Jan 30
We have nothing but the fondest memories from Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica’s premier national park, which we first visited (separately) nearly two decades ago on shoestring budgets. Unfortunately, our return to Manuel Antonio some eighteen years later felt far less triumphant than we had imagined it would be.
Those who have followed our perambulations over the last decade know that we like to push the envelope and seek out adventure in our travels. In so doing, we at times court mishaps, which seemingly tend to befall us most often when we have visitors. Some of the tight spots we’ve had to navigate resulted from events that were well outside our control: civil unrest, volcanic eruptions, security lockdowns, etc. Other misadventures, including the scrape in which we found ourselves last week, are very much of our own making.
To accomplish great things one must usually stand on the shoulders of giants. This is true in pretty much all walks of life, from scientific discovery to athletic dominance, even if our western civilization tends to emphasize individual accomplishments over the communal contributions that make them possible. Every Edmund Hillary has a Tenzing Norgay or, more likely, a whole team of Tenzing Norgays. Even with something as mundane as bird watching, which at its best is a solitary act of communion with nature, one can go a lot further by leveraging the birding community, from local guides to area expert reviewers to ornithologists studying bird populations to the hobbyists who report their sightings.
From muddy rainforest trails to mangrove-lined waterways and coastal jungle, we have done a lot of birding over the past month. We say “we” because although there remains a sizable enthusiasm gap between our relative levels of interest in ornithology, so much of Costa Rica’s tourism ecosystem hinges on bird watching that going on birding walks is typically the best option if one wants to really experience a place.
D spent so much time shuttling between sites on weekends and after hours during his recent work trip to South Asia that he accrued nearly two weeks of compensatory time off. At the outset of our Foreign Service odyssey, accruing time off was the primarily limiting factor to our travels. At this stage of our careers, on the other hand, finding the opportunity to actually use our accrued leave is a much bigger challenge.
If D needed a bird-watching idol to emulate, he’d look no further than Peter Kaestner, a fellow diplomat and amateur ornithologist who leveraged his overseas postings over the course of 36 years in the Foreign Service to reach #1 status on eBird. D’s birding ambitions are far more modest, especially since he birds exclusively by sight and only counts species he can positively ID visually. Even counting conservatively, however, D’s life list has been growing by leaps and bounds since our arrival in San Jose.
San Jose marks our fifth overseas posting, so we knew the math before arriving in Costa Rica.
Settling in takes approximately three months. Incoming presidential administrations meticulously plan out their first hundred days — when the excitement of the electoral victory lends momentum to major legislative victories, before political inertia sets in and the public ceases viewing the new president as an agent of change. Similarly, after arriving at a new post, it typically takes several months to familiarize oneself with a new job, make useful contacts, learn the lay of the land, and put the administrative headaches of settling into the rhythm of a new country behind us. East Africa. Eastern Europe. Southeast Asia. Central America. The particulars have changed with each location, but the overall settling-in period in our experience has remained roughly the same. We’re now two months in, and while in many respects we have checked the right boxes, in several crucial ways we still have a long way to go before feeling settled in. Read more
Jan 16
The initial blog post of our birding highlights from Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui drew enough praise that we’re back with a second batch of favorite bird phots from that trip (not that D really needed encouragement on this front).
Maybe it’s because the big 4-0 is not too far around the corner or perhaps because we’re now living in a country we first got to know at the pinnacle of our youth, but nostalgia has been hitting hard and heavy of late. There’s a bit of the pandemic effect clouding our reminiscences as well, amplified in no small way by our friends — especially those friends we made in high school and college who, it turns out, have now known us for more than half our lives (sobering thought!). One friend who lives half a world away recently shared photos from sleepaway camp, unearthed in his parents’ closet and scanned from old film; another triggered a wave of recollections with a social media post about high school prom. Confined to our social bubbles and missing the hugs and face-to-face time with close friends scattered all over the globe, the mind tends to wander back toward happier, more carefree times.
Jan 11
One of three medieval city-states in the Kathmandu Valley, Bhaktapur is the best preserved. Though the city sustained heavy damage during the 2015 earthquake that rocked Nepal, most of Bhaktapur’s numerous temples and historical buildings survived largely intact. Bhaktapur’s other chief attraction is its proximity to Nepal’s capital city. To the extent that navigating Kathmandu’s legendary traffic can be termed easy, Bhaktapur, located a mere dozen kilometers from the Kathmandu airport, is an easy drive away.
towels packed, will travel 