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‘My Favourite Hotel’ review – Yatama Ecolodge, Costa Rica

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Today, our ‘My Favourite Hotel’ review is the Yatama Ecolodge in Costa Rica.

We are currently running this reader-written feature to provide some positivity and inspiration to Head for PointsYou can find all of the ‘My Favourite Hotel’ reviews so far by clicking here.  This was scheduled to be a series of about 25 hotels, but a good response from readers means that we have commissioned another batch and are continuing the series.

Today’s hotel is the Yatama Ecolodge, a private tropical rainforest reserve in Costa Rica.  It’s reader Cat’s favourite hotel and here is her review:

Where is Yatama Ecolodge?

The Yatama Ecolodge is located near the village of Horquetas, in Heredia province, Costa Rica. The closest airport is San Jose and from there you will need to get yourself to Horquetos. You can either drive in a private vehicle, which takes about an hour and a half, or if you don’t mind a more “authentic” experience, use local buses – with one change it takes just over three hours.

Pedro, the owner of Yatama, will arrange a 4WD pick up in Horquetas to take you on the ridiculously bumpy 40-minute journey to Yatama Ecolodge. Do not attempt this in your own vehicle, wrap clothes around precious electronics and, ladies, wear a sports bra!

The private tropical rainforest reserve of Yatama borders, and provides an ecological buffer zone to, Braulio Carrillo NP, which in turn borders La Selva. This creates an extensive zone of astonishing biodiversity that crosses diverse habitats, for enthusiastic naturalists who don’t mind temporarily trading in some of their creature comforts for an epic adventure.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

Hotel overview

Disclaimer: this is not a 5* hotel! There is no pool. You will not get cooled towels to mop your brow when the humidity gets to you (and it will). There is no free WiFi if you book through the hotel website. In fact, there is no WiFi at all, and almost certainly no phone reception, so let your loved ones know that you’re going off-grid for a few days before you head out there to avoid panic and search parties being sent out.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

Instead, booking direct gets you a guided day hike and a night hike into this incredible, breathtakingly beautiful ecosystem, with a highly knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide each day, included in the room rate (this is as a group with any other guests of the ecolodge while you’re visiting – as I went at the end of the season, I frequently ended up with a private guide).

The guided day hikes usually take between one and three hours, and might just be a tour of the extensive, jungle-swathed grounds, or there might be a trek through a variety of terrains, fording a river or two along the way to a remote waterfall, where you can expect to swim (if you can navigate the slippery rocks) surrounded by dense, verdant foliage, with morpho butterflies flitting past you on a seemingly never-ending circuit up and down the river.

My room

You can expect your dinky en-suite rustic wooden cabin (elevated on posts above the forest floor) to come with the occasional Insect Of Unusual Size (IOUSes), and intermittent hot water, although the relative frequency of each is a constantly fluctuating thing. There is also a hammock on the veranda.

I can’t even tell you how much I enjoyed that hammock – every day, after my morning hike, I’d make a pot of tea in the kitchen, take it to my hammock and then just lounge there with my Kindle, listening to the din of the aptly-named howler monkeys, the calls of the great curassows that would occasionally strut past, and the faint, high-pitched “chee-dit” calls of hummingbirds as they hover momentarily, just out of reach, and then suddenly are gone. I also enjoyed the rather spectacular view of the resident green macaws’ occasional flight in the middle distance, far behind my feet!

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

Of course, if you take sugar with your tea, I strongly recommend having a flicking stick at the ready, to get rid of the leafcutter ants (the smaller ones – they will make mincemeat of your skin) and the bullet ants (the bigger ones – they will make mincemeat of your central nervous system) who will definitely congregate. Check said flicking stick carefully before picking it up, and be prepared to fling it if the ants start to use it as a route to your arm. Or be dreadfully un-British, and add the sugar in the kitchen while it’s brewing. I couldn’t bear to do this.

