If you live every day of your life as if you were on a wonderful journey through an infinitely fascinating and strange land, it will be so.”
Michael Kaye, March 2010
Michael Kaye, a 76-year-old pioneer of ecotourism and rafting in Costa Rica, died in this country.
For his friends and promoters of tourism in Costa Rica, Kaye was an adventurer, one of those crazy people who jumped into river on rafts, shouting about the wonders of Costa Rica, a country which he always described as “natural paradise”.
Kaye came to the country in 1978 and immediately started promoting this land as a tourist destination, highlighting the system of national parks and protected areas in specialized magazines.
This “gringo loco”, who fell in love with the Reventazón and Pacuare rivers, where he practiced and promoted rafting at the end of the seventies, used to say that in the water was a great place to experience emotions and moments of serenity, qualifying this practice as
a full experience of agility and grace, a sense of team, and the illusion of deceiving death.”
Michael, who was born in New York City on December 12th, 1941, built small but cozy hotels in Tortuguero, Monteverde, and Corcovado and began his exciting activity with three rafts, touring the Reventazón and Pacuare rivers.
Later, he created his own company, which he named Costa Rica Expediciones, whose main objective was observation trips of natural history around the hostels that he built throughout the national territory.
He survived a septic shock that was mainly caused by an infection in an old ankle injury. The aftermath of septic shock ended up taking his life.
José Segovia Pinto, a tour guide who worked in his early days as a naturalist guide with Kaye, baptized him as a true icon of eco-tourism, and described him as “a respectful promoter of nature.”