Big Five Tours & Expeditions announced a new nine-day program, Undiscovered Costa Rica, which ventures into new territories. The tour journeys to Guayabo Archeological Site, a 3,000-year-old site considered the most important archaeological site in Costa Rica. It includes a network of causeways, aqueducts, cisterns, petroglyphs, monoliths, tombs and sculptures from an advanced pre-Colombian city, which was inhabited between 1000 B.C. and 1400 A.D.
Visitors meet local coffee producers at Los Santos Coffee Cooperative, a co-op of 760 producers, and see how a large coffee processing plant and cooperative works. At the Tropical Agricultural Research and Education Centre, Central America’s oldest and most respected research facility, they learn more about agricultural practices, planting techniques and shade-grown coffee. Travelers also tour Quetzal Education and Research Center, a living research laboratory supported and used by scientific institutions worldwide. For the active vacationer, Undiscovered Costa Rica includes the Hacienda Baru National Wildlife Refuge’s “Flight of the Toucan Canopy Tour.” This zip-line tour features eight separate cable rides that take visitors from one ridge top to another, across valleys and streams. Guests can kayak in the Pacific Ocean at Bahia Ballena National Park, where they may encounter dolphins and whales, and hike the Savegre Reserve, a popular place for bird watching. The tour begins at $2,790 per person, double occupancy, and includes daily accommodations, all hotel taxes and service charges, meals, a professional driver and a private bilingual guide throughout, scheduled sightseeing, including entrance and park fees, domestic flight from Quepos to San Jose, and more. For a complete itinerary, visit www.bigfive.com.