Panama and Costa Rica

The trip started with an evening flight to Madrid and a short night in the centre. In the morning we had just enough time for a walk through the empty streets in the winter sunrise before the long flight across the Atlantic.

We landed in Panama City in the late afternoon, to warm, heavy air and a skyline of glass towers that looks more like Miami than Central America, lit up for Christmas.

The first morning belonged to the canal. At the Miraflores Locks we watched huge container ships being lifted and lowered between the oceans, pulled by little locomotives, with only centimetres to spare. In the afternoon we wandered through Casco Viejo, the colonial old town of restored balconies and plazas, and watched the sun set over the towers across the bay.

The next day we went out along the Amador Causeway, past Frank Gehry’s colourful Biomuseo, to the big Panamá sign and the view back at the city.

Before dawn a car took us over the hills to the Caribbean coast, and from there a boat to the San Blas islands. The archipelago belongs to the Guna people and is run by them: hundreds of small coral islands, some no bigger than a few palm trees and a strip of white sand, others packed edge to edge with the Guna’s huts.

We spent three days island-hopping, swimming and doing very little.

Back in Panama City we caught the night bus west to David and continued up to Boquete, a mountain town in the cloud forest on the slopes of Volcán Barú. After the heat of the coast the air was cool and fresh.

We hiked through the dripping forest to waterfalls, and one evening found a shop full of sweets.

A shuttle took us over the mountains to the Caribbean side, with a long wait by the road in a village on the way, and a boat from Almirante brought us to Bocas del Toro.

We stayed on Isla Bastimentos, in a wooden house with a hammock. We walked through the jungle to Red Frog Beach, and on Christmas Eve we took a boat out to the Zapatilla cays, two uninhabited islands of white sand and palm forest in a national park.

On Christmas Day we crossed the border at Sixaola and rode a series of buses past Limón up to San José, arriving late in the evening.

The next day the capital held its big horse parade, the Tope, with riders in their best clothes, decorated horses and food stalls along the route.

In the evening we picked up a hire car and drove down to the Pacific coast, spending the first night in the surf town of Jacó.

From Jacó we drove south along the Costanera to Uvita, where the rainforest comes right down to the beaches. The first evening ended with a sunset over the Pacific and a lively bar; in the morning we flew the drone over a beach lined with palms a little further south.

In Sierpe we left the car and took a boat down the river through the mangroves and out along the coast to Drake Bay, a remote village on the Osa Peninsula that can only be reached by boat or a long rough road.

Drake Bay is the gateway to Corcovado National Park, one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Early in the morning a boat dropped us at the San Pedrillo ranger station, and we spent the day walking through the rainforest, past scarlet macaws, to a waterfall where we could swim. Back at Drake Bay a crocodile was waiting in the river.

Back on the mainland we drove north to Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica’s smallest and most famous national park: rainforest, white beaches and very tame wildlife. We saw sloths hanging in the trees, tried paddle-boarding in the bay and celebrated New Year’s Eve with a sunset over the islands off the beach.

On New Year’s Day we drove to Guanacaste in the dry north-west, to the beach town of Tamarindo. The landscape here is different: dry forest, wide bays and horses on the beach in the evening.

We stayed four nights, explored the beaches to the north, and spent long mornings over breakfast.

On our way inland we stopped for a last swim at Playa Hermosa, a quiet bay further up the coast.

In the evening we reached Arenal, the near-perfect cone of a volcano that was active until 2010, usually wrapped in cloud. We spent the next day walking in the rainforest around its base.

The last full day was a beach day back on the central Pacific coast, before we drove to the airport for the night flight home via New York.