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Travel to – Costa Rica

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A Swiss filmmaker spent three weeks chasing waterfalls, wildlife, and coastline across Costa Rica — and turned it into four minutes that have racked up over a million views.

“TRAVEL TO – COSTA RICA” is the work of Antoine Janssens, a Swiss director who crossed the country with his partner in 2016, moving from north to south and east to west over three weeks. The result is a tightly cut, 3-minute-59-second short film built almost entirely on visuals: rainforest canopy, jungle rivers, coastal breaks, and the animals that call all of it home. There’s no narration walking viewers through an itinerary — the footage does the talking.

• Antoine Janssens and his partner traveled Costa Rica for three weeks in 2016, crossing the country north to south and east to west.
• The finished film runs roughly 3:59 and was uploaded to YouTube, where it has drawn more than 1.1 million views.
• The short leans on wilderness cinematography — rainforests, waterfalls, coastal scenery, and wildlife encounters — plus footage of local communities Janssens met along the route.

Three Weeks, One Country, No Wasted Frames

Janssens didn’t stick to one coast or one park. The couple’s route cut a diagonal through Costa Rica, hitting the kind of terrain that doesn’t show up on a standard beach-holiday map — muddy trailheads, river crossings, backcountry roads. That structure is what gives the film its range: within four minutes, the footage shifts from dense jungle canopy to open coastline without ever feeling like a highlight reel stitched together at random.

The pacing is deliberate. Rather than lingering on any single location, Janssens builds the film in short bursts — a waterfall here, a wildlife sighting there, a beach sunset a few seconds later — mirroring how the trip itself likely felt: constant motion, new terrain every few days. Viewers looking for van life or slow-travel documentation elsewhere on this site, like the cross-country drive covered in WE DROVE OUR VAN 1,461 MILES ACROSS AMERICA, will notice the contrast — this is compression, not a day-by-day log.

Wildlife and Biodiversity on Camera

Costa Rica’s reputation as one of the most biodiverse countries per square mile on the planet is the backbone of the film’s visual appeal, and Janssens’ camera catches it directly rather than describing it. The footage includes wildlife moments woven between the landscape shots — the kind of encounters that separate a generic tropical travel video from one that actually earns its setting.

Three weeks, cutting the country diagonally north to south and east to west — that’s the entire premise of the film, and it’s why the footage never repeats itself.

That range — rainforest interior to open water — is also what separates this kind of production from a straightforward resort or itinerary video. It reads closer to the ecotourism-driven content that’s built Costa Rica’s reputation as a bucket-list destination for independent travelers, in the same vein as coverage of other biodiversity-heavy stops like the Zanzibar adventure guide covered elsewhere on this site.

Meeting Ticos Along the Way

Beyond the landscapes, Janssens’ film includes footage of the local communities he and his partner encountered on the road — a detail that grounds the piece beyond pure scenery. Costa Ricans, commonly known as Ticos, are frequently cited by travelers for their hospitality, and the film’s brief community interactions give the video a human throughline between its nature sequences.

It’s a small but deliberate choice. A film built entirely on empty landscapes can feel sterile; cutting in glimpses of the people who live there is what turns a scenery reel into something closer to a travelogue. For readers weighing their own version of this kind of trip, the budget side of a Costa Rica itinerary is covered separately in the real-life Costa Rica vacation budget breakdown also on this site.

Nearly a decade on from its 2016 upload, “TRAVEL TO – COSTA RICA” still functions as a reference point for the cinematic travel-short genre that took off in that era — short, wordless, visually driven films built to sell a destination in under five minutes. Its million-plus view count is the proof it worked.