Dec 30
Two flights, two countries, and a two-hour drive after departing San Jose, our two kiddos raced out of the car and straight into their grandparents’ waiting arms. After several prior visits to Costa Rica, S’s parents suggested we rendezvous in a different country this holiday season. So, in lieu of planning another multi-week tour around our host country, we flew to meet S’s parents and aunt in Belize, adding a new country to our travel list in the process.
There’s never a bad time to go birding, especially in Costa Rica, but some months are better than others. For D, December historically has been one of his most productive months, with about 250 species seen per year. This is partly because migratory birds abound, having arrived on their tropical wintering grounds in the fall, and partly because we’ve been able to schedule blocks of leave around the winter holidays, freeing D up to spend significant amounts of time out in the field. With our visit to Macaw Lodge over the Christmas weekend and aided by a birding outing in Colombia at the start of the month, D is within striking distance of seeing 300 species this December and on pace for his best birding year ever.
Fortunately, the bats in Costa Rica are nowhere near as dramatic as the ones in Fear & Loathing, but there sure are a lot of them: 117 different species to be exact, accounting for half of the country’s mammals and a whopping 12 percent of all bat species known to man. Bulldog, mastiff, and dog-nosed bats; mustached and fringe-lipped bats; ghost and vampire bats; long-tongued, big-eyed, and short-tailed bats; and dozens upon dozens of other species with fanciful names and interesting habits.
Stereotypically, Jews in the United States — and especially in New York — patronize Chinese restaurants on Christmas Day. We’ve never settled into this tradition, even though D grew up in NYC, in large part because we’ve spent so much of our married life overseas. Instead, as we don’t have a Christmas tree or stockings stuffed with gifts to keep us at home, we usually take advantage of the holiday to travel. Last year, D’s parents visited us in December, and we organized a two-week adventure across a large swath of Costa Rica. The year before, Christmas fell mere weeks into our San Jose assignment; we spent the holiday in Sarapiqui, our first family excursion outside the capital. This year, we likewise took a short family trip to get out of the big city for a couple of days of green therapy.
Dec 26
The northern reaches of Guanacaste have little in the way of habitation or development. Two sprawling national parks — Santa Rosa and the namesake Guanacaste — protect much of the land. Like many of Costa Rica’s national parks, they are designed with conservation rather than visitation in mind, with only a tiny portion of their territories accessible to the public. Santa Rosa still receives a decent amount of visitors, ranking just outside the country’s top ten most frequented national parks with more than 400,000 guests in the last decade. By contrast, so few people make it all the way to Guanacaste National Park that we couldn’t find reliable publicly available data on its number of annual visitors. Between them, the two parks protect a diverse expanse of dry, wet, and cloud forests in addition to two volcanos and beaches where sea turtles nest.
We’ve written extensively about the many joys of birding in Costa Rica: the country’s incredible avian diversity, the ease with which one can see amazingly colorful birds, the fact that one can find incredible wildlife all over the place and frequently see rare birds in the most mundane of locations, the fact that one does not have to travel far to access vastly different climates and habitats — and with them many different kinds of birds. Costa Rica draws birding enthusiasts from all over the world with good reason. For Americans, to be sure, the experience must seem a bit weird because mixed in with all sorts of exotic birds are plenty of familiar species that spend their summers in the United States while wintering in Central America.
Because we frequently write about our travels while purposefully bracketing our professional lives, this blog sometimes suggests that we may be on permanent vacation. This month, such an impression would be more accurate than most of the time. The kids are nearly two weeks into their holiday break, which comes much earlier and lasts much longer in Costa Rica than in the States. We too have taken time off this month to make the most of our kids’ vacation.
A mere 40 kilometers outside Bogota, Finca Suasie might as well be on another planet. It took D’s driver an hour in heavily gridlocked traffic to get across the Colombian capital, which is home to more than 11 million people — double the entire population of Costa Rica! Another hour on rutted gravel roads, and D stepped out into the quiet, cold solitude of the paramo near Chingaza National Park, where he had decided to spend a day before returning to Bogota to see Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. With the exception of the artist/conservationist couple that owns the Suasie homestead, the only other person D saw during his entire stay was a municipal water worker on his rounds to check a nearby reservoir.
In the spirit of self-medication, the morning after we had returned from the Savegre Valley, D repacked his bag for another trip and headed out to the airport…where he wound up spending the better part of the day. That last part wasn’t part of the plan, of course, but sometimes them’s the breaks. Travel often enough, and you’re bound to run into all sorts of flight delays. Tropical storms, air traffic controller strikes, volcano eruptions — we’ve endured our fair share of exotic travel inconveniences over the years. This time, it was a simple mechanical failure that delayed D’s flight to Bogota from its mid-morning scheduled departure time. San Jose’s is a small airport and, despite Costa Rica’s popularity, not a regional hub. By the time a replacement plane was identified and the passengers boarded, it was 3 p.m.
Although we write about the ups and downs of the Foreign Service lifestyle with some regularity, we rarely delve into the specifics of our jobs. There are many reasons for this; one important one is a desire to avoid compounding the mental strain this career imposes. Think about the international issues dominating the news right now — wars, terrorism, mass displacement, natural disasters, etc. Whichever crisis came foremost to your mind, know that our colleagues covering these issues are up to their eyeballs dealing with the fallout — and that we’ve shouldered our fair share of these burdens also. And, of course, there are many smaller, more personal crises that don’t make the newspapers but exact the same kind of emotional toll.
towels packed, will travel 