charliedoggett.net
Both my gardens and ones I visit
My usual next step after a series of blog posts on a Costa Rica lodge visit is to post in my GALLERY another TRIPS sub-gallery on that particular visit and here it is:
2019 Feb 9-13–Tortuguero Turtle Beach Lodge or click image:
“To Travel is to Live”
– Hans Christian Andersen
¡Pura Vida!
I know that the flowers I show from different Costa Rica locations are often the same species but they are all different to me with each individual flower a particular work of art with its own personality! So here’s a few from my 3 nights at Tortuguero Turtle Beach Lodge – most in their gardens but a few photographed in the wild rainforest where there are especially a lot of Heliconia. Click to enlarge or start manual slideshow. Enjoy!
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
And that will be the “Amen” of my Tortuguero reports until I finish the photo gallery to send you to and then the book which will cover all 3 trips there. I always have something fun to work on! 🙂 And you might like seeing some of my other Costa Rica flower photos in my FLORA & FOREST Gallery. Or if particularly interested in Tortuguero and the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, then the sub-gallery CARIBBEAN COAST flowers gallery.
¡Pura Vida!
When the lodge in Tortuguero tells me their van they will pick me up at any hotel in San Jose at around 5am and I live at an hour+ away, getting up at 3am to get there is not appealing, thus when I go to Tortuguero (my 3rd time now) I usually use my Hilton Honor points from an American Express Card to spend the night at Hampton Inn Airport. Well, Hampton Inn was full this time for the night I needed and thus the next closest Hilton Hotel was DoubleTree Cariari, at the Cariari Country Club, also called an airport hotel (5 miles). But it used to be an independent, locally owned unique Costa Rican Hotel Cariari. And I’m glad I couldn’t get in the “cookie cutter” Hampton Inn which is an identical building/room as all Hampton Inns in the U.S. Nothing unique or Costa Rican about it except the coffee and staff! 🙂 And the Cariari is the favorite hotel of my new friends from Durango, Colorado.
My favorite transportation from Atenas, Walter’s Taxis & Tours, brought me here midday and I’m enjoying the exploration of a new hotel to me. Here are a few my cell phone photos made here:
Tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM I leave for Tortuguero National Park on the North Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica.
¡Pura Vida!
The other morning before breakfast I just walked through my garden using my cell phone to snap a few happy sights. This slide show of 14 shots shows just one reason I like Costa Rica so much – year-around! 🙂
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. ~Georgia O’Keeffe
🙂
¡Pura Vida!
And oh yeah! My flower galleries: Flora & Forest
“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.”
― Georgia O’Keeffe
These flowers were photographed both in the wild and in the gardens of the Maquenque Lodge Rainforest randomly presented:
NEWSFLASH: Pope Francis: Costa Rica has ‘the world’s best coffee’ – stated to the new president of Costa Rica at World Youth Conference in Panama this week. And some of the best is grown right here in Atenas! 🙂
More of this rainforest in my TRIP GALLERY: 2019 Maquenque Eco Lodge
Or check out my Flora & Forest photo galleries
And check out the lodge website: Maquenque Ecolodge
¡Pura Vida!
Every leaf is a work of art and I love trying to capture some of it! There are so many things to see and focus on in the rainforest and sometimes a simple leaf is the best eye candy! Enjoy the slideshow!
More of this rainforest in my TRIP GALLERY: 2019 Maquenque Eco Lodge
Or check out my Flora & Forest photo galleries
And see the lodge website: Maquenque Ecolodge
¡Pura Vida!
I’m not often in my garden or even out of my house at night, but with late watering tonight I saw how different it looks and tried to photograph it, though a photo can’t capture the magic of night in a garden. The blue flowers are Plumbago.
“A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
So much is blooming with the beginning of “Dry Season” or our Spring and Summer that as I prepared breakfast this morning I decided to take my camera around the garden for few shots before eating, AND, as maybe God intended, two birds got into the photo areas while I did this. I live in a beautiful garden! 🙂
Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. ~Song of Songs 2:12 NIV
The Flowers — Click to Enlarge
Morning Glory
Yellow Bells (my name)
Desert Rose
Porterweed, a type of Verbena: Stachytarpheta
Red Ginger
Flame Vine or Triquitraque
Tibouchina or Princess Flower
Plumbago
Peacock Flower, Dwarf Poinciana & other names for Caesalpinia pulcherrima
Poinsettia
Torch Ginger or El bastón de emperador
Crown of Thorns
Once de Abril
See my Costa Rica Birds Gallery
See all my BIRDS Galleries including other countries
The Joys of being Retired in Costa Rica!
This morning I left Si Como No Hotel in Manuel Antonio after 6 nights at Christmas time. They call it their “Flagship Hotel” of the Greentique chain of 4 eco-hotels in Costa Rica. Their marketing department or ad agency is doing a fabulous job with websites (which hooked me) and other advertising, but they touted so much that the actual experience was a let down at Si Como No.
I had two other experiences with Greentique which were very positive, so I got here more because of those experiences than their marketing of this location. Back in May 2017 at Drake Bay (link to my photos) I stayed in the Aguila de Osa Hotel (link to hotel site) which was pricey but not as expensive as Manuel Antonio’s Si Como No. I loved Aguila better in every way! I got all the nature tours I wanted and did not here. The room was bigger and better with equal ocean view and the food was so much better there!
Then in November 2017 at Villa Blanca Cloud Forest Resort (link to my photos) nearer me at San Ramon, I was one of few guests still in the low season and got fabulous service and nature experiences and again much better food! Villa Blanca (link to hotel site) is on an old farm and is a much quieter, relaxed setting than either of the other two, but again I liked it better and felt like it was worth what I paid. Si Como No is way overpriced for what you get!
Now, with all of that said and maybe only the second time for me to be negative (I didn’t like a B&B in Orosi), let me show you some photos of my room and the grounds of this old but nice hotel or you can see my total experience at 2018 Christmas at Si Como No trip photo gallery. And I must say this was maybe my best ocean view anywhere and one of the better sunsets anywhere. Just bad service and food!
All good hotels tend to lead people to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do at home.
~Andre Balazs
See my Trip Gallery for this 2018 Christmas at Si Como No Hotel
On the hotel property’s “Wildlife Refuge” or nature trail is a “Butterfly Garden” like you find all over Costa Rica, a big, high ceiling cage with lots of flowering plants and continuously hatching butterflies. Here’s some of the ones I saw there today in a simple little slideshow. I do not have my butterfly book with me, meaning I could have mis-labeled one or two and there is one I have no idea of the name and there was no attendant to help me label them. Most I already knew from all I have photographed all over Costa Rica. Enjoy what Robert Frost calls “Flying Flowers!”
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
See this TRIP GALLERY 2018 December Si Como No.