Costa Rica, on the cheap and without a guide (well, at least we tried)

Like every other traveller, I suppose, I feel dreadfully the want of copious notes on common every day objects, sights and sounds and incidents, which I imagined I could never forget but which I now find it impossible to recall with any accuracy.
– letter from Alfred Russel Wallace to Charles Darwin, 1864

1st January 2025
San Jose – Peurto Viejo
I would forgo Chaucer and Shakespeare, The Beatles and Bowie, Brunel and Blake, Turner and Bacon, Wren and Hawksmoor, if only England’s nature we could restore. By that I mean its rainforests, trees and wildlife. Costa Rica, roughly the size of Wales, contains 5% of the world’s biodiversity. The UK, a lot bigger than Costa Rica, has pretty much the lowest biodiversity on the planet (and with a Labour government chanting ‘Homes over Nature’, it’s only going to get worse. At least Johnson, with his catchy ‘Build Build Build’ mantra, only seemed to target great-crested newts – Starmer has the whole of nature in his sights).

H and I had two New Year’s Eves, one in London and one in San Jose, capital of Costa Rica. Not up to doing much, we lay in bed listening to fireworks sounding like machine guns going off in our bathroom. Pretty much the first creature I saw in Costa Rica was not the most exotic of species – it was a cockroach. I stepped on it in the middle of the night whilst taking a pee. Luckily it was okay, well, it was gone by the morning.

Come morning, the first of the new year, the city was completely empty and beautifully quiet, not a single car drove by and all the shops were shuttered. We heard birds everywhere. It was like lockdown, only more exotic. One bird sounded like a video game, another like a pedestrian crossing. From our hotel courtyard we saw hummingbirds on exotic flowers and H spotted a racoon walking across a nearby roof.

We wondered the back streets of San Jose, an empty railway track, a few abandoned buildings, a closed down zoo and park where exotic birds and butterflies still hung out. It was a dirty city but still impossibly tropical. And impossibly expensive. The first few times we bought anything – coffee, pastries, a Coke – we thought we’d been conned; it was extortionate. This was apparently normal, for various reasons (mainly taxes) but would still jar every time we bought anything. (I think partly it has to do with expectation (and my complete lack of any research – despite not buying a guide book we ended up with five, from various friends, all unread) – if it was Florence or Paris we probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Central America, we expected it to be cheap. Other countries in Central America are a lot cheaper, Nicaragua, for example, but not yet geared up for tourism.)

We didn’t linger long in the capital but got a shuttle bus east to Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast. It was raining quite hard, even though we were out of rainy season. The journey was as lush and verdant as any I’d ever been on, with miles and miles of pristine rainforest. The traffic was terrible in the other direction with large trucks trying to get uphill and presumably people returning home after the New Year break. In general there aren’t that many roads in Costa Rica hence they mostly tend to be choked up all the time. The only other passenger on our shuttle bus was Canadian, the first of many we would meet. She’d just been to Nicaragua for a few days, and highlighted the bribes she’d had to make to various border police. After a few days in Costa Rica, she was off to Panama. This was a person who hadn’t had a holiday for a few years and was trying to relax.

It’s always disconcerting arriving at a place at night. The hotel was directly on a main road a mile out of town and cars and motorbikes raced along it all hours. But the hotel was nice, there was a small pool lit up at night, and a lush, green garden with a large papaya tree overhanging the pool – the result, the American owner said, of a bird dropping a seed just a year ago (things grow fast here). We walked into town along the busy road, found an okay restaurant, I had sea bass. It was still raining incessantly.

2nd January 2025
Peurto Viejo, Caribbean Coast
If our opinion of Costa Rica was still unformed, it was waking up early the next morning to sunshine and a cacophony of bird sounds, whose bright colours we could see from our balcony, that we knew we’d arrived somewhere special. Especially when our morning walk, along the main road, where starfruit trees had their fruit falling on the floor going to waste, then onto the beautiful black sand beach, Playa Negra (littered with fallen palm fronds, washed up tree branches and coconuts), into town for a quick breakfast (pancakes and coffee), then walking along the beach again and into a small forest, consisted of spotting the following (the walk being a total of perhaps two miles): great-tailed grackles, cherrie’s tanagers, blue-grey tanagers, cockerels (one called Randy), a great kiskadee, monkeys, hummingbirds, herons, diving pelicans, a whimbrel, adult sloths and a baby sloth, lizards, leafcutting ants, frigatebirds, various butterflies including the amazing blue morpho, a common black hawk and red dragonflies (with wings like X-wing fighters). The sea was warm, the sun was out, there was a chilled vibe on the Caribbean coast and it mostly looked like how paradise was meant to look.