Back to the room – the bathroom was very basic. If you are inextricably attached to your creature comforts and need a bathroom that is an ode to enamel, marble and chrome, this is not the place for you. However, the water for the shower comes from natural springs, as does the filtered drinking water, which you’re welcome to refill your water bottle from. Electricity to light your room and to charge your camera (you will want to bring your camera) is available from 5:30pm – 7am, and is solar panel generated. This is a true ecolodge.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

Plan in advance for IOUS removal from your room at night though – it didn’t matter how long I left between switching off my headtorch and unlocking my door, you could guarantee an insect larger than my fist would follow me in. Trying to get them back out again was a challenge that’s not for the faint-hearted.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

The night hikes

To be honest, if the swimming under waterfalls with morpho butterflies dancing through the air from one beam of light to another didn’t instantaneously make you decide to visit, then the night hikes are unlikely to appeal.  For me it’s a tough call whether I’m completely smitten with this place because of said morpho-laden waterfalls, the hammock of joy, or the night hikes.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

The day hikes were more about the location – the lush, liana-filled rainforest, the waterfalls that you have all to yourself, the moss-covered bridges and rivers that you ford. Sometimes we’d chance across a large bird, an agoutis, or a troop of Geoffroy’s spider monkeys, but the night hikes were when the fauna of Costa Rica really seemed to come alive. The frogs make the oddest variety of noises at night and they come in crazy colours, then there’s the snakes (only 3 of the 5 snakes we saw could potentially kill a human, if that’s any comfort…) and the mad IOUSes – it felt like a new adventure every night.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

Dining

The food is simple, homely, delicious, plentiful and greatly appreciated after a hike. However, meals are taken as a group and there is no menu, you all get the same. If you have particular dietary needs, I’d discuss them in advance.

review Yatama Ecolodge Costa Rica

The dining room is a mesh-sided structure that allows for marvellous wildlife watching while enjoying your meal. It has comfy sofas, should you wish to lounge in a communal area, and 24-hour charging points.

Conclusion

This is not the place for everyone, and I realise that many HfP readers will be firmly in the not-on-your-nelly camp. The hikes are properly trekking through undulating jungle – as a Lincolnshire lass (albeit one who did the Tour du Mont Blanc right before this trip), Pedro’s idea of a flat hike and mine differed wildly. If the idea of being off-grid, surrounded by nature in all it’s creepy-crawly-slimy-flying-jumping glory fills you with joy, then this place will be your idea of heaven.

If you book direct, the $70 per person per night rate currently includes accommodation, taxes, three meals per day, fresh fruit, water, tea and coffee throughout the day and two guided hikes per day. Having stayed in various other hotels and guest houses around Costa Rica where I was paying $20-40 just for guided wildlife hikes and boat trips, this is a steal.


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Comments (80)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • The Savage Squirrel says:

    Nice choice HfP team. By definition we will see a lot corporate chain hotels on this site (and nothing wrong with this – I enjoy staying and eating in nice cities for free, thanks to some judicious credit card activities, as much as the next person) – but really enjoyed something completely different.

    • Cat says:

      I have to admit, I really did have an absolute blast writing this article for this audience Savage Squirrel! I’m still very much an adventure traveller, but I do like to book-end my adventures with a spot of luxury (last summer consisted of a week in a lightweight tent in the Alsace, followed by the Tour du Mont Blanc, followed by an afternoon at one of the nicest spas in Europe, followed by Lufthansa first class flights to Mexico, then Tulum, then over 2 weeks hopping from one ecolodge lodge to another in the Costa Rican rainforest, followed by one of the best restaurants and one of the nicest hotels in San José, followed by a flight home in Iberia business class – I do like to mix it up!). As I’m now in my early 40s, I wonder how long before the balance shifts the other way, and it ends up being luxury travel with an adventurous day trip or two!
      I’m getting as many adventures as I can, while I can still cope!

      • The Savage Squirrel says:

        Yes, I enjoy a similarly odd range of places. In a paralell and less disrupted world I would be mixing the wilds of Yellowstone followed by the fake glamour and tackiness of Vegas this summer. Both very enjoyable in their wildly different ways!

