase for six days because we were changing hotels every night wears you down. Getting back late and turn it around and checking out by 7:00am daily takes a toll on everyone on the crew. Having said that, Costa Rica was truly a learning experience for me. To see monkeys in their natural environment as well as standing fifty feet away from a crocodile is pretty impressive. All good things had to come to a end so we boarded a plane and left ninety degree weather to head back to Boston, which was sitting at the zero mark. A ninety degree change in temperature in one day quickly makes you realize that reality unfortunately is back