Day 18 didn’t work out as planned, so we hung around the hotel, which was interesting in itself. When I woke up, I joined Tom on our balcony, overlooking a broad swath of jungle spilling down a steep slope to the ocean. Tom reported he had just seen a flock of scarlet macaws. As I sat and gazed, I saw a toucan flying below—its enormous yellow beak was unmistakable. That was my first toucan sighting, and as we leave day after tomorrow, it may be my last.

We spent some time in the adult pool and bar. I don’t know what the attraction is of swimming up to a bar for a drink but it’s undeniable.

On Day 19, we had a mangrove swamp tour scheduled for the afternoon. We discovered that the tour included a dinner, which was not what we had in mind. But we went with the flow.

Our guide was named Tomàs. I think he had doubts about us at first—I don’t know why, but he just seemed a bit standoffish at first. After a bit, when we listened attentively to his history talk as we drove, he began to warm up. His family was from Jamaica, and he grew up on a farm on the Caribbean side. He speaks English, Spanish, and French (yes, we chatted briefly in French), and he wants to learn Hebrew because he thinks it is the most beautiful language he has ever heard and he loves Israeli people. If he does learn Hebrew (and why not? He taught himself French), he will have a lock on the Israeli tourist market here. (My thought, not his.)

There were no other tourists booked for this tour. We started out in a bayou full of small, Fiberglas boats similar to the one we were on. This is the first time I have seen serious poverty here—the shacks lining the waterway reminded me of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, only utterly without charm. I imagine that the swamp is not a popular location for housing, especially during the rainy season.

In the beginning of the tour, there were many mangroves. Many, many mangroves, if nothing else. Poor Tomás talked manfully about the differences between the mangrove species for a while, as there was nothing else to be seen. He pointed out that crocodiles didn’t live in this mangrove swamp because there were no sandbanks for them to haul out on—just tangled mangrove roots, impenetrable to crocs, providing no places to nest or lay their eggs. The channels seemed deeper than the ones in Tamarindo, and Tomás said there were lots of fish, some of them quite large.

We finally did begin to see birds—blue herons, which are a bright blue and smaller than great blue herons, white ibis, yellow-crested herons, great blue herons. As we approached the mouth of the estuary, we saw pelicans roosting in the trees. We approached quite closely as the pelicans stared down at us. They were clearly judging us, and not for the better. One of them made a disapproving gurgling sound as we passed by.

There are sandbanks and crocodiles here, but we didn’t see any (crocs, that is. There were plenty of sandbanks). We did see a chachalaca, but it was too far away to photograph. We also saw a HUGE iguana, lying on a branch and basking in the sun.

The exciting finds were a silky anteater, a ball of golden-brown fur in a mangrove tree, and a capuchin monkey, who went about his business quite close to us without seeming to care at all that we were there.

We were constantly astonished by the sharp eyes of the boat captain and Tomás, who could pick out a bird sitting like a statue within the tangled mangrove roots. There were times we didn’t see anything until it moved.

We headed back as the sun was setting and drive into Guero, a small town on a deep shipping harbor here. Tomás took us to a restaurant for some casado. I am a fan, but I wasn’t hungry. Tom did it justice, though. It was delicious, but my late lunch stuck with me. We had a gorgeous view of the sunset over the harbor.