        • Cat says:

          Nice (especially Yellowstone)! Are you trying to rebook for another time?
          I was supposed to be flying in Qatar QSuites to Singapore, from whence I was planning to island hop around Indonesia – Bali, Nusa Penida, Komodo, Rinca, Flores and the Maluku islands for a £35 per night OWB…

          • The Savage Squirrel says:

            Have mentally shelved USA travel for the forseeable. Do have a Qatar vouchers for the family burning a hole in my pocket (yes they bought me for 10% :D) and family in Australia we were also trying to visit this year – that’s the first priority. Was booked on all non-Q-suite flights on the cancelled booking and never flown them so there may be a silver lining yet….

          • Cat says:

            I hope you get QSuites on the rebooked flights!
            I went with the refund option, because I couldn’t bear to spend the amount of time I’ve spent listening to hold music recently, doing it all over again to rebook! Cash seemed best!
            Whereabouts in Australia?

  • Yorkieflyer says:

    On a similar but more upscale theme we really enjoyed our stay at Sukau rainforest lodge in Borneo. Pygmie elephants, orangutans and multiple birds on a great location on the kinabatangan river, the wildlife viewing is excellent, sadly largely because they have been driven to the riverbanks as the only refuge left from the palm oil plantations

    • Cat says:

      I spent a few nights at Uncle Tan’s on the Kinabatangan river, back in 2007 (right after climbing Kinabalu!). It’s an incredible spot – we never saw the pygmy elephants, sadly, but we saw wild orangutans, proboscis monkeys, hornbills, eagles and anhingas galore. The palm oil plantations as far as the eye can see really hit home when you imagine the vast tracts of forest that will have been logged, slashed and burned to make way for them.
      The only way to help make keeping the patches of rainforest that are left realistic, is to visit them and help make ecotourism economically viable.

      • Yorkieflyer says:

        Yes, we drove back to Sandakan airport through a barren landscape of palm oil plantations starting within a mile of the river, from a ridge on route it was all you could see in any direction. Appalling what is being done for cheap processed food. No wonder the included transfer is along the river, you could’ve d visit and be wholly unaware of the devastation for Palmolive etc. Pity the Iceland orangutan campaign didn’t gain more traction

        • Cat says:

          Agreed Yorkieflyer.
          I think the world is starting to pay a lot more attention to environmental issues like this.
          Sadly, all progress on that front has been a tad stalled by this blasted virus, but I hope (when we have a vaccine) we carry on where we left off.

    • Andrew (@andrewseftel) says:

      I too was reminded of my visit to Sukau (although at a decidedly more lo-fi property on the other side of the river).

      Great review.

      • Cat says:

        There are a surprising number of people who’ve spent time on the Kinabatangan River in the HfP community! It’s an incredible place!

  • mvcvz says:

    Sounds legitimately hideous beyond words. I would have a more enjoyable experience at a UK motorways services. Each to their own I guess.

    • Cat says:

      😂🤣 This was never going to be everyone’s cup of tea mvcvz! I am enjoying reading these varied responses!

  • AmandaB says:

    I like rustic but not this rustic. I can thoroughly recommend Picare
    Lodge in Costa Rica. Just like this but with a luxury edge. Arrive & leave by white water rafting too And much much more expensive!!

    • Cat says:

      Yes – Yatama isn’t for everyone! Another fab ecolodge that’s much more luxurious (without compromising on the wildlife spotting) is Cristalino Lodge in Brazil – the rooms there are beautiful. If memory serves, my room had his and hers sinks, and the choice between an indoor and an outdoor (gorgeous) shower, and was beautifully decorated. I had a guide to myself, and they built 50m observation towers, so that you can get a glimpse of the wildlife in the canopy.
      I highly recommend that too AmandaB, if you need a bit of luxury to return to at the end of a day in the jungle!

  • Novice says:

    The best written review in the series. Good job on the review Cat.

    Sounds like a great place. It is totally an Experience thing to do. Although I would struggle due to OCD, I can imagine myself putting up with all the downsides just for such an awesome experience. I can be reckless sometimes.

