After navigating all night, we arrived at the first stop of our Wild Costa Rica Expedition: Playa Zapotal, an idyllic, grey sand beach on the Nicoya Peninsula. Here we had our first taste of what the Guanacaste dry forest has to offer. It didn’t take us long to see our first troop of howler monkeys.

In the afternoon, we took Zodiac tours through the Palmares mangrove forest, where we saw numerous birds.