For years, I had heard people speak of Golfito and the Osa Peninsula. The area sounded like a place of adventure—panning for gold in forest streams, fishing for trophy sailfish or hiking rain forest trails. so I rented a car and was soon on my way to Golfito, the jumping off place for the Pavones-Zancudo Beach areas. The drive south on the Pan American Highway is gorgeous. One unbelievable view after another invites a pause wherever the car can be parked safely off the pavement. Ordinarily, the trip takes six hours, but by the time I stopped several times to sample pork chicharones, to marvel over the views and take a nap in the shade of a banana tree, the trip stretched into an eight-hour day. (know they fill the potholes on the Panamerican Highway so you could make it in five hours.)
Golfito is an often-neglected part of Costa Rica, with scanty information provided by most tourist guides. The town began its existence as a banana port for United Fruit Company, but was abandoned when the company decided that the operation had became unprofitable. As a banana port, there was no incentive to develop it as a tourist attraction, although today it is becoming one with a marina on it way and tremendous interest of north Americans and Europeans buying land all around. Just recently a famous musician had bought a big land just above golfito bay to create a tropical recording studio.

Sitting on a bay of Golfo Dulce, Golfito's water scene is absolutely gorgeous, reminiscent of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound. The coastline and islands jut steeply from the water, green and matted with trees, vines and thick brush. The water is so calm at times that it is hard to realize that this is not a lake, but a protected little bay of the Pacific Ocean. From the slope, a rain forest watches over the town as fishing boats play the calm waters of the Golfo Dulce. During the town's banana shipping days, the company wisely kept these mountain slopes as a wildlife preserve and watershed, assuring Golfito a relatively pure water supply.
The town itself can hardly be described as anything but picturesque. It looks like a cliche movie set of a banana shipping port. Just a few blocks wide, the town follows the water's edge, with some houses actually standing over the water on stilts, others clinging to edges of the hills and hanging out into empty space. A couple of excellent hotels on the edge of town accommodate the growing number of curious tourists, but most accommodations are rather rustic.
A surprising number of North Americans live in or around Golfito. One place to meet them is at Louis Brenis Restaurant, which sits across from la bombe (the gasoline station). The Costa Rica Surf bar is another local Gringo hangout. The main commercial street, looking ramshackle, climbs a hill paralleling the high­way and waterfront. Foreign residents patronize a couple of open-air restaurants here, as well as hardware stores, shops selling tackle and boating supplies and several redlight bars.

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