    • Cat says:

      Thanks Novice!
      It would certainly be a challenging but worthwhile thing for you to do. I know the first time I stayed in a similarly challenging location, I found putting up my own mosquito net, and sleeping inside my own silk sleeping bag liner helped me deal with it all, as the extra boundary between me and the beasties helped, and it became easier after that! Another option is staying in a similarly rustic place that’s a bit closer to town initially, but with the safety net of an escape plan / backup hotel room booked for the first night, in case you struggle.
      I don’t know if that helps at all. It is totally worth it for the awesome experience!

      • Novice says:

        I was thinking along those lines. Thanks for the tips. Much appreciated as you seem to have seen/ been pretty much everywhere and survived. I can just tell myself if Cat can then I can 😂

        But honestly kudos to you for doing all that you do.

        • Cat says:

          Thanks Novice! I do have an absolute blast seeing / being pretty much everywhere and surviving to tell the tale! Keep pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone and see where it takes you – you might surprise yourself!

  • Freddy says:

    Great review and probably one of the first hfp reviews I’d seriously consider going to. Perhaps a tad rustic for my liking but the surroundings look amazing!

    • mvcvz says:

      I will never stay anywhere with “eco” in its title. This hasn’t persuaded me to change my mind.

    • Cat says:

      It was just incredible! It’s a gloriously beautiful part of the world, and I’d go back in a heartbeat!

  • Jill (Kinkell) says:

    I’m a bit older than you Cat, and at the stage where comfort and a spot of luxury has to feature in our travels! We stayed at Nyara Springs for a couple of nights( the luxury bit) before a long, potholed and unpaved drive to the Cloud forest…the bones were definitely jiggled about! The style of your Ecolodge is very definitely not in our accommodation criteria, but you obviously had a great time. Happy travels….eventually.

    • Cat says:

      Thanks Jill! It sounds like you had a blast too!
      I’ve only explored a very small portion of CR so far – that was very deliberate, in my earlier travels I raced around trying to see whole countries in a week or two. Now that I’m a bit older and wiser, I tend to pick one area to explore. I’ll be back to see Arenal, Monteverde, Manuel Antonio and the Osa peninsula soon (hopefully, if vaccines work), and I can’t wait! Would you recommend Nyara springs, and where would you recommend in the cloud forest? Thanks!

      • Jill (Kinkell) says:

        As Kilburnflyer,we found a Hotel Belmar to be ideal. It’s a Swiss Style hotel on a hillside with lovely views in the distance. Not formal at all and staff were very friendly. I’d be more than happy to stay there again. Nyara Springs is very lush,, huge rooms and walks round the area. The complimentary laundry was so welcome…. with all our damp/ soggy / sweaty gear! I sent a weeks worth of stuff! Great breakfast admiring Arenal Volcano where we were told it was the first time in 6 weeks the summit was free from clouds.
        I’ve just cancelled our 17 day trip round Peru followed by 11 days in Ecuador and Galapagos. 😂

        • Cat says:

          Wow, that does all sound incredible! Cloud-free views of Arenal are rare, I’m told! Yes, the suspension bridges, and obviously Arenal and the hot springs are one of the main reasons I want to go back Kilburnflyer! And it’s incredible how soggy everything gets there Jill! I often just hand wash things, but CR is the first place I’ve been where my clothes just wouldn’t dry.
          Thanks for the recommendations!

  • Lyn says:

    What a wonderful review, Cat, and so beautifully written. I can easily see why you loved this lodge and the incredible natural landscape and fauna so much. Your photos via your link in the comments are simply stunning, and add another dimension to this review for those of lucky enough to come across it while reading the comments.

    Very well chosen review, Anika. Thank you.

    • Cat says:

      Thanks Lyn! I’m glad you enjoyed the review and the photos! I do absolutely love Yatama, and can’t wait to go back when the dust settles from this blasted virus.
      Have you been to Costa Rica at all?

      • Lyn says:

        Unfortunately I haven’t, Cat It sounds like a wonderful country. As you say, when the dust settles. Like Anna, I have a round birthday coming up this year, and had hopes of visiting Portugal for the first time (and the IC in Porto) as well as returning to Italy for the first time in a few years. Nothing as ambitious as Costa Rica. But right now I’d like nothing more than simply being able to return home to my countryside village!

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