The great-tailed grackle, a large iridescent black bird with a fan tail and a fun array of noisy sounds, which we heard before seeing it for the first time in a tree in San Jose, would be the bird we would see and hear in large numbers everywhere we went. Though quite common in the States (it would happen often, being on the same continent, Americans and Canadians would tell us they were used to seeing all kinds of exotic creatures at home, from grackles and hummingbirds to racoons, that us Brits don’t), they were a never-ending source of wonder, amusement and reassurance to us.

I’d been quite apprehensive about Costa Rica – mainly about not booking a tour or having a guide, and therefore not seeing anything at all (slightly scarred by jungle walks in Peru where – even with tours and guides – “that tiny red dot a mile in the distance? That might be a macaw”). What hope would we have on our own? Before we left, two people we’d met who had recently been had exclaimed to us (one in Truro Cathedral, of all places) “I never saw a sloth! I never saw a sloth!” I got it into my mind I wasn’t to see a sloth (you can see where this is going – obviously we saw loads of sloths but before I come across as too smug – we never saw a resplendent quetzal, possibly my one regret, despite hanging out at avocado trees, despite everyone else – on guided tours – having just seen one).

So we saw monkeys and a sloth (the first of many) in the small forest near the beach. Not just a dark, furry mass asleep in the dark recesses of the canopy but we saw a sloth climb s-l-o-w-l-y down a tree, relieve itself, then climb s-l-o-w-l-y back up the tree. Sloths only do this once a week, so it was a real privilege watching it in action, so to speak. We watched it for perhaps an hour. Well, we weren’t in a rush either. This was the Caribbean Coast. Chill!

A tourist came up to us and started chatting. He kindly explained how he’d been here last year, met an American woman who lived here, asked her where to see wildlife off the beaten path, she’d told him the place where the toucans go, he went earlier in the day and saw lots. Toucans! He got out his phone, showed us a map where they were. Back into town, left before the bridge, up a hill, past a yoga resort, then a school… I thanked him of course, but lost track of his directions and H was still entranced by the sloth and wasn’t really listening. Besides, what were the chances of the toucans still being in the same place hours later?

Still, we knew the bridge, took a turn left up a hill, suddenly we felt we were in remote, uncharted territory. And a dog started following me but didn’t want me to go much further up the hill. And then we saw – and heard – toucans high in the trees (to me, iconically recognisable from old Guinness adverts). I should say at this point that my daughter lent me her camera which has a 70-300mm zoom lens, and my mum lent me her binoculars. Both were invaluable in a country where you are constantly reminded to “look up!” (The majority of tourists bafflingly only had their mobile phones as their main camera. Hopefully their phones were better than mine – I still had an iPhone 6 as the iPhone 16 was just being released.)

We could only just make out the toucans with our eyes – their bills were the giveaway – but with the camera and bins we could make out two species on the same tree – the keel-billed toucan and chestnut-mandibled toucan. Toucans are playful birds and make a variety of sounds, including very recognisable clattering noises with their bills. We got stiff necks from watching them for so long. I wanted to walk up further but H, and the insistent dog, guided us back down the hill. It had been an incredible first day on the coast.

So this would be how we found at least 50% of all the wildlife we saw – either by getting tip-offs from tourists or seeing them gasping, pointing and taking photos. The other 50%, well, H was great at spotting wildlife, so I’ll give her 35% and myself 15% – I was pretty good at spotting monkeys, and especially good at spotting tourists spotting wildlife.

Here was the thing about Costa Rica – nature and wildlife is everywhere, all the time. I’ve never been any place like it. The animals and birds don’t just stick to the national parks, we were regularly told. Indeed, they were up side streets, at bus stops, on beaches, along telegraph wires, next to resorts, car parks, roadsides. In the national parks, mainly consisting of dense and dark rainforests, many animals were actually hard to see, and birds were more likely to be seen in clearings.

The American owner of our hotel only talked to us when we arrived and when we left, and even sent out her old mother just as we were leaving, who wasn’t sure if we were coming or going. I had a long talk with the sassy black owner who had moved here from DC, as Americans call Washington DC. She’d been a corporate lawyer, and was trying to restore her soul in Costa Rica. She came here on holiday, bought a hotel. She was friendly, and seemingly anti-Trump, anti-Capitalism, anti-the west in general yet she was buying another hotel on the coast here, then buying one in Nicaragua. She employs Nicaraguan labourers in Costa Rica and pays them a quarter what she would pay Costa Ricans. I don’t know, from her point of view, she was doing good, she certainly wasn’t evil, but it just seemed like she was doing capitalism (which is evil) on a small scale. She said everything – Costa Rica, yeah, but also the whole world – was eventually going to become a playground for the wealthy, homogeneous and overpriced.

