the final count

While slowing our frenetic pace and cooling our heels in Filandia, we set out for one more off-the-beaten-path adventure to nearby Otun Quimbaya and El Cedral prior to packing our bags for the return to Costa Rica. 

happily falling into the tourist trap

After wrapping up our visit to the Rio Blanco Reserve, we headed across Colombia’s Coffee Axis to Filandia, the final stopping point on our whirlwind, all-too-brief trip through this beautiful country. “Oh, Filandia is a tourist trap! You’d be better off just staying here,” offered an older Colombian birder we met at Rio Blanco. He wasn’t necessarily wrong, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying our time in Filandia, which grew on us more and more the longer we stayed.

antpitta fever

Of all the places we hastily visited in Colombia, the one we gave the shortest shrift to — and the one we wished we had had more time to explore — was the Rio Blanco Reserve near Manizales. 

sifting through the sands of time

In the Foreign Service, we tend to mark the passage of time in reference to our assignments. For example, Emmie came into our life at the outset of our overseas adventures, when we were posted to Nairobi a little more than eleven years ago; Munchkin was born during our subsequent assignment to Chisinau; and we learned S was pregnant with Junebug toward the beginning of our third overseas tour in Kigali. By the same token, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic indelibly marked our assignment to Manila, while our subsequent posting to San Jose will always be synonymous with the return to a semblance of post-pandemic normalcy: the end of mask mandates and suspension of COVID travel protocols leading to a reinvigorated social and music scene and the resumption of interrupted travels. 

the birdiest place in the world

Hastily planning our trip to Colombia, we knew we were about to enter a land of superlatives, at least as far as ornithology goes. Boasting an astonishing 17 percent of the world’s known bird species, Colombia is the birdiest country on the so-called Bird Continent. In a brief moment of lucid insanity S even contemplated booking our entire trip with a birding tour company to make the most of this opportunity. Fortunately, D — who is by far the bigger bird lover — talked her off this ledge. It’s good to know one’s limits, and while we surely would have seen an insane amount and variety of birds had we committed to a full-scale birding expedition, dedicating an entire two-week holiday to one niche hobby seemed like overkill. 

Mother’s Day getaway

If you had “spend Mother’s Day at a golf resort” on your Costa Rica travel bingo card, raise your hand, step forward, and collect your prize. Considering that we do not golf, generally prefer active vacationing, and are slowly working our way through a long list of adventure-laden locales for nature-based tourism in Costa Rica, a golf resort was not a particularly likely destination. And yet, after hustling out of the house early Saturday morning to catch the morning Puntarenas ferry, we found ourselves a few hours later driving through the gates of the Tango Mar, past its golf course, and up to the hotel’s reception, scenically situated at the lip of the Gulf of Nicoya.

friends and family

After dedicating much of the last month to a photo tour down the memory lane of our Colombia travels, we took a creative break from blogging to focus on the present. In addition to our mundane goings-on — the kids settling in for the new school year while we try to re-acclimate to work after two weeks offline in remote Colombian jungles and rainforests — we’ve also had a few visitors. S’s mom spent two weeks with us after bringing the kids back from the States. The tail end of her stay also overlapped with a visit from one of D’s oldest and closest friends and his partner.

your mileage may vary

While we frequently plan our trips at the last minute out of necessity, there is a strong argument to be made for less planning in general — in fact, Geoffrey Morrison made just such an argument in the NY Times a couple of years ago. The potential upside of not planning out every minute detail of one’s travel is less stress and more opportunities for adventure, the argument goes. The downside to last-minute haphazard trip planning, it turns out, is that some of those adventures will be unanticipated and may be uncomfortable, leading to additional stress. There are two sides to this coin, as we learned during our recent trip to Colombia.