It’s a classic piece of ‘received wisdom’. The ‘rainy season’ is best-avoided. Or it’s when you go if you have no other choice. And the vast majority of people follow this maxim. Tourist numbers fall dramatically from their peak period. But is it really the washout that people imagine it is? Or is the old dichotomy of ‘dry vs wet’ an unnecessarily-reductive way of thinking about travel to the tropics?
In service of answering this question, we found ourselves in Costa Rica, during the time described by one of our trade partners as a “must-avoid”.
A force of habit
We Brits have a unique relationship with the weather. It comes with the territory. Another bleak November day scurrying through grey concrete streets under a sheet-metal sky is enough to make anyone an ardent sun-seeker.
This has informed how we approach travel since the early days of mass-market holidays. The package holiday boom was founded on the new availability of easy-access sunshine.
There’s something in here about how we think, too. Without getting too philosophical - we like to put things in boxes. Making full use of our mighty prefrontal cortex, we make the world easier to understand and predict by putting it into neat, tidy conceptual categories. Like, for example, ‘wet season’ which is nice and distinct from ‘dry season’. All of this makes it easier to make decisions about stuff. And our energy-hungry brains love it when things are simple and easy.
The only problem is, the world outside our heads is messy. It doesn’t fit into neat, tidy conceptual categories. And here we see how black-and-white thinking can blind us.
It’s unpredictable
The reality is that in the tropics - particularly in the rainforest - rain can happen at any time. It may be slightly less frequent during dry season, but it still happens. Equally, travel during wet season is no guarantee of rain.
And so it proved. Having imagined constant, monsoon-like downpours, the first two days in Costa Rica’s ‘no-go’ season passed with a sky that stayed defiantly blue. The air was still and heavy. And for us the cool forest pools were an absolute dream.
Here, though, the heat of the sun isn’t always what we’re hoping for. Under the heat of its glare, Costa Rica’s wildlife retreated. The monkeys were quiet. Toucans and quetzals were nowhere to be seen. A solitary sloth lounged lazily inside a cradle of Cecropia branches.
