I didn't expect a country to ruin smoothies for me. But two weeks in Costa Rica did exactly that—and not because they were fancy. Quite the opposite.
Nearly every small restaurant, roadside soda, and café seems to have a menu full of batidos—fresh fruit blended with water or milk. No protein powder, no supplements, no twenty-dollar wellness branding promising to align my chakras. Just fruit.
The first smoothie I tried was at our hotel restaurant, looking out at the mountains in the distance. I was exhausted, hot, sweaty, and starving after a day of hiking, and a fresh smoothie felt like the right thing to make me feel human again. I decided to go with passion fruit, though if I'm honest, I'd only ever had it as a flavor in yogurt or candy—never the actual fruit. I thought it would be kind of sweet and citrusy.
It arrived bright yellow and impossibly fresh, tiny black seeds floating throughout like confetti. Tart, sweet, and somehow more alive than any passion fruit anything I'd ever tried. One sip in, I realized I had never actually tasted passion fruit before. I'd only tasted the idea of it.
From that point on, ordering a smoothie became part of the adventure. Every menu offered fruits I knew and several I didn't. And then there was the one I'd never get to know at all: mango. I'm allergic, which means that in a country practically dripping with the stuff, I spent two weeks watching everyone else order it. Mango is my one great culinary "what if"—the fruit I'll always wonder about, forever just out of reach across the table.
So I made peace with it and went looking elsewhere.
My favorite discovery was soursop. Before Costa Rica, I didn't even know soursop was a fruit. The best one came at a small restaurant overlooking Lake Arenal, the water stretched out below us, framed by rolling green hills and clouds hanging low over the mountains. I ordered it for the simplest reason: I had no idea what it was.
What arrived was creamy, slightly sweet, and unlike anything I'd tasted before. Somewhere between pineapple, strawberry, banana, and citrus—but not really any of those. The kind of flavor that stops you mid-conversation to ask, "Wait. What is this?"
For the rest of the trip, I read menus like treasure maps, hunting for fruits I hadn't tried yet—pineapple, papaya, watermelon. And whenever I spotted soursop, I ordered it without hesitation.
It's funny what becomes memorable when you travel. I came home with photographs of volcanoes, cloud forests, toucans, and monkeys. But if I could bring one thing back from Costa Rica, it might just be the fruit. My only regret was not ordering the fruit smoothies from day one.
