Apr 19
Our Costa Rica countdown clock is ticking down rapidly — we’re down to just under two months. Naturally, we’re trying to pack in as much as we can even as we focus on packing up and preparing for our next transition. This means there is frequently entirely too much going on and no time at all to process any of it, much less write about it.
Mar 10
Munchkin considered a couple of options to mark his double digits, including a VR experience with his closest friends, before opting to reprise last year’s festivities with another pool party in our condominium. The gifts he received reflected well his current interests — both new ones and those acquired long ago: anime and manga, sports and board games, and plenty of books. Observing the utter chaos in the pool felt like watching a rerun. Looking at our growing son, now a year older and wiser, we see many of the same tendencies and characteristics that defined him as a nine-year-old. We see important changes too as he continues to approach what he already told us will be his “sassy teenage years.”
A bonus day in February only served to underscore how quickly our remaining months in Costa Rica are flying by, time slipping through our fingers like grains of sand sliding through the hourglass. We are about to start our hundred-day countdown to departure and already have spent about as much time and effort over the last month on pre-departure logistics as on our actual jobs. Hopefully, this advanced planning will help smooth the transition when the time comes to bid adieu to the life we’ve built in San Jose over the last two-plus years.
Whenever another move approaches — and our next overseas move is just around the corner — George Carlin’s brilliant A Place For My Stuff inevitably comes to mind. A house is just a place to keep your stuff, Carlin quips, and when you travel, you take smaller versions of your house with you until you pare your stuff down to the bare essentials. We move quite a lot more often than an average family, which thrusts the questions at the heart of Carlin’s humor to the forefront every year or two. Which of our things are absolutely essential and which are nice-to-haves we could do without in a pinch? Which items have sentimental value and which ones simply take up space?
Jan 25
One of the joys of exploring Belize is that it is small and supremely easy to navigate. An hour’s drive west from our lodge would have brought us to the Guatemala border. Two hours in the opposite direction, and we found ourselves in Hopkins on the Caribbean coast. Compare this with our recent travels in Colombia, where renting a car in Cartagena and driving to the Santa Marta Mountains locked us into the Caribbean corner of the country for the better part of two weeks. It was time well spent, as D tracked down almost all of Santa Marta’s two dozen endemic birds on repeated visits to the El Dorado Reserve, but we also found that we had less flexibility than we thought a rental car would have afforded us. At any rate, this was not a problem in Belize. So, after spending a week exploring the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, we headed to the beach, stopping for one final Mayan cave tour on the way.
When we travel on our own, we rarely spend more than 3-4 nights in one place, preferring instead to string together several different destinations so that we can see as much as possible on each trip. With a larger group, however, frequent moves are more difficult to execute. When S’s parents and aunt visit or travel with us, we tend to pick a destination for a week (or two if we travel together for two weeks), supplementing each location with day trips. So it was for Belize, where we split our two weeks between the Mountain Pine Ridge in the country’s interior and Hopkins on the Caribbean coast.
In addition to exploring the Maya underworld on several caving tours, we also visited two of Belize’s most important Maya ruins at Caracol and Xunantunich.
A lot of our recent travels around Costa Rica either were organized entirely around birding or prioritized birding opportunities. Nature-based tourism is a great way to explore Costa Rica; having visited all of the typical tourist hotspots, we discovered numerous off-the-beaten-path destinations and hidden gems thanks in part to D’s quest to see as many different Costa Rican birds as possible. By contrast, birding was not among our top considerations when booking our trip to Belize with S’s parents and aunt. We had never been to Belize and were excited to explore everything this new-to-us country had to offer. Even so, D packed his birding gear, did his usual research, and found ways to integrate birding into all of our outings, even bringing his birding camera and binoculars on an all-day snorkeling tour. The results far exceeded his expectations.
The first of the many things we learned about Belize is that 60 percent of it is covered in limestone, the karst topography leading to the creation of hundreds of caves all over this small country. We visited three caves during our stay, spelunking in Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) Cave, canoeing inside the Barton Creek Cave, and tubing through the Nohoch Che’en Cave. In addition to the obvious adventure aspect of cave diving, these tours provide an opportunity to learn about Mayan culture and see artifacts from Central America’s dominant civilization, including calcified remains of human sacrifices preserved deep inside the caves.
Jan 7
We started 2024 in Belize — a country, we realized shortly after our arrival, we knew very little about. After living in and traveling extensively throughout the Spanish-speaking world, we usually have a pretty good compass for what to expect in most Latin American countries. Belize, which grew out of settlements started by British buccaneers and pirates on land previously dominated by the Maya and only partially overrun by Spanish conquistadores, does not fit neatly into this mold. After spending the last week exploring the country’s interior region, we’ve learned a thing or two about this land, which, as the tour guides frequently say, is unBelizeable!
towels packed, will travel 