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Becoming world famous for hikers is the coast to coast (Atlantic to Pacific) hiking trail titled El Camino de Costa Rica (WEBSITE link), a 280 kilometer hike through forests, mountains, farms and small villages with many suggested overnight stays in homes, camping or even a few luxury hotels nearby. 🙂
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
– Lord George Gordon Byron, 1813
9 more photos below . . .
Continue reading “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods”
Google sent me this map showing everywhere I went in 2023 and that motivated me to make a little travel map for my planned 5 trips in 2024, which again is a slight decrease from the previous year as I slow down a little – but not too much! :-) I really need to get to different parts of Costa Rica to maintain a variety in my nature photos! Though all of these 5 lodges for 2024 are favorites I’ve visited before, they are all good and will yield a lot of photos! :-)
I make many of my reservations nearly a year in advance because of the popularity of most of these and they fill up fast! (Especially Christmas Week!) One example is that I tried to get in Selva Verde Lodge Sarapiqui in March and there was no vacancy! But I’m glad I will go back to Villa Lapas near me instead, while it is still locally operated, because in the next year or so it will become a Marriott and thus much more expensive and who knows if it will be better or worse? It is next door to Carara NP and the Tarcoles Crocodile Safari Boat tours that I like and they have now added a jungle tree top bridge and other activities, along with their pretty good birding reserve. We will see what happens in the future with Marriott. :-)
Including local obviously and the 4 points on the Caribbean side are one trip that include separate flags for 2 national parks, the airport & the hotel. And the 6 flags in the north represent 4 trips. :-)
Somehow I missed scheduling Corcovado, Osa Peninsula or the South Pacific this year, but that puts it at the top of the list for 2025! :-) And to see what my trips and places are like, visit my Costa Rica TRIPS Galleries. If you are planning on a trip to Costa Rica, you can tell a lot about some of these lodges and parks by the photos I post there for each trip.
Buenos viajes para . . .
¡Pura Vida!
🙂
No big surprise for those of us who live here, but Costa Rica was named as the #1 Travel Destination for 2024 by Travel & Leisure Magazine AND the International Living Magazine and organization simultaneously named Costa Rica as the #1 Best Place to Retire in 2024! Read about it in Travel & Leisure. Or on International Living website.
For someone who made what a few American friends back in Nashville thought was a radical or crazy decision to move here in 2014, these announcements confirm the good decision I made back then! :-)
And these rankings are a good celebration of my 9 years of living in Costa Rica (as of December 24, 2023 — 2+ weeks ago). And my survival of cancer a celebration of the excellent healthcare here! Plus there is no better place for a nature lover and nature photographer like me! Tell your nature-lover friends to follow my blog to see what it is like to be “Retired in Costa Rica!” :-)
¡Pura Vida!
Taking someone else birding gets me into new locations sometimes and yesterday was my first visit to the very nearby dam on Tarcoles River named officially “Hidroeléctrico Chucás” which was under construction when I moved here. In addition to the expected water birds, the trees around the dam were just full of many small birds and a few larger ones. I got photos of more than 20 species and we heard a Scarlet Macaw, though we did not see him. Well, we heard a lot we did not see. :-) But I’ve always said we are too far from the coast for Macaws, but evidently not! It was a good birding walk before breakfast at Crema y Nata! It may be awhile before I get all those photos processed, but at least I did not erase or lose any this time! :-) Today is the last birding walk which will be at Reserva Madre Verde in Palmares, another new location for me which my neighbors Neal & Judy told me about. A report sometime in the future.
¡Pura Vida!
My birding friend from British Columbia, Canada, is here this week and we went birding on a former rural road on the west side of Atenas with lots of houses going up of course! Here’s 3 shots of the area and most of my bird shots were not real good because of light and distance plus I lost about 1/3 of them when somehow my computer deleted a bunch from the camera disk. Aghhhh! (I know! It was me hitting a wrong key or something! Grrrr!) Technology will be the death of me yet! :-) But the cows are cute! And that bright yellow tree is a Cortez Amarillo (Tabebuia Ochracea) tree that is blooming all over Costa Rica this time of year and in the landscape shot you can see yellow spots of them blooming. Thursday morning we will try a real country road south of Atenas and then Friday morning we are visiting a nearby nature reserve that I hope will be birdful! 🙂
And read on for a photo of a cow & calf nursing and a close up of the Cortez Tree! :-)
Continue reading “The Other Side of Atenas Yesterday”
See all the good photos in the GALLERY: 2023 Christmas Parade Atenas. And to introduce the gallery, here’s 5 shots from the 4 sub-galleries . . .
Underdog Day (December 15): If you watched this past year’s World Cup, you know the power of an underdog story. Unknowns Morocco and Croatia gained millions of fans as they upset top-ranked soccer teams. But underdogs are everywhere. The shy classmate running for student government. The teammate who is usually on the bench. Cheer for them today. Your support may be what helps them achieve their goals. And feel better about themselves. I know. As one of the shy, unknown kids in my 1958 H.S. graduating class of a thousand other kids, I received a citizenship award that the local newspaper called “The Typical Jane and Joe Award,” with a photo of me and an equally shy and unknown girl. It made us both feel better about ourselves! 🙂 Try to make someone you know feel better about themselves today!
¡Pura Vida!
Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day (November 24): You may not be a basketball star or have the lead role in the school play, but you have a talent or two to celebrate. Maybe you can whistle every song on Taylor Swift’s new album. Or balance 27 stacked Legos on your fingertip. Whatever your talent, share it with friends and family today. 🙂 And I will continue to share my nature photography on this blog! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!
See the many talents here in Costa Rica and the many ways they celebrate them in my GALLERY: PEOPLE, FIESTAS & ARTS Costa Rica
Here’s photos of 8 species of birds I photographed at Hotel Banana Azul which is fewer than usual like everywhere has been this year! And there are 10 photos because the male and female Scarlet-rumped Tanager look like 2 different species 🙂 and the juvenile Tropical Kingbird looks like a different species from the adult, so I included a photo of each. These 8 are all fairly common species all over Costa Rica except the Wood-Rail which is only in wetlands or coastal rainforests like the location of Banana Azul where there has always been a family of Wood-Rails living in their garden by their lily pond. Note that I saw 9 totally different species at Gandoca-Manzanillo (link to those bird photos) and a photo of only one bird at Cahuita but it was my Lifer this trip. 🙂 Thus in this trip gallery there will be a total of 18 species of birds this year, which is fewer than usual but not bad! 🙂 I always get a lot of photos in the Caribbean side of Costa Rica!