3 January 2025
Cahuita National Park
We took a local bus to Cahuita National Park, with a dog docilely following me as we walked to the bus stop. It’s too hot for dogs to bark here, they seem very chilled. I never usually get on with dogs but I’d already had two nice dog experiences. Cats, who usually adore me, here avoided me. The national parks are rightfully quite strict about not letting in tourists carrying food or single-use plastic, and we had to hastily eat our packed lunch after just having breakfast. We never quite got it though, once inside we always saw families having picnics. Anyway, it’s a great concept that should be applied to the whole country, which in general has a pretty severe litter and waste problem.

The small yet stunning national park contains trails along the coast, with beautiful white sand beaches on one side and rainforest on the other. This is pretty much my favourite kind of landscape in the world – the exotic beach/rainforest combo. We spotted lots of monkeys (howler and capuchin), one of which swam across a river, sloths, parakeets, a caiman (pointed out to us by a tourist otherwise we’d never have seen it), a family of racoons, hermit crabs, blue butterfly, white headed eagle?

I had to tell off annoying teenagers feeding the monkeys, trying to get a dumb selfie with a monkey for their stupid Instagram shot. I think of that Pulp line, “Cause everybody hates a tourist / Especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh” from Common People.

We’d seen photos of this area looking like a Robinson Crusoe deserted desert island, and at certain picture postcards viewpoints it was, but, still, we were actually always just a few minutes from other tourists, a main road, a town, resort, or cafe, even if it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.

Despite the small size, it was actually quite a hike. The final part was through an atmospheric, almost eerie mangrove-swampland area and we heard frogs croaking all the way – but we could never see them. I’d stop and think I’d isolated the exact spot where the sound was coming from, but they were forever elusive. Two tourists were peering through a thick tangle of mangrove branches and pointed out a family of racoons to us, pretty hard to make out but just about. Waiting for the bus back there were hummingbirds doing their thing in the nearby flowers.

4 January 2025
Peurto Viejo to Sarapiqui
We were picked up early from our hotel and drove towards the Sarapiqui region to a rainforest lodge and research station called Tirimbina. We stayed in the same room David Attenborough had slept in a few years before. I managed to get us locked out of our room in the back patio almost immediately after arriving, then we got soaking wet and covered in mud during a late afternoon walk in the rainforest.

We had seen amazing birds and wildlife so far but crossing over into the rainforest (quite literally over a terrifying, rickety hanging bridge over a very wide river) was another experience altogether. Here was paradise, not a Biblical paradise created by humans but a primeval paradise for all the flora and fauna. Though we were walking along manmade paths, this still felt like the real jungle, not a place for humans at all, dark and deep and everything green.

5 January 2025
Tirimbina rainforest, Sarapiqui
First thing in the morning we heard a god awful noise which echoed throughout the reserve and could have been manmade, machine or animal, we had no idea. I asked the receptionist, who was vacant, uninterested and noncommittal, so I ventured out on my own to find the source of it. Even before I overheard a tourist say the words ‘howler monkey’ I had kind of guessed as much, as a few minutes later I found myself alone with the sound directly above me, then saw the large black monkey, and wondered to myself, is it aggressive, angry, hungry? The howler monkey was my favourite animal noise (one of the loudest animal noises in the world, it can be heard three miles away). H’s favourite was that of the iguana. There seemed to be lots of them in the trees at the back of our lodge, which had a little garden (where we only spotted numerous birds and butterflies). They were massive and prehistoric and indeed roared at each other like dinosaurs.

We made virtually no notes but sometimes remembered to jot down all the creatures we’d seen in a day and today it was thus (most likely just in the space of a couple of hours): ‘snake, three iguanas, two types of toucan, summer tanager, bat, dog, sloth, butterflies, loads of other birds, hummingbirds, yellow birds, howler monkeys, leafcutter ants, common basilisk, heard frogs but saw none!’ Except when one landed on H’s cheek. In the rainforest, a small creature just jumped out of nowhere onto her face, she instinctively flicked it off, it landed on the ground. I could barely make it out, my glasses weren’t on. It jumped off, so seemed okay. H said it was a tiny green frog. Seeing as many of the frogs are poisonous, we half-expected her face to swell up but luckily it didn’t. Slightly later a bird just next to us on the path flew out of a hole. The leafcutting ants were an incredible sight, thousands of them in a line all carrying a piece of leaf to take back home, turn into fungus then eat it.

Near our lodge we had been walking in what we assumed was a lovely botanical garden and part of our reserve. Apparently we’d walked too far into the next hotel complex, far posher than our humble rainforest lodge. I’d thought there were too many old people and families walking around. We’d seen lovely sights in these gardens (including the howler monkey and many stunning birds called Montezuma ornopendolas) and they were very tranquil. But when I was taking a photo of a large millipede I was told by someone working for the hotel that we weren’t allowed there. Whatever, we were leaving anyway.

