Motorcycle Touring Kicks into High Gear with Onset of the Dry Season

Everyone looks forward to the end of the rainy season and the consistently beautiful, sunny Costa Rica weather that begins this time of year. But one particular group of people gets really excited right about now: the motorcycle riders among us.

While rainy-season days may start with picture-perfect sunshine, you know you will get soaking wet when returning home from a motorcycle trip in the afternoon; riding with rain gear on takes most of the fun away (and at some point, water will find its way through even the best rain gear); and, above all, wet roads make riding more dangerous. So, come January, the riders are psyched to go riding.

While some people might think I'm crazy, riding my bike through the busy city traffic of Costa Rica's capital San Jose every day – and through the country on weekends – I would always choose a motorcycle over renting a car. In fact, having covered most of Europe, half of the United States, and a good part of Latin America on motorcycle, to me, Costa Rica is the world's greatest paradise for motorcycle riders.

A group of touring motorcyclists stop to take in Arenal Volcano, in north-central Costa Rica.

It starts with the temperature. To most European and North American riders, thermo gloves, heated boots and angora underwear are common accessories. But in Costa Rica, even at the highest point you can ride – Cerro de la Muerte, on the Inter-American Highway between San José and San Isidro de El General in the Southern Zone – a sweater, windbreaker and a light pair of gloves will usually do.

Then, there is the incomparable variety in nature: from the steaming-hot Caribbean lowlands to the Pacific cloud forests, from active volcanoes down to the flat and dry northwestern province of Guanacaste and the dream beaches along the Pacific, Costa Rica offers it all.

But the very best part is what most people in a car would hate: the bad road conditions and the numerous unpaved highways and gravel trails. When people ask me how the ride is along the northern Pacific coast from Tamarindo to Samara and onto Malpaís, I usually reply, “It's torture in a car, but it's paradise on a motorcycle.”

The same is true for many other routes, such as the rocky road to Monteverde National Park in north-central Costa Rica, the climb to Guanacaste's Rincón de la Vieja Volcano and even the stretch between Quepos and Dominical on the central-to-southern Pacific coast, which can be great fun on a dual-sport bike (and will reduce traveling time from about two and a half hours to somewhere close to an hour). The large-suspension travel of these bikes absorbs most of the uneven surface, and having only two wheels in line (as opposed to four wheels on two axles) makes it easy to get around the numerous potholes.

Finally, there are an endless number of trails you could not travel in even the best four-by-four, simply because they are too narrow for a car or there are too many big rocks in the way, such as on the ride along the south shore of north-central Costa Rica's Arenal Lake or the direct route from Arenal to Monteverde, which otherwise can only be done on foot or horseback.