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Quepos: Animal Magic & Other Stories
By the end of our second day in Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, we have covered every inch of its trails and hiked to every corner, and had many wonderful close encounters with amazing and exotic creatures. For our third day in the Park, we hire a guide to see if we can dig deeper and see things which our untrained eyes may have missed. But first, that second unguided day is truly magical. It really is very hard to put into words the unbridled joy of seeing exotic wildlife at close quarters, and marvelling not just at this wonderful, environmentally conscious country, but also at the magnificence of nature. In…
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Quepos And Manuel Antonio
A few random and unconnected facts. One: At the last official survey, there are 932 species of bird in Costa Rica – that’s more than the whole of the USA and Canada put together, pretty impressive for such a small country! Two: Since we began travelling together in 2011, we’ve kept a record of every place outside GB where we’ve stayed at least one night; Quepos is number 144 and the first one ever that starts in the letter “Q”. Three: This place puts the “rain” in “rainforest”. Wow, when it rains here, it really means business, we can honestly say that in all our travels we have never seen…
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Birds & Paradise: Our First 24 Hours in Quepos
“Ahhh I see”, he says as we explain our travel philosophies, “so you’re just a couple of retired travel bums like me”. Oh, we like that. So much so that had we thought of it ourselves, we may well have been the “retired travel bums” instead of the “hungry travellers”! Like our good friends Terrie and Charles, this guy (sorry bud, we didn’t catch your name) is from Oregon, but spends a lot of time in Costa Rica and he gushes heaps of useful advice as we sip yet another cup of fabulous local coffee. Sometimes you just meet the right people. As we hang around in the busy and…
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Into Costa Rica: San Jose
With COVID protocols and admin overcome, we have made it, and on Tuesday December 14th we finally arrived in the Costa Rican capital ready for what is planned to be a 7-week tour followed by a detour to California before we head home. If the traffic on the way into the city is anything to go by, then San Jose is one heavily congested capital. It takes over an hour to inch our way through heaving, chugging giant trucks, buses belching fumes and huge numbers of less than pristine cars, from the airport to downtown San Jose. Darkness falls during that hour, and brings with it just a hint of…
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Christmas Is Early
Well, it is in our house anyway! Once we’d made plans to be travelling again over the Christmas period, we decided to give ourselves our own Christmas Day, and Boxing Day come to that, on just about the only date left in our diary – December 9th. So here we are, 16 days ahead of everyone else, enjoying traditional Christmas dinner and drinks – although we haven’t gone as far as Christmas tree and decorations, which seemed to us to be too much of a waste of effort. Our diary has been full of visits to friends and family since our Vilnius trip, leaving us with a rather full diary…
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Vilnius: Knights, Russians…And Frank Zappa
Tuesday’s snow melts away quickly as a rise in the mercury brings heavy grey skies and occasional drizzle, the ice patches on the uneven pavements are once again just harmless puddles. A 17-mile train ride out of the capital brings us to Trakai, a lakeside town which in summer is a popular destination for city dwellers and tourists alike. Trakai is a town surrounded by water, built on both lakeside flatlands and grassy peninsulas, and is a ramshackle mix of timber clad houses and characterless rectangular apartment blocks, but its popularity is down not just to its watery location but also to its stunning castle structures. One of the castles…
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Vilnius: Stories And Histories
Imagine walking across a bridge in the middle of a capital city and being met with a sign on a shop wall reading “border control”, passing entry instructions to the Republic which include a smile icon, multiple flags with an open palm as the centrepiece, and then finding yourself alongside a wall with the Republic’s constitution detailed in over 40 languages, including such clauses as… “Everyone has the right to die, but this is not an obligation” “Everyone has the right to be happy” “Everyone has the right to be unhappy” “Everyone has the right to have no rights” And concludes with the Republic’s motto… “Do not defeat…do not fight…
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Wintry Days In Vilnius
The temperature touches minus 7 as we head back to the hotel after our evening meal, frost forming fern patterns on car windscreens and turning pavement puddles into treacherous mini skating rinks. But the air is clean and crisp, the moon is bright and we breathe in the tastes of proper winter for the first time in a long time. By first light next morning the snow is falling and the cobbled streets have a covering of pure white as workers shuffle to offices and factories, huddled inside heavy overcoats and hidden behind hats and scarves. For us this is a bonus: we hadn’t expected to see snow this early…
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California Dreamin’
All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day I’d be safe and warm if I was in LA California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day. Four years ago, in October 2017, my sons and I waved a tearful farewell to my daughter Lindsay as she disappeared through the barrier at Heathrow and set off to begin a new life in Los Angeles. At that point, as she gave one last look over her shoulder and headed off to a brave new world, I never thought for one moment that it would be more than four years till I saw…
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Opening Doors To New Destinations
This week it will be a calendar month since we arrived home from Greece, and we seem to have spent a good deal of that time watching and waiting for the time when we can book our COVID booster jab. It seemed to us that the undeniably most sensible course of action was to wait until the booster jab was sorted before we looked at setting off on another lengthy adventure. Our patience broke though, and we quickly put a pre-booster short city break in the diary for later in November. Then, at the weekend, our raspberry-and-yoghurt breakfast was interrupted by a whoop of joy as the booster rules changed…