6th January 2025
Tirimbina — Arenal volcano, La Fortuna
With a few hours to go before our bus picked us up, we had a last walk around the reserve. There was a wooden hut where a chocolate tasting tour takes place. It was empty and we walked around it. I was a little ahead of H and spotted something hopping around the recycling bins – a tiny frog. I couldn’t believe it. These little things, so tiny and exquisite they’re like precious jewels, were actually top of my list of creatures to see. This one was adorned with a green and black camouflage pattern, and is actually called a green and black poison dart frog (if only everything was named after what it looked like). Then three more popped out from behind the bin. It was quite a sight. I sort of froze, so entranced was I, and forgot to take a photo of them (luckily H did).

Our bus journey was spent with a young couple. The man didn’t look up from his phone for the entire journey, about three hours. They barely spoke, except to show each other stuff on their phones. I despaired inwardly. They got off at an expensive spa resort. Figured. Soon after, we arrived at the foot of Arenal volcano in La Fortuna in the pouring rain and it didn’t really let up. We were staying in a pretty chalet in a large garden and there were birds everywhere but the rain, then the mist, put a dampener on things. We saw part of the volcano when we arrived in the evening, most of it being shrouded in mist, thinking it would clear by the morning.

7th January 2025
Arenal volcano, La Fortuna
The mist and rain was worse in the morning, the volcano completely invisible and the rain relentless. We were officially in the dry season but locals were saying this was unusual and put it down to climate change. Still, we couldn’t stay in our chalet all day so we spent the day in the rainy rainforest. We had raincoats and hiking shoes.

A young tourist came running towards us and a nearby guide with two Japanese tourists. He explained to the guide a woman had broken her ankle nearby. There was a young French woman on her own who was sort of with us but not for a while. She was pretty aloof but went the same way as us and asked us once or twice what we were looking at. It was usually a leaf or something. In general, tourists were pretty disappointed with what I was looking at. I too on occasion would point and gaze excitingly at something in the distance. Sometimes tourists would follow my finger or camera lens and gaze then look nonplussed when it turned out to be fungi, bark or leaves. Often I would have to explain, almost apologetically, ‘it’s just fungi but it’s pretty’. Even flowers weren’t good enough, it had to be an exotic bird or creature of some sort to captivate the tourists.

Anyway, H, myself and the French woman followed the directions the young man gave, and after ten minutes found the woman with the broken ankle, sitting across the muddy path, three strapping young men looking after her, one holding an umbrella, whilst her husband looked for help. There wasn’t much we could do – we stepped over her and went on our way. Later, said strapping young men were now topless. I usually think when it’s raining so hard, it’s better to wear less clothes instead of more, as we mostly do. Especially when the weather is hot, a sticky raincoat is the last thing I really want to wear but I wouldn’t have the confidence to walk around topless and in shorts like the strapping young men. I asked one of them how the woman was. She was fine, he said, pausing briefly before jogging off with his mates.

By now completely drenched, we walked over black slippery rocks which are in fact lava fields from an old volcano eruption, and climbed metal steps to reach the viewing platform which indeed did have splendid views. Despite tourists everywhere else, it was just us and an American family on the platform. The husband and I joked about not being able to see the volcano. We were walking on it, but we couldn’t see it. Suddenly the rain stopped, the sun came out, the clouds and mist lifted majestically from the forest, revealing more of the volcano than we’d seen before. We took off our coats, the sun warming us. It was a magical, blissful few minutes.

Then the wife pointed out an anteater. We looked around and sure enough a black creature with a long tail was sniffing around, oblivious to us. We all took photos. A few minutes later the anteater left, the rain started again, and a stream of tourists came onto the viewing platform. Actually it wasn’t an anteater at all. H and I both thought its nose wasn’t long enough, tail was too long. But the wife had named it, and we believed it for a bit. The American kids made ants in pants jokes. We soon found out it was actually a coati (pronounced qua-ti), more in common with a racoon than an anteater, and a mammal we would now see a lot of.

With the rain starting again, we were soon completely drenched once more. I sometimes listen to my brother – in this case, I always remember something he said years ago about how people widen paths in the countryside by walking around the muddy bit in the middle, thereby constantly enlarging the path and eroding countryside. I was so drenched I just walked through the middle of the paths, in the mud and water. Funnily enough, I didn’t sink as much as I thought; maybe the mud in the middle had hardened. Tourists really are namby-pamby, most wearing flimsy trainers and, as brother mentioned, walking as far away from the main path as possible to avoid water and mud, thereby widening the path.

