Christmas is coming on like a freight train. Our festive plan was originally to skip across the border to Nicaragua, but everyone we speak to grimaces and shakes their head. Security is so bad right now, they say, hurricanes, revolution, covid, crime, poverty. So we’ve done an about-turn, and decided to go the other way instead. We will head to Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean south coast for Christmas, then we’ll skip across to Panama for New Year. As we’re currently up on the Pacific north coast this will mean diagonally crossing the country – a 500km drive along some pretty poor roads.

Various bear traps lie in our path: our Costa Rican visa expires on Christmas Eve, so does our car hire agreement and our travel insurance too. We haven’t bought a single present yet, and perhaps more pressingly we have nowhere to stay. It is now the 21^st December and time is running out.

Directionless and uncertain we start start bumbling our way cross country anyway, for we have been kicked out of our house in Playa Grande. We stop en route to spend a couple of days with London friends, Ohad and Yael, who are on holiday here, bravely travelling with a cluster of four small daughters. This is not a family who believes in relaxing on the beach. No, they have built themselves instead a challenging itinerary of volcano hikes and climbs in the rainy highlands and it is all laid out carefully on a spreadsheet. They are data scientists. We intend to insert ourselves carefully into this schedule for a couple of days as we work our way across the country. Overlay some of their order onto our chaos.

Our rendezvous is on Volcano Tenorio.  It is a four hour drive and we rattle up in our dirty jeep, surfboards bouncing on the roof, only forty minutes late. We have an inflated belief that we are now Costa Rica experts and will be called upon over the next couple of days to deliver a series of impromptu lectures on local flora and fauna, offer some well-meaning snippets of advice.

Falling out of the car in our dirty vests and broken trainers, we immediately see that they are much better prepared for this expedition than we are. Stout walking boots, utility trousers, headwear, large camera, bulging backpacks, exotic kit (a UV ‘black light’ torch whose sole purpose is making scorpions glow in the dark!). Furthermore they seem to be very well researched and with some prodigious wildlife sightings already under their belts (tarantulas, crocodiles, sloths, something called a olingo that I have never even heard of). As we set off on the trail, we find ourselves upstaged: recipients of travel tips, students of wildlife facts.

It is interesting to be back with other humans again. Over the months on the road, as new landscapes have unfolded our social sphere has shrunk, particularly for the kids. Travelling families are rare; local kids don’t hang out at hotels or on jungle tours and when we do meet them Arthur and Matilda have only the most basic rudiments of Spanish and are shy and uncommunicative. So they hang out with us instead. All day, every day, in close proximity. Since arriving in Costa Rica three weeks ago, we have stayed in nine different places – hotels, tents, cabins, hostels. We have all shared a single room for seven of the nine. Now, reunited with their schoolfriends, our kids are suddenly flutter off like leaves in the wind. It feels like having a plaster ripped off – a sudden tear then the forgotten touch of air and sunlight.

Matilda and Shiraz flit along the trails, hand in hand, whispering secrets to each other like a pair of woodland ghosts. Arthur and Eden run, climb, shout, they hang upside down, try to outwit each other and fabricate animal sightings. Menna and I find ourselves deep in grown up conversation. We are rusty.

We trek along the trails and find the psychedelic turquoise waters of Rio Azul. The Ticos say that after painting the sky, God washed the blue out of his brushes in the waters here, but Yael tells us it is aluminosilicate particles expanding in the acidic volcano waters. We cross Indiana jones style rope bridges and see a bold coati that saunters past us like he owns the place. Further on we see an obese family feeding it chocolate bars. Ohad catches a lizard.

It is a new thing for us not to own our time and pace. We are swept along, passive to someone else’s agenda. In a busy 24 hour period we complete the Rio Celeste hike at Volcano Tenorio, then drive cross country over to Volcano Arenal. I blow out a tire on a mountain road and have to do an exciting pit stop with a local lad who is sitting on the roadside. We stay the night in a hotel that reminds me of the Overlook in the Shining, swapping kids between rooms so they can have sleepovers with their friends. We listen to Ohad’s statistical analysis of Covid lockdown efficiency and we play chess. In the morning we loop our way around the 17 hanging bridges of Mistico Sky Park (and spot a Motmot), we grab lunch in La Fortuna (and spot a toucan) then more waterfalls and a swim in the rocky pools (and spot a sloth with a baby on its back). Arthur and Eden are very taken by the big rope swing that drops into the rocky pool and do it time and time again, chattering with the cold.

All the time the spectre of Christmas looms. Yael and Ohad don’t celebrate Christmas and feel no stress – but we do, and our kids have picked up on it. They have no home address to put on their letters to Father Christmas, and are nervously asking if he will even come to find them in Costa Rica. At this point we can’t honestly say that he will.