Costa Rica
To celebrate our silver wedding anniversary (which was in October 2019), we decided to take a long holiday in Costa Rica. To avoid the worst weather, we delayed the trip until February.
We flew to the capital, San Jose, and spent a couple of nights (just one full day) there, before leaving early in the morning to travel over to the Caribbean coast at Tortuguero to a hotel that was only accessible by boat. Here we had a number of wildlife spotting trips, and amongst other things saw our first tiny frog - about a centimeter high.
After two nights here, we started our journey back across the country to Sarapiqui (where we saw lots of red eyed tree frogs and visited a chocolate plantation), and then into the cloud forest. Here, we saw loads of humming birds - and loads of rain.
Our next stop was at the Osa Penninsula - which we travelled to on a very small plane with just five passengers, a drive across a couple of rivers onto a beach where we had to paddle, with our luggage, to get onto a small boat to travel to the hotel. While here, we went snorkelling.
Our trip to the next location, Manuel Antonio, started with a boat trip. This took longer than expected as, in the middle of the Pactific Ocean (well, about 100 meters off shore), the boat broke down. We had to change boats on the ocean, having to pass all our luggage from our boat to the new one before jumping across ourselves.
Manuel Antonio was not our favourite destination - there were far too many other people there, especially in the national park. However, we were able to see spider monkeys, which we did not see anywhere else, so worth a stop.
Our final visit was to a coffee plantation in the central valley, just north of San Jose. While here, we visited Poas volcano, an active volcano that last errupted just a few years before.