After completing the trails, drenched, exhausted, hungry and thirsty, we nevertheless walked miles along a dull, stony road to get to the observation tower, where there were more trails. We were talking to a Canadian couple – to whom creatures like hummingbirds and racoons are as common as pigeons – and H exclaimed that the motmot we’d all just seen reminded her of a kingfisher. Nothing like it, replied the Canadian woman. H had only seen a flash of it, and the colours had understandably reminded her of the kingfisher. It looks nothing it, repeated the woman, obviously quite offended. The beak, tail, size, it’s completely different to a kingfisher. Anyway, we saw other birds here too, cherrie’s tanagers and hummingbirds (which we saw everywhere but here I got a photo of one almost in focus. Well, they do rotate – not flap – their wings 80 times a second).

It was heartening to hear that the secondary rain forest we had been walking through had only formed after the last volcano eruption. Significant eruptions in 1968 and 1992 had destroyed much of the surrounding area so the forest was very recent indeed; we had assumed it was hundreds of years old. Nature grows fast here.

8th January 2025
La Fortuna
By the next day the rain was still pouring torrentially, and we resignedly decided to spend some time in La Fortuna, a bland, depressing town ‘built for tourists’, as one Uber driver told us. On the shuttle bus coming in, I’d spotted a watch repair shop. My watch had stopped the day we’d arrived in Costa Rica, maybe it was a sign, but I still needed to tell the time, and taking my phone out of my pocket to tell it was annoying*. The town was bland but I got my watch battery. We found a large, almost empty church in the centre of town and dried out a bit in there. When getting a watch battery is the highlight of your day in Costa Rica, there’s nothing more to say. Even paradise looks a bit soggy after days of rain. H mastered Uber, neither of us had ever used it before; it’s unknown in Cornwall.

(*When it comes to phones I really hate having all my eggs in one basket. Phone, watch, internet, email, calculator, compass, camera, debit card, travel card and a hundred other things – I don’t want them all on one device.)

Everywhere in and around La Fortuna were signs to do stuff. Adventure. Consume. Souvenir. Quad Bike. Horse Ride. Hot Spring. Waterfall Tour. Zip Line. Jesus, why do people always have to do stuff? Tourists are like kids who have to be entertained all the time. We walked, looked and took photos, pretty much the entire time.

9th January
La Fortuna — Monetverde
Though there were hot springs and quad biking still to do, we left Fortuna without regrets. Soon after leaving town, a fallen tree was blocking the road and we all got out to remove it. It was one of the busiest shuttle buses but moving the tree didn’t exactly bond us all and most of the tourists spent the time glued to their phones, one actually watching a TV show most of the way. The young couple glued to their phones we’d been on the previous bus with were on this one too.

Tourists are extraordinary. For better or worse I am forever looking out of moving windows – plane, train or automobile, I love to gaze, look and dream. Tourists like to look at their phones. No matter where they are. Watching a film. Checking social media. Here’s me, jaw-dropping at amazing landscapes, and they’re checking Facebook. In fact, the changing landscape was quite interesting on this trip. We had gone from rainforests to plains with less trees, reminding H of the African Savannah and me of the Midwest in the States.

When most of the other tourists were dropped off, it was just us and two young French Canadian women, who we chatted to, and things felt more relaxed. They were dropped off at some backpackers place in an ugly, industrial part of town.

The landscape was stunning as we got close to Monteverde, home of the cloud forest. We drove steeper and steeper until we were indeed up in the clouds. It was impossible to get a good shot from the bus but there was one spot where a rainbow shone over the clouds which would have made a great pic. It’s handy how my best photos are always the ones I never took (it always looks better in my head).

We arrived at our old fashioned hotel which had stunning views of the valley. All hotels had huge, high beds, at breakfast and dinner we were served food on huge bowls and plates, the butterflies were huge… we felt like we were in Gulliver’s Travels.

10th January 2025
Monteverde
Next day we got a bus to what we thought was and were told was the world famous Monteverde Cloud Forest but was in fact Curi-Cancha Reserve (which we didn’t find out until the next day). The tourist bus was something like $8 for a two minute ride; we would walk on the way back. The Reserve was amazing anyway, we saw a family of coatis.

Sometimes we would stop where a guide and tourists were looking and see what the fuss was all about. We stopped at a group of tourists as they tried to convince each other there was a large pale-billed woodpecker right in front of us through the trees. We must have stayed and looked for five minutes but could not see it. Apparently it was a foot tall.

When we did walk back we went over to a hotel where lots of young Americans were hanging out with cameras and binoculars. We went to see what they were seeing, it was an exotic bird, can’t remember what, then I saw some monkeys and pointed them out (usually hard not to spot them, they make a great racket and chuck branches and coconuts down from above); the Americans seemed excited. They appeared nice, and we would bump into them again, but they acted like they were in a cult or something. I don’t have any evidence, it was just a feeling.

