This is my second visit to Costa Rica. On my first—a quarter century ago—I drove through the country without stopping for anything but gas, food and a huge backup on the Pan-American Highway (long story).   

      I now realize what a mistake that was. The people are wonderful. The animal life is as varied and unusual as anywhere I’ve been—besides, of course, Africa or the national park formerly known as Denali. And, although while here in Costa Rica, I’ve only entered one of the available oceans—the larger one—the swimming has been perfect.

      However, as good a time as I’ve been having in Costa Rica, I realize there is a sense in which . . . I’m not here. (I hear those three words as The Zombies might have sung them.) I’m not here in the way that I might have been here had I been smart enough to get out of the car 25 years ago.

      For I dive significantly less deeply into foreign places now than then.

      For a bunch of reasons:

•      Back then I would have loaded up on the local currency. Now I don’t even know the denominations or the colors of Costa Rican money. Every shop or restaurant we’ve been in so far has accepted Apple Pay.

•      Although I studied it once, my facility with Spanish is as bad as my facility in every other language, excepting, perhaps, English. But in the 20th century I would have rehearsed at least one or two Spanish sentences. Not necessary nowadays: I was confident my phone could translate for me. And the truth is even that hasn’t been necessary. I have gotten by everywhere with por favor, gracias and, in a pinch, someone coming over who does speak English, which—a quarter of the way into this new century—someone, wherever, invariably does.

•      Getting around at the turn of the century still required studying paper maps. And I could get a little obsessive about it. But one thing I invariably knew was where I was. Now that Google has assumed responsibility for directing me around the planet, I often don’t have a clue. Indeed, the other day when I saw an old-fashioned map of Costa Rica hanging on a wall, I tried to pick out the beach town in which we spent two weeks: Samara. I failed.

•      My regular traveling companion is an obsessive and knowledgeable fine-food lover. There is, therefore, no McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken for us, though I did, somehow, manage to maneuver her into a Subway a couple of days ago. Instead, we often frequent one of the better restaurants in whatever town we have the pleasure of visiting. Well, as she has noted in a resigned voice, even many of those restaurants in this land of rice, beans and ceviche have a pasta dish, a pizza and a hamburger—the global stalwarts—somewhere on their menu. Local cuisine is rapidly sinking into the global cuisine.

•      Back then, if I was beyond the reach of the International Herald Tribune, I might have picked up a local newspaper to see if I could make out anything about what was going on in the world but also about the government and politics of wherever I was. (My newspaper Spanish was slightly less nonexistent than my conversational Spanish.) Now I mostly just go to nytimes.com and learn nothing about wherever I happen to be.

      The result is that, despite the fact that I have more time to travel now than I used to, my immersion in other countries is significantly less immersive than it used to be.

      No one told me about this: that the cumulative result of the 21st century’s technologies and transformations has been to make travel so damn smooth and easy that after I arrive someplace . . . I’m not there.