The Buenaventura Story... 

Harlow's first visions, inspirations, & manifestations towards his dream of creating Buenaventura began in August of 1996, when he was on a two month soul-searching backpacking trip through Mexico and Central America, when he found himself sitting on the backside of a Mayan Temple in Tikal, and while looking out over the Peten & Lancandon jungles of Guatemala... it was at that moment when the Buenaventura dream was born!

My life story...

I was born August 3rd, 1971 on a US military base in Landstuhl, Germany. My father was born in San Jose, Costa Rica to a Spanish/Guatemalan mother and a North American father and my mother was born in New York City to an Italian mother and a North American father.

After serving his tour of duty as an officer in the United States Army in the early 70s, my father returned to El Salvador to work for his father's company, which my grandfather had started in the early 1940's. I was raised in El Salvador from the age of 3 to 14, learning the language and Latin American lifestyle, and most importantly, falling in love with the people, customs and latin culture.

At the age of 15, I moved to the United States to live with my mother and attended high school. Shortly after graduating from high school, I sold most of my belongings and bought a one-way ticket to the island of Guam, one of the Micronesia islands in the Pacific Ocean. My passion for travel and exploration had led me to Guam, using the island as a travel base to destinations such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and some of the neighboring Micronesian islands.

A year and half later, I set my sights on San Francisco, a place I knew I could attend college, while at the same time knowing that if I wasn't traveling the world, the world would come to me. I attended San Francisco State University studying a range of subjects including Business, Hospitality, Psychology, and Public Relations.

In the fall of 1996, after a two-month "soul searching" trip from Mexico to Costa Rica, I return to San Francisco with the opportunity of starting up SFStation.com, a local city guide internet company with a group of friends I had met in Guam and San Francisco. I knew that if I worked hard enough to grow it into a profitable business, I could fund my dream of buying the land and developing Buenaventura down the road. In the fall of 2005, almost 10 years of dedicating my time and energy to building a New Media company, Boulevards City Guide Network (which runs sites like LosAngeles.com, SanFrancisco.com, Seattle.com, Denver.com, etc.) aqcuired SF Station, and my partners and I signed up for a 3.5 year employment agreement (earn-out) which ended in April 2009.

In addition to running SF Station, a couple years later in the summer of 1998, my love for travel and sharing travel information lead me to pursue one of my personal dreams and start "Tico Guide Travel", a travel services company specializing in Costa Rica eco-adventure and leisure travel. I continue to operate my travel company and have begun using it to help promote the early Buenaventura group retreats I am organizing.

Using 13 credit cards to initially purchase the land in Costa Rica back in 2002, and with the good fortune of having some funding from the sale of SF Station starting in 2005 to further fund Buenaventura, I've been organically building Buenaventura over the past few years, from tractoring in new roads, to building a 2-story Main Lodge, to fixing up a couple of the roadside cabins to rent out, and most recently, in August of 2008 I accomplished and completed the unthinkable, I produced, managed and funded the construction of a new 250 foot long steel-and-cable suspension bridge over river Division, which many of my guests have now coined as "Costa Rica's Golden Gate Bridge"... and its fitting since I've been living in San Francisco for almost 20 years, so its become my little piece of SF in paradise!