I’ve mentioned before how wildlife is everywhere in Costa Rica. Well, behind our hotel, beyond what looked like a stagnant pond, was a small wood with a trail (it seemed that every hotel, cafe and restaurant has its own bit of rainforest out back). We’d been meaning to explore and had a bit of time before dusk. It was pretty much the same as the national parks but smaller. This one was dark and we spotted lots of giant fungi. We started talking to an elderly couple into birdwatching. They pointed out a woodpecker with a red chest to us, and said it lives in a tree by the stagnant pond. The man said they’d just seen a pair of motmots by the abandoned banana plantation, so we set off there.

We didn’t know what a motmot was, but when H spotted a stunningly beautiful, exotic bird on a post in the plantation, we guessed it was probably one of the pair. We took some pictures then walked on. A minute later the other one landed on another post a few feet away from me. I daren’t move. I stood still and looked at it for a while, then remembered to take some photos. H was some distance away, also taking photos, then an old tourist came upon the scene, also keeping his distance, and took pictures too. Mostly I just looked at the amazing bird. It seemed to be saying, well, I’ve landed on this post, and I’m going to stay here, I don’t care if three tourists are staring at me. Eventually, after a few minutes, the bird went on its way. But what a treat.

It wasn’t until our lodger in Cornwall sent H a text and jokingly apologised for interrupting our sipping of piña coladas on the beach that we realised it wouldn’t have occurred to us to order cocktails. So we began drinking piña coladas, which originate in Puerto Rico. It was the only time it felt like we weren’t being fleeced, as the cocktails were mostly 2 for 1 in happy hours at the bars and hotels, which ended up costing the same as a beer, which usually cost the same as a large bottle of water. In other words, cocktails are cheaper than water in Costa Rica.

11th January 2025
Montevede
The only day we misstepped in Costa Rica was when we eventually went to the actual Monteverde Cloud Forest. What happened was we walked to town – aside from souvenir and coffee shops it seemed to consist of dentists and pet shops – to what we thought was another rainforest but the gates were closed. We went into a nearby tourist information and a friendly man who seemed to collect English idioms (he hadn’t heard of “don’t cry over spilt milk” and wrote it down to remember) told us it wasn’t a rainforest but an administrative centre. We continued talking and it dawned on us we hadn’t been to the Cloud Forest after all but a reserve (which, nevertheless, was amazing).

It’s true we had found the booking of the national parks a challenge – partly due to the terrible, confusing website where you had to book. This is obviously not a blog post to explain Everything You Need To Know Before You Go (I pretty much insist I Know Absolutely Nothing Before I Go Anywhere); there are plenty of other blogs for that. We did finally book several of the parks online but could have got tickets for them all on the day (though Curi-Cancha only allows in 50 people at a time).

Anyway, the aforementioned friendly tourist man convinced us we had to book the bus to the Cloud Forest and a guide through him. “Otherwise, you know, you will go home, you will say you went to Monteverde, people will ask you how was the cloud forest, you will say you didn’t go there.” To cut a long story short, we panicked and booked it through him. And probably paid a bit more than we should have.

It was at this point a woman came in and got me to take a photo of her chest. That sounds wrong. We started chatting to a couple who were opening a social impact hotel in the area and wanted some information. Hotel con Corazon invests half their profits in education and social issues. The logo was on her T-shirt so I took a photo of it.

There was a lot of faffing organising a bus, which turned out to be the same one we got on the day before to go to the reserve, with the same driver who said he’d take us to the Cloud Forest (but didn’t). I tried telling the driver this but his understanding of English had suddenly ceased. We were late getting there and late to meet our guide, who wasn’t official.

It was hard to engage with our first and only guide (who was obviously in a hurry to get elsewhere), who churned out his well-rehearsed spiel – beginning with “Welcome to my office” as he gestures around the rain forest – and imparts as much knowledge I have from reading the information boards around the forest. Even when I mentioned H had met a former Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Óscar Arias, it only managed to raise an eyebrow. Actually when I told him the theory that fungi is going to take over the world, and magic mushrooms are mind control — I’d read it in Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake – and told him I can’t believe there’s no fungi tours, I could even do them, I’m such a fun guy, we briefly had a bit of a banter going on and talked about horror films.

But over all, I hate guides. Many people seem to have good guides, and some have bad guides. In Costa Rica, if nothing else, the guides were loud, and pretty annoying. Tourists think they’re going to miss out if they don’t have a guide, but we saw plenty on our own. I don’t really like being told where to walk and where to look with a complete stranger – especially when I’m on holiday!

