Costa Rica July 2021 - Day 7 (Laguna de Lagarto Lodge)

 July 12, 2012 

(Teri)  Since it had rained all night and the grounds were wet, we decided to just relax in our room until time for our 10 am ride to Laguna de Lagarto Lodge.

Our driver told us the drive would be about 2 1/2 hours but that the last hour would be on a very bad road.  It was a kidney buster!  Even though he had borrowed the owners Mercedes SUV, the last few miles to the lodge were very rough.

We arrived at the lodge about 12:30. 

We knew our room was going to be pretty basic, and it was.

The room was nice and clean with one very small shelf on the wall.  A few more shelves or even hooks on the walls would have been useful.

After putting our suitcases in the room, we headed to the deck.  The dining area was very large. 

Even though we arrived at 12:30, for some reason they hadn’t planned on feeding us lunch.  When we explained that we had skipped breakfast and hadn’t had lunch, the cook made us a couple of sandwiches. 

It was raining when we arrived and ended up raining all day.  We stayed out on the deck until 5:30. With the rain, it was nice and cool.  There was plenty of room on the deck for Mark to use his tripod.

Dinner was at 6:30 and by then it was starting to get pretty buggy with moths and mosquitos.

Dinner was a hard squash soup that was very good, chicken, carrots and some kind of shredded vegetable that was excellent.

We got back to the room about 7 pm and discovered there were towels but no hand towels or wash cloths and no place to put clothes.

7/12/2021 (Mark) – We listened to the rain falling all night long and scrubbed our plan to get up early to bird our last morning at Arenal. Instead, we slept a bit late and enjoyed time sitting out on the terrace and catching up on journaling, reading, etc.  Neither of us was particularly hungry, so we skipped breakfast.

A bit before ten we took our bags up to the parking area, checked out, found our driver and were on our way to our last lodge, Laguna del Lagarto.  The driver told us that the last part of the drive would be very slow on a rough road, and he wasn’t kidding!  It took more than 45 minutes to cover the last 15 miles. It was really bad.

We knew that Laguna del Lagarto would be the most basic lodge that we would stay in on this trip, and that turned out to be true. There was no formal check-in, passports, etc. Just “who are you” and “here’s your key”. We were given the basic info about meal times and what we could do there. We were a little late for lunch but they made us a nice ham & cheese sandwich.

The room (#20) had two twin beds, a nightstand, and fan, and that was about it. No place to really put anything, not even a hook on the wall!  But it had a large, covered porch along the front with rocking chairs, a hammock, and a small table.

The highlight of this lodge was supposed to be their feeder/photography deck, and it didn’t disappoint. The feeder was a large bunch of bananas suspended on a tall pole, with a very nice perch branch running horizontally through the bananas. The photography deck was on the same level as the bananas, and no more than 25’ away. Luckily the deck was covered, as it was raining when we arrived and continued right up until dark! 

I finally got a chance to break out the tripod and flash setup that I’d been carrying throughout the trip.  We sat on the deck until it got dusky and enjoyed a wide variety of birds coming and going all afternoon.  There were a bunch of Shiny, Red-legged and Green Honeycreepers that were on the bananas almost constantly.

Green Honeycreeper - male

Shining Honeycreeper - male

Red-legged Honeycreeper - male

They left only when bigger birds like Montezuma Orependula, Collared Aracari, and Keel-billed Toucans showed up. 

Keel-billed Toucan

Montezuma Oropendula

We had a fly-by of two Scarlet Macaws, and a group of 4 Brown-hooded Parrots spent several minutes on the feeders.

Brown-hooded Parrot

In addition to the feeder “tree” there was a big pan of cracked corn on the lawn behind the deck. It first attracted an Agouti, but later a group of nine Great Curassow came into the area. Four males, four females, and a much smaller/younger juvenile. 

Great Curassow group with juvenile

Quite the sight to see these huge birds interacting with each other for about an hour. One of the workers also took us out to the parking lot to see a small group of spider monkeys feeding in a tree.

Spider Monkey

We came back to the room and sat out on the porch for a while, but there was a hatch of 1” long flying insects that were attracted to the porch light and kept landing on us. We decided to go into the room, and then soon headed off to the (open) dining patio to do the E-bird list and enjoy dinner. We had a few of the flying insects there as well, but they weren’t much of a bother.

Next time: Vultures, bats, and other flying things.

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