I'm from New York. This is the Costa Rica I stayed for.
Off the Grid is what I built after years inside this country's tourism — the version with everything the big operators leave out: room to breathe, and the real thing.
I’m from New York City. I came to Costa Rica young, started my first businesses here at twenty-three — most of them in tourism — and somewhere in those years it stopped being a place I was passing through and became the one I stayed for. Working from the inside, I watched the same thing get sold a thousand times over: the country packaged and run at scale. Fifty strangers on a bus, the same fixed loop, a photo stop and a gift shop on the way out.
What no one seemed to be protecting was the part that actually matters — two things, really: authenticity and privacy. The real country, met on its own terms, with room to breathe. Not performed for a crowd. Not shared with forty people you’ll never see again.
So I stopped chasing tours and started finding people — the ones who do a single thing extraordinarily well. One at a time, all over the country: the chef who built his own kitchen, the coffee fanatic who turned a daily cup into a craft, the guide who knows every turn of a canyon, the naturalist who reads the forest like a page. Everything they’re great at, I gathered into one thing — a single, quiet, genuinely private experience, made for you and no one else.
LenaFounder, Off the Grid
Why we can take you there
A network of welcomes, built one at a time.
The coffee fanatic
Weighs the beans to the tenth of a gram. Turned a daily cup into a craft, and will quietly ruin ordinary coffee for you.
The self-made chef
Built his own kitchen, on his own terms. Cooks the region in front of you, course by course.
The canyon guide
Knows every turn of the rock — where it's safe to swim, where the light comes down at the right hour.
The naturalist
Reads the canopy like street signs: the sloth you'd have passed, the bird you only ever hear.
How we work
We run quieter ones
Smaller groups, emptier places, slower days. Scale is the enemy of the real thing.
Privacy is the point
Not fifty people on a bus. Your party alone, on your own time — the thing almost no one else protects.
The real thing, or nothing
No staged culture, no manufactured moments. Real people, doing what they're great at, in their own country.
There is no fixed loop, and no crowd to share it with. What we build is one experience — quiet, unrepeatable, shaped around you as it unfolds, and meant to be lived entirely in the present.
It is an immersion built on raw, uncompromising contrasts — from the clean, rich aroma of estate-grown organic coffee warming your morning, to the heavy, primordial sulfur rising from a volcanic thermal pool accessed exclusively by us. It is tracking the ancient, wild scent of a tidal waterway flanked by crocodiles and prehistoric life, punctuated by views that still completely take my breath away, even after more than a decade of looking at them.
Come see the Costa Rica we know.