Unable to rely on most animals and birds being in the exact place at a certain time, the guides all have their sure-fire techniques – showing us bats or a tarantula by shining a torch where they nest (hollow tree trunk and hole, respectively). It’s kind of cruel. It’s one reason we never did a night tour (though I did want to see more of the tiny frogs). Anyway, our guide left us after showing us virtually nothing – a wren, a tarantula’s legs – then the real adventure started and we stomped off into the clouds of the rainforest.

12th January 2025
Monteverde to Manual Antonio
On the bus to Manual Antonio, perhaps our longest journey, well, H said afterwards I chatted for hours to a French Canadian woman almost entirely about learning Spanish, something I wanted to do a course in. It didn’t feel like hours. And I’m sure we spoke about Leonard Cohen too. And David Cronenberg. And Justin Trudeau (which we did with every Canadian we met). We also chatted about architecture, both remarking on the fact that though we weren’t here for the buildings, most of what we’d seen so far was quite basic (except the grand old Spanish colonial buildings, of course) – residential homes seem to mostly be small shacks made of breeze blocks with corrugated iron roofs and bars on the windows, they certainly aren’t the most attractive homes to look at. The French Canadian woman, who also spoke Spanish and was here with her husband and two children, had asked a local what they were like inside, and they said surprisingly spacious and very nice too. Another point we made was how we never quite get to see how the locals live, except in cities or tourist places. There was many a small town, unremarkable except for its lack of tourists, that I would have liked to spend a day just walking around.

The bus stopped off at a huge, hideous souvenir shop called El Jardin, complete with a large car park and coach loads of moronic tourists. Online reviews give glowing reviews such as “good clean toilets”, “a very interesting place” and “A great souvenir shop!” Honestly, it’s a disgraceful, disgusting shop. It was doubly annoying stopping there as ten minutes later we cross over Crocodile Bridge, obviously not knowing anything about it until our driver tells us “crocodiles” as we drive over it but don’t stop, and a whole tourist industry has been created around the bridge where, of course, large American crocodiles swim below, and bask on the muddy banks of the river. We just got a passing glimpse of the crocs.

A note about the shuttle buses. They were mostly brilliant, shuttling tourists from town to town, the buses big enough to hold about a dozen, picking them up from their current hotel and dropping them off at their next hotel. It was the most time many tourists spent with each other, and sometimes there was constant chatter, other times stony silence. We spoke to more French Canadians than anyone else. The only annoying thing about them is when multiple buses would stop off at some random location, usually a cafe or souvenir shop, for about half an hour, then there was a confusing change of tourists and buses. We had an imaginary relationship with one of our drivers, Mario, who drove us on several trips. We tried being friendly and banter with him but he seemed pretty grumpy. We didn’t speak the same language for a start.

We arrived in the afternoon at Manuel Antonio and found the pricey supermarket at the end of our road full of American tourists. Black vultures circled overhead and a family of agoutis (cute, large rodents) ran around the small shanty town next to our hotel. We made our usual lunch – avocado, tomato, cucumber, baguette, crisps, two cans of Cokes = $30 – and headed out in search of the beach. It was the hottest place we’d been so far. And like most towns, we discovered, pretty ugly. With ubiquitous white SUVs clogging the streets. I was hot and bothered. H and I started to bicker as we walked down the horrible road called Calle 1 to the beach. Then H pointed out something colourful on a nearby tree. Two macaws! The large, red parrot was unmistakable. We couldn’t believe it. Then tiny squirrel monkeys, a species we hadn’t seen before were walking and running and jumping along telegraph wires, engaged in their own soap opera, completely ignoring the humans and cars. It looked like they were being chased by another monkey species, a bigger one, but maybe it was the leader of the pack (technically, troop), we weren’t sure. We walked for ages, spotting toucans too as it got dark.

Exhausted but exhilarated, we were starving as we came across Emile’s, recommended to us for the cakes. Ordering the cheapest items on the menu, salad and chips plus a well-deserved beer, and obviously the biggest Mississippi mud pie I’d ever seen, the bill still came to $60. (It was probably the best meal we had in the country, over all the food was average and expensive, mostly rice and beans, along with bland western dishes and one terrible Indian meal, a huge portion but inedible.)

The service was impeccable. In fact it was all over the country. If Costa and Cornwall share some similarities (the whole of Costa Rica is like a real Eden Project) – the coasts, the reliance on tourism – the differences are rather stark: Cornwall’s flora and fauna have been decimated, its service industry unpleasant at best, surly at worst.

