Into the Gulf
- Christopher Roche
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
The Road to Pavones
Last time I left you one drive away from where this whole thing actually started. Roosters, jungle birds, slow mornings — I promised you all of it.
Strap in; this is where it gets good.
The road from Dominical to Pavones is the kind of beautiful that interrupts conversation. The way is layered with palm rows and glimpses of beach through breaks in the jungle wall. Before we left, the sky opened up — a downpour of rain accompanied thunder while we savored Danyasa's breakfast: fresh eggs, beans and rice, fried sweet plantains, and the best pineapple I've had in my life.
We pulled into Pavones travel-light this time, no twenty-hour grind behind us, just a drive that couldn't decide if it wanted to be scenic or a car wash.
Arriving in Paradise
A couple hours on the road and then: paradise. Not a figure of speech, that's the name on the map. Paraiso de Miguel, my Aunt Beth and Uncle Michael's farm, their home for almost two decades now. Perched above El Golfo Dulce, it boasts a view of the clouds lifting off the water and the waves rolling into Playa Zancudo below.
We were greeted the way you hope to be greeted anywhere: by my aunt and uncle, and then a blur of a dog, Gus, a Staffie with an abundance of energy. Shortly after Gus had ambushed us, we met Lucy, an older rescue with considerably more of the laid-back Pura Vida lifestyle.
We hadn't even finished unloading gear when Michael mentioned, almost offhand, that a lone howler monkey was working the trail near the waterfall. We left the bags where they were.
Gus is something of a primate specialist. He and my uncle led us down the trail until we heard it, a howl that stops you in your tracks. Seriously, it's terrifying. We found him hanging in a bejuco vine: a lone male howler monkey, investigating the visitors in his jungle. We spotted a few capuchins canvassing the canopy on the hike home, like the jungle was handing out wildlife as a welcome party.
This is the part of Costa Rica nobody has to sell you on. You have to show up and let the jungle welcome you.
That first night, we ate like kings. Beth had spent the whole day crafting the menu, and it showed. The star was the pork marinated in honey, thyme, and rosemary, roasted potatoes, fresh bread, a bright salad, homemade applesauce, all of it grown 50 feet from the table where we sat.
We ate on the back patio, watching the last light going soft over the gulf. Plates full, nobody in a hurry. By the time the food was gone, conversation had drifted to the week ahead. What would the rainy season let us get away with? One idea kept surfacing: Crossing the gulf.
So we hatched a plan.
Neno and the Inés
The plan came together Thursday night. After dinner, maps laid out on the coffee table, Michael floated the idea of a full day on the gulf with his friend Neno — a third-generation Tico who's been navigating these waters since he was three years old, captain of his own boat, the Inés. We jumped at the idea.
Friday morning was set.
The next morning, the gulf wasted no time reminding us where we were.
We were launching the Inés when a wave came in wrong—no build, no warning swell. One second I was pushing the boat; the next, the ground dropped away, and I was under, not floating but sinking, salt water up my nose, the current dragging at my legs until my back hit the floor of Golfo Dulce. One thought cut through the watery turbulence: stay clear of the 300-pound engine swinging somewhere in the water near my head.
One of only four tropical fjords on the entire planet, and I was getting a very intimate, very unplanned tour of its floor before the day had even started.
Then a hand, Michael's, hauling me upright.
Air. Spencer's face. Wynn already braced for the next wave. Neno holding the Inés steady like this happens every Friday.
For him, it probably does.
I climbed in. Wetter, saltier, and, I'll admit it, a little more awake than I'd been sixty seconds earlier.
And we set off.
This gulf doesn't ask permission. It just puts you on the floor and waits to see if you get back in the boat.
The Caves at Punta Gallardo
The route was ambitious even written down: Punta Salea to Punta Gallardo, where caves cut into the rock hold their own private pools, and then Punta Adela, where the passage narrows enough that Neno had to thread the Inés between the rocks like he was challenging the sea, not sailing.
The caves were something else. At high tide, the water crashes into them and throws momentous spouts of spray high into the air, like the ocean is still trying to win an argument with rock that stopped listening a few thousand years ago.
Michael explained that at lower tides you can float the boat deeper into the caves, an experience we filed away for next time. We watched the water and the rock while Michael and Neno got some fishing in, the way you do when the extraordinary is just another Friday.
The Terrible Swimmer
I am, by my own admission, a genuinely bad swimmer. Breathing through a snorkel with salt water finding its way in every five minutes is not a pretty sight.
At Punta Adela — life vest strapped on, holding on for dear life, trailing behind Spencer and Wynn on more than one stretch — I nearly threw up more than once just trying to breathe correctly.
I was a little ashamed of the vest, if I'm honest.
But you have to start somewhere. And starting in Golfo Dulce is jumping in the deep end in more ways than one — the gulf had already decided that morning that I didn't get a say in whether I went under.
What kept me in the water was what was in the water.
