I Stayed in a Jungle That Used to Be a Cattle Ranch
I knew the forest around me had been replanted. What I did not know was what had been standing there before it, or how much work went into getting the trees back.
I woke up to howler monkeys.
They start before the light does, an enormous sound coming out of the trees, and by the second morning I was lying there waiting for it. There was no alarm in any of it and no phone, only the forest announcing that the day had started.
The volcano was in every view I had. From the room, from the road, from the coffee farm, from the middle of the jungle. I am usually good at describing places and I have never quite managed that one.
What the week looked like
We had a private yurt back in the trees with a plunge pool heated by the volcano. You get in when the forest wakes up, and again as it goes to sleep.
The coffee was the best I have had and I am spoiled now. I roasted my own, juiced my own sugar cane, and tasted cacao straight out of the pod. The staff were beyond amazing, and that is the part I would tell you first.
I knew going in that the land had been replanted. What I did not know was what it had been before, which was cattle pasture.
How the forest came back
Costa Rica lost a great deal of its forest between the 1960s and the late 1980s, at times approaching four percent a year, and the reason was international demand for beef.
Then the country set up a system that paid landowners to keep trees standing and to let the forest return on old pasture. Forest now covers around sixty percent of Costa Rica again, and it became the first tropical country to stop and reverse its own deforestation.
The hillside I stayed on is one small piece of that, and somebody had to do the actual work.
The owners describe the mountain as decimated by cattle ranching and then run as a dairy. One of them says he used to walk up it and want to cry, because there were no birds and no butterflies on it at all.
The first job was not planting. It was erosion, because bare ground turns to a river of mud in the rain and nothing takes hold. They hauled in volcanic boulders to hold the slope still, and only once that was done did they start putting trees in. They brought in an Australian landscape architect, Matthew Flynn, whose firm records restoring six hectares of former farmland as an extension of the rainforest already there. The first plantings were guarumo and cecropia, chosen because they colonize bare ground quickly and because their leaves are what sloths eat.
The owners say the project took about ten years. In other interviews they have said seven, and the tree counts they give range from twenty thousand to forty thousand, with one of them admitting outright that they lost count. So those are their numbers rather than anyone’s measurement. What I can tell you is what the hillside looks like now.
Nobody carried a sloth in. The trees got tall enough, the canopy closed over, and the sloths turned up on their own.
There is a word for it
There is a name for what that week was doing to me, and I did not know it at the time. In Japan it is called shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, which means going into woodland slowly, with nowhere to be, and letting the place reach you. A new experiment put people either in a replanted forest or in a built-up spot, with birdsong or traffic playing through their headphones. The forest slowed their hearts. The birdsong settled the rest of them. Their forest had been replanted too, which is the part I keep coming back to.
There is also a study that followed mid-life women over eleven years and asked them what built their resilience. They named being outside, doing something physical, and the company of other women doing it alongside them. That one records what the women say rather than measuring anything, which is both its limit and rather the point.
The nervous system you arrive with at fifty has usually been running on alert for a couple of decades. A week where the loudest thing is monkeys and the schedule is written by the weather does something to that. Some of it, I now think, is that people decided to put the trees back and then waited long enough for the animals to agree.
We went in April, right before the rains, which is a good window if you want the forest full and the roads easy.
If you want to think through what a restorative week would look like for you, I put together a free Restorative Travel Guide on choosing a place and a pace that will leave you better than it found you. It is a short read.
And if you would rather just start planning, tell me what you have in mind here.
Debra Orringer, MS, ACE-MES, ACSM-CEP, CIHC, owns a luxury travel business designing restorative journeys.
References
Costa Rica’s forest loss and recovery: Fred Pearce, “Lauded as Green Model, Costa Rica Faces Unrest in Its Forests,” Yale Environment 360, Yale School of the Environment, 21 March 2023. Pearce notes that Costa Rica’s historical deforestation data is thin and the estimates vary, so the percentages above are the shape of it rather than a measurement.
Forest, birdsong and physiological stress: Ford, T. et al., “Exposure to forests and birdsong may reduce physiological stress among college students,” Frontiers in Bird Science, 3 September 2026. A randomized field experiment with ninety five university students, mean age twenty two, measuring heart rate and heart rate variability over roughly eight minutes of exposure. No mood or cortisol measures were taken, and the authors note their sample limits how far the findings generalize.
Nature, activity and connection in mid-life women: “Nature, activity, and social drivers of mental resilience: a test with mid-life women surfers,” Tourism Recreation Research, 2025. A qualitative eleven-year ethnography of forty mid-life women surfers across sixteen countries, with a comparison group of women hikers. It records participants’ own accounts rather than measured outcomes.