2018/02 Costa Rica - Villa gardens |
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A buffet breakfast was included but we’d have to buy other meals at the restaurant. There was no way we’d need two large meals a day so we decided we’d skip lunches and survive on granola bars until dinner. This would also maximize our use of daylight; as always in the Tropics, Costa Rica has just 12 hours of daylight regardless of season.
We set out to explore the areas around the villa; extensive gardens, an orchid house, a chapel, and an oxcart. The gardens featured a
mix of local and exotic tropical; many of them were familiar from garden shops, but here they had grown to enormous size. Plants grew on each other and vines grew high into the canopy. There were a few birds around; this is a rufous-collared sparrow.
The orchid house could have done with some clean-up, but we found a few interesting plants there. The chapel, built for the president’s wife, is now just used for meetings; it still looks romantic with its garden setting and gorgeous views of the mountains. 
These are a few examples of the plants we saw in the gardens and the orchid house. It’s just about impossible as a visitor to distinguish between endemic plants and those introduced over the last century. We enjoyed them all and most of our pictures are merged here into one composite.
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Villa Blanca gardens (2.19) |
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The oxcart is a Costa Rican cultural icon. They were used to haul goods through the country’s rugged terrains and across clayey soils. Often they were highly decorated like this one. Restaurants may have one on show but it’s usually just a quarter-sized model.
We were ready for our first jungle trail, a short one as we were tired after being up for about 30 hours. It was labelled Sendero Los 
Helechos or Fern Trail. The vegetation is fascinating, a riot of growth. The downside was that it’s hard to see anything beyond the greenery; we’d hear rustling and see leaves moving but the animals stayed hidden. We saw few bugs and there didn’t seem to be any coming to feed on us.
We came nose-to-nose with a coati as we left the trail; this is a relative of the raccoon with similar habits. The coati had an urgent appointment elsewhere and I was too slow with the camera.