We snorkeled for over an hour, following a marked restoration trail along the reef — a string of plaques fixed into the seabed, teaching divers about the local coral and the work being done to bring it back. It gave the whole swim a strange grace: I was flailing, sure. But I was flailing through a classroom filled with life.
A stingray gliding along the bottom like it had somewhere to be. A sea turtle. Tigerfish.
More life in an hour than most days hold in a year.
The longer the day went on, the prouder I got — not of how I looked doing it, but that I was doing it at all.
I had brain surgery in December 2024.
And here I was: snorkeling badly, knocked to the sea floor at the launch, loving every second. Still catches me off guard.
Los Mogos and a Climb to Nowhere
Back on the water, Neno swung the Inés toward Los Mogos — a pair of small islands strung across the gulf that show up on no tourist itinerary, which is exactly the point.
We put in at Isla María and climbed, following nothing but broken branches snapped by whoever had dared it before us — other explorers, probably, chasing the same payoff waiting at the top: the whole gulf laid out, green and blue and endless.
Then back down, back in the boat, on toward the day's real quarry.
First, Coconuts. Then, the Waterfall at the Edge of Another Age
We beached on a stretch of sand lined with palms. Neno went up the trunk of a nearby tree, came back with coconuts. He opened them with a few clean strokes of a machete, handed one to each of us to drink straight from the shell. Cold, sweet, and delicious.
Then the last mission.
Neno pointed us toward the mouth of Rio Esquinas, into Piedras Blancas National Park, a rainforest fed by rivers that have been arguing their way down to the gulf since long before anyone was around to write it down.
There's no trail marker out there.
Just the sound of water working its way towards the gulf. Ahead, Neno gestured more or less toward up. We began our ascent, maneuvering slick rocks and tree roots the size of cars. Our group scrambled up the river, grabbing and hauling each other through nature's obstacle course. To borrow a line from my own journal that day:
"The enormous jungle and its symphony of sounds seemed to swallow our intrepid group of creatives whole"
It felt like another age.
Strip away the boat engine and the drone, and it looked the same as a few hundred years ago: rushing water, green on every side, a handful of people finding out together whether the way forward even exists.
Explorers charting the way. Pirates hunting a place to stash their loot. Take your pick.
Out there, both felt true.
And then the thunder up ahead that every hiker knows. The tell. We'd found the treasure we set out for that morning: water dropping into a pool cut straight into stone.
Spencer and Wynn went to work with the FPV drone zipping around the falls at breakneck speed, taking in the beauty at angles the rest of us would only see later.
Michael, Neno, and I climbed into the dipping pool. After hours in the warm ocean, the water came as a shock: cold, clear, carved out over ages of water cutting into the fjord's rock. Small camarones nipped at our legs while we floated. We took the group photo of the trip right there.
A day to remember for a lifetime.
A Beverage in Golfito
On the way back, we stopped in Golfito. We beached near a small café serving the usual Tico menu and, more to the point, the finest café italiano, if you know, you know.
I'd barely sat down before I was greeted by a black-and-orange cat named, aptly, "Meow." We ordered, we talked. Three bachata songs came pounding out of the jukebox. A fan of both dance styles myself, I asked Neno whether Costa Ricans lean bachata or salsa. Bachata, he confirmed, at least for him.
It's a small thing. But the small things are half of why I do this. The Modern Xplorer isn't only about the rogue waves and the hidden falls from another age; it's about the café, the cat, the conversation, and being somewhere on purpose. Learning where you actually are instead of photographing it and moving on.
(Yes, I see the irony.)
The Ride Home
The gulf gave us one more gift, in the only way it knows how to give them: all at once, and soaked to the bone.
The rain came down so hard the horizon disappeared. Waves crashed over the bow and broke across all of us, and the Inés climbed and dropped and climbed again while Golfo Dulce threw everything it had left at us. I should have been miserable.
Cold, drenched, salt in every cut the day had opened.
I looked up instead. Water running off my face, the whole gulf gone white and roaring around the boat, and I was grinning like an idiot — because this was it. Not the postcard version. The real one. The one you have to get knocked to the sea floor and hauled back up and rained on sideways to earn. This was exactly where I wanted to be.
That's the whole idea behind The Modern Xplorer: it's an engine to push myself — and hopefully you — toward the raw, the unmapped, the places that hand you the kind of perspective you can't get anywhere comfortable. It's a catalyst to chase days like this one, wherever the adventure leads.
Because the seven-year-old me who dreamt of being Indiana Jones wasn't wrong.
He was just early.
More Soon
We got back to Paraiso de Miguel already talking about doing it again. Pavones itself, the surf break, the gear that earned its keep, the FPV drone incident, is still ahead of us.
But that's the next chapter.
Siempre una aventura.
Follow the crew: Spencer (@spencer.is.a.story) · Wynn (@wy_photo_video) · The Modern Xplorer (@themodernxplorer)
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