Category: 2024 Costa Rica

Time to wrap up our vacation (and this part of the blog). We arrived at 10:45am in Madrid and now have a dreary five hours to fill before our three hour flight to Berlin leaves. I think it is not…

Read More

There was a cliff hanger yesterday, I pretended to be done with birdwatching for this trip, but old habits are difficult to break and I got up at 5:45am again. This morning the Pygmy-Owl did present itself very well and…

Read More

Today was a day full of emotions, goodbyes, adventure and finally birdwatching. The first goodbye was a last pre-breakfast walk that Chris and I took along the beach in Santa Teresa. The Pacific is Chris’ ocean and nothing really compares.…

Read More

A bit of a quiet day as Chris got stomach-sick yesterday evening and spent half the night in the bathroom hanging over the toilet. Either the Ceviche or the Salmon Sushi dinner (or something else) did not want to go…

Read More

Today we left the dry north of Guanacaste close to the Nicaraguan border and moved south onto the Nicoya Peninsula where Nikolaus lives and works. Guanacaste province and also Nicoya which is part of the former is dominated by cattle…

Read More

Heavy hot winds raged the whole night and throughout the day today. Nikolaus and Chris want to do vacation things and sleep in until 8:00, but I didn’t want to risk missing potential new birds, so I got up at…

Read More

Morning breakfast at the Cafe Colibri at the entrance of the Monteverde Cloudforest National Park. Although that park is very beautiful, it also sees busloads of visitors so we had decided to skip it. But not the attraction that the…

Read More

What an absolute perfect bird day and the best thing: Nikolaus and Chris seemed like they were enjoying it too. The day started with Juan Cano, our bird guide, picking us up at the lodge at 6:00am in the morning.…

Read More

As you might have noticed on one of the pictures from yesterday the roof of our cabin had glass panes in it so that you could look into the sky. As the cloud cover descended over night it pretty much…

Read More

I am back! The bleeding has stopped and I can solve simple math questions again. Feeling much better today and right on time as now our joint trip with Nikolaus starts. Nikolaus had a very early morning because he had…

Read More

Wolfram is not having a great day today (and we didn’t see any new birds anyway) so I am taking over the blog again. It was an intense day! We woke up at dawn and went for a sunrise goodbye…

Read More

Do you know the feeling when you are on vacation and you don’t know if you are ripped off or everything is as it should be? Generally, Costa Rica is a safe country, you are not being hassled, bargaining really…

Read More

A good day starts with a good breakfast. Today we wanted to visit the Sea Turtle Conservancy Station to learn a bit more about the effort and how that fits into the history of this part of the country. But…

Read More

Tortuguero has many activities to offer and we intend to do a lot of them: Canoe tour, Jungle walk, “volcano” hill climb, bird watching tour. We have done enough night walks and the turtle tour is out of season. Today…

Read More

We are on the move again and hug the coastline northward. In this region there is no Uber, so our host asked a neighbor if he would drive us the hour north to make some cash on a Sunday morning.…

Read More

What do you write about, when there is not a lot to write about? We spent another day at the Cahuita National Park and naturally there is a bit of repetition in what we do and experience. If Cahuita is…

Read More

Bed bugs – they are the worst. Or fleas, who knows. But one of them is the worst. It is sometimes difficult to blame one specific bed / hotel as the red signs appear 1-4 days after the bite. Dealing…

Read More

Travel day from San José to Cahuita at the South Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. I went to the bus station yesterday to obtain two tickets and seat reservations (12$ per person) as they sell more tickets than seats are…

Read More

Today is Quetzal day and what a day it was. But before we come to that I forgot to mention that we crossed a 3380m pass yesterday (no glaciers, still jungle) and stayed in the Trogon Lodge at around 2500m.…

Read More

We are now on our way back to San Jose where our birding round-trip will end. We exchanged the sweaty lowland wet forest of the Corcovado region with the highland wet forest and much cooler temperatures. Our lodge is at…

Read More

Nighttime temperatures are not that bad, but the humidity with 92% makes it unbearable, we are in the so-called lowland tropical wet forest. Coming out of the shower gives you relief for 10 minutes, maybe a bit longer if you…

Read More

We follow the Interamerican Highway One or rather the Carrera Interamericana Sur and reach our southernmost point, close to the border of Panama. The climate gets hotter and more humid again, so that we are back in proper rainforest area.…

Read More

Oh these guest commentators, you can never control what they write or forget to mention and then the next edition has to be full of retractions and corrections. For instance name dropping, there was definitely also someone in the group…

Read More

Guest post by Chris:  It’s hot! As we travel south on the Pacific coast we are getting back into humid rainforest but without the rain this time. Our days are starting earlier and earlier, birdwatching at sunrise at 6, breakfast,…

Read More

Pre-breakfast birding consisted of a boat trip on the Gulf of Nicoya with a beautiful sunrise and Brown Pelicans, Magnificent Frigate birds, and Royal Terns. As soon as the tide was high enough we entered a river delta with mangroves…

Read More

What difference a mountain range makes. Up to now we were at the wet end of the Passat winds driving up the humid Caribbean air to an altitude where the air cannot hold the humidity anymore and rains off. Every…

Read More

Today we drove north to Los Chiles, a border town to Nicaragua. Most of the land was former jungle, then farmland to raise cattle and is now full of pineapple, sugar cane, cassava/manioc, orange plantations. Fun fact, with the size…

Read More

Rainy season, dry season, what does it matter? Apparently, we are in a region where the two seasons are the rainy season and the super rainy season. And we can call ourselves lucky that this is the rainy season. We…

Read More

Yeah, no 6am birdwatching today as it not only rained, we were actually in the clouds and sight was limited. But the view out of our balcony was stunnning nevertheless. The La Tigra Rainforest Lodge is part of a conservation,…

Read More

The day started with a little pre-breakfast walk down to the river with effortless birdwatching left and right (Green Heron and a Spotted Sandpiper, a species I have seen some years as an extremely rare migratory bird close to Kiel…

Read More

Meeting with the group in the lobby and some of the prejudices are immediately confirmed. We are all nerds, but the diversity is at least as wide as the Costa Rican bird fauna. Cannot say anything about birding expertise of…

Read More

Although fully tuned into Costa Rica time zone (Austin is in the same), I feel thoroughly tired. The last months have been long, dark and rainy, and I was busy at work. The good times are about to start. After…

Read More

After completing a memorable Planview RKO 2024 event (for the uninitiated, RKO means Revenue Kick-Off) I am about to depart from Austin- Bergstrom airport to fly via Houston to San José, Costa Rica. Hope to be reunited tonight with Nikolaus,…

Read More