Monday 20 March 2023 – As I said yesterday, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with our stay at the delightful Tranquilo Lodge. We had a relaxed schedule (nice change!) so could have a leisurely breakfast before saying our goodbyes.

The Lodge also had some last-minute wildlife for us. All the time we were there, Scarlet Macaws were flying to and from a tree in the far distance, in preparation, Sebastien told us, for mating. This was, sadly, the only chance to see them and we couldn’t get close enough for a decent photo.

A Broad-winged Hawk was a little more obliging.

But we had a couple of gigantic insects on our veranda: a couple of Giant Katydids – each about 4 inches long not counting antennae

and, most impressively, a Dead Leaf Moth, one of the Giant Silk Moth family.

Here it is with a light switch for scale – it was the size of my hand.

So we said goodbye to Sumi and Raj, and Matthew and Jean-Pierre (lovely guys, but expensive acquaintances, these two – discussions with them have simply increased the length of the list of places we now want to visit) and, of course, Sebastien and Christophe.

Our four days at the Lodge were a superb, relaxed, comfortable, enjoyable and good-humoured counterbalance to the intense days that preceded them. Sad as it was to leave, our next destination, the Finca Rosa Blanca in Heredia, beckoned.

Heredia is, like Alajuela, where we stayed on arriving into Costa Rica, a suburb just north of San José, not too far from the airport. Since Drake Bay has its own airport, a flight from one to the other is the logical way to travel between the two. But first we had to endure the road from the Lodge to the airport, which was quite as bad as anything we’d encountered when we were driving ourselves around, But we made it OK, to a very tiny aerodrome,

where we checked in and were given our boarding passes.

There was no air conditioning in the building, but a very hot and humid day was somewhat mitigated by the giant fans in the roof – three of them in total.

We were amused by the manufacturer’s name, which had a distinct Ronseal overtone it it.

Our aeroplane, we discovered, was a Cessna Caravan (C208B for the aeroplane afficionados among you), which flew in and was swiftly loaded with the passengers’ bags.

and we rather informally wandered out to it

and boarded – 12 passengers and the plane was full.

Jane made an inspired choice of window seat, so I brutally dragged her out of it so I could take photos as we went along the 40-minute journey.

We had to wait a few minutes in San José airport to make contact with the driver who was to take us onwards, but Jane eventually found her and off we went, past an example of a sign I had been wanting, childishly, to take a photo of ever since we’d arrived.

Yes, I know it’s an ironmongery. It still makes me chortle because I haven’t grown up properly yet.

San José’s main roads are fine, but as soon as you get away from them the surfaces deteriorate alarmingly and we did a fair bit of crater and pothole slaloming as we went along. But we made it OK to Finca Rosa Blanca, which will be our final resting place in Costa Rica; we have two nights here. We were welcomed and checked in in a very smooth and professional fashion and whisked along to our room to settle in.

It’s a funny old place – architecture somewhere between César Manrique, as we saw on Lanzarote recently, and the confected appearance of Binibèquer Vell, where we stayed one night in Menorca.

The entrance hall to our apartment is, well, entrancing.

and the pool is a thing of joy,

lavishly decorated.

The site has an “Old House” – once the building where all the accommodation was, before more modern apartments were added.

It’s a resort, with reasonably substantial grounds, but based around a function that I will reveal to you in the next post. There. Can’t wait, can you?