Best New Trips in the World: Hike and Rappel on Costa Rica’s Caribbean Coast

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Costa Rica. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

Costa Rica: Coast Confidential

With Costa Rica’s Pacific coast looking more and more like Southern California’s —overdeveloped and overcrowded—it’s a far cry from the adventure getaway of 15 years ago. And until recently, the country’s other coast, the Caribbean, simply wasn’t a viable alternative. But the extension of a paved road to CR’s far east has unlocked the area’s beaches and parks, and inspired one outfitter to launch a new trip. Wildland Adventures’ nine-day excursion begins near the Panama border at Selva Bananito Lodge, a family-owned eco-retreat on a private, 2,000-acre preserve. You can hike through rain forest, rappel down an 80-foot waterfall, and help reintroduce a tropical hardwood forest to the area by planting trees on a rundown 19th-century banana plantation.

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