13th January 2025
Manual Antonio
We did two good deeds in the morning – well, I pointed out an upside down cockroach and H turned it over. Further along, I pointed out some dropped keys on the floor, H picked them up, gave them to a nearby waitress waiting for a bus who said she knew the owner. Two good deeds = a reward, which was the bus turning up immediately and we got on to go to Manual Antonio national park (for less than a buck).

We arrived early at the national park and it felt like paradise with everything aligned: golden sand beach, monkeys in the palm trees, iguanas in the sand, pelicans dive-bombing into the ocean, tropical fish in the sea, frigatebirds overhead, the sea warm. Half the shells on the beach were moving; they were hermit crabs.

14th January 2025
Manual Antonio
On our last full day on the Pacific Coast we finally had a proper swim, and left cameras and phones at the hotel. Wearing my sunglasses in the sea, I lost them when a huge wave knocked me under. Despite them being £2 Poundland glasses, it was going to annoy me all day; luckily, half an hour later, they literally rose up from the depths of the ocean and back into my hand.

Afterwards, I left H to walk down the beautiful beach whilst I explored the grassy area at the top. A shady path lined with trees, it was a break from the sun. There were birds, iguanas and white-faced capuchin monkeys everywhere (the third species we’ve seen in Costa Rica, along with howler and squirrel). I reached for my camera which wasn’t there but it was magical just walking amongst them. The area was empty and the monkey’s were relaxed, lazily picking nits out of each other on tree branches.

We had to return with cameras, of course. And when we did, several hours later, it was a frenzy, with tourists and picnics everywhere, monkeys stealing packs of Doritos and marshmallows, people feeding them crisps and sweets. It was a horror show, really, but I got some good shots of the cheeky capuchins. We relaxed with the by now obligatory piña colada at an open air bar nearby (at happy hour once again, two cocktails were cheaper than a $13 portion of chips). Monkeys were still jumping all over the place, with more tourists than ever taking pictures. A waiter put fruit on a tree right by us and it looked at one point as if a monkey was going to jump on us.

Despite Costa Rica being a small country, we had only just touched on the wildlife. There were whole worlds we had not explored – the creatures in the oceans, the insects on the ground. It’s difficult to say why the country affected me so much, as I’ve never particularly been into birds or wildlife before. Perhaps it was a ray of hope with rainforests being decimated elsewhere (and also in Costa Rica, though thankfully we never saw any evidence), and England so-nature depleted. It took me a while to remember what waking up to the sound of birds reminded me of: lockdown. Now five years ago, and a difficult time for many of course, but I embraced it, and strangely enough still prefer the sound of birds to cars in the morning.

But the idea of Costa Rica will never catch on: they abolished their military in 1949; the country spends more money on education than the global average; they protect the environment – we were told to call 911 if you see someone cutting down a tree, even if it’s on their land (in England they’d hand you a chainsaw and give you a pat on the back). I know Costa Rica has many problems, social, political and economic, and we were on holiday there for just a few weeks but, damn, it was so beautiful. (Even weeks after returning home I’d say to people “I wish I was back with the toucans”, like it was a euphemism for madness, but I meant it.)

Everyone we know has either been to Costa Rica or knows someone who has just been or just going, and I recommend it to virtually everyone I speak to. But that’s the problem of course. I tell them to go now before the highways and resorts, but that’s just fuelling the problem. The more tourists, the more development, hotels, restaurants, bars… and the more nature gets destroyed. It’s got the balance about right at the moment (between nature and humans, for we are antinature by nature), but it’s at the tipping point, and we saw lots of new roads and big resorts under construction.

14th January 2025
Manual Antonio to San Jose
On the way back to San Jose we again stop off at El Jardin, which outdid itself this time. Outside the shop, there were two keyboard players covering Black Lace’s The Birdie Song. There were dancing women in Spanish flamenco dresses in the foyer. Both times I’ve been here I’ve walked off on my own and found the nearest tree to hang out at. This time I saw a family of great-tailed grackles nesting behind the huge sign for the shop.

Approaching San Jose in the shuttle bus, suddenly beautiful bright orange blossom was to be seen on tall trees everywhere, but as soon as we arrived in the city and walked around, we couldn’t see them anywhere. With the Poás Volcano in the distance and the orange blossom of what are called poró trees, it looked almost like a view of Mount Fuji by Hokusai. I’d also been searching for the rainbow eucalyptus, ‘seen everywhere’ – until I try to find them. In fact, our exotic options were running out as we were inexorably heading towards the airport. My last glimpse was of two parakeets near the entrance to the airport, then we were suddenly sucked into the maelstrom of so-called civilisation and the dream was over.

Previously on Barnflakes
The cattle of Costa Rica
Myanmar Days
White clouds, dark skin

Costa Rica, on the cheap and without a guide (well, at least we tried)

Bonds of the West Indies

Flickagrams #41