Packing for the perfect holiday was easy when I was younger. You took your suntan oils, your trunks, your aspirins. And there you were. But these days, the demands of the perfect older holiday require a much larger wash bag for the different grades of Nurofen to go into. Then there are the inflatable aeroplane pillows to squeeze in. The phone recharging equipment, with the spare batteries.
And, bulkiest of all, the travelling library of property brochures. It’s not as if you can leave them behind, can you? Any more than you can leave behind the range of large-format topographical survey maps that situate your prospective properties in the wider geographic scheme of things.
I think I discovered the pleasures and advantages of Propo-Tourism a few years before most Propo-Tourists. A couple of decades ago, after years of visiting the obvious places in France, I chanced upon a home-made advert on a notice board at the Chelsea Arts Club about a house that a member was selling in an area of France called Languedoc. I knew nothing about this southerly backwater. Looked it up on the map. Saw it was near the Med. Saw that the house was going for £10,000. Saw it looked great. And decided to fly to Montpellier for a week or so with my girl and have a peep.
The house turned out to be too large and too isolated. It had a trout stream burbling through the middle of it — I didn’t fish — and too many ruined barns to do up. But having traipsed out there and enjoyed the heat, the smell of wild thyme and all that, we decided the next day to see if the local estate agent had anything closer to a village. The guy put us in his car and for three days we toured upper and lower Languedoc on a fascinating voyage of rural discovery.
At that time, Languedoc didn’t have a beaten track. So you couldn’t say we went off it. But we went places nobody ever goes, we heard things nobody ever hears and we learnt more than we would ever have learnt on our own. He did all the driving. And we went home with a new house. The perfect holiday.
Since those long-ago days, I don’t think I have ever visited anywhere, in any circumstances, without pausing at least once before an estate agent’s window, or its equivalent, for a quick sense of the prices. It’s such an infallible way of getting to the pace of a place. Sometimes I take it much further. So many estate agents have boated me around Venice, for instance, that I reckon I now know the Serenissima’s darkest alleys better than the little red dwarf in Don’t Look Now.
My list of favourite Venetian restaurants, given to me by an early agent, is still reliable today: estate agents know these things. And what smart drivers they tend to be, familiar with all the short cuts; so thrillingly and enticingly free. The only thing you need absolutely to remember at the end of the tour is not to buy a house, because you’ll soon have too many of them.
Thus, as an old hand at Propo-Tourism, I plunged into our Costa Rican land- buying adventure holiday filled only with confidence. We’d been there a couple of times before, and a few minutes into the first visit, at the sight of the first imposs-ibly orange flame tree by the side of the road, she had said “We should think about a house here”, as she usually does. And I had said “Yes, we should”, as I usually do.
Costa Rica has lots of things about it that bring on those dreamy house-buying highs. It’s safe. It’s sun-filled. You get two fab oceans for the price of one, the Caribbean on one coast and the Pacific on the other. But what does it for me, what makes me tingle all over at the prospect of the place, can be conveyed in a single statistic: there are more species of butterfly in Costa Rica than in the whole of Africa. Nature adores this tiny country, and has been uncommonly generous to it. A place the size of Scotland boasts a bird list longer than Europe’s.
Because it’s only Scotland-sized, Costa Rica ought to be easy to get around. But it isn’t. Yes, there are plenty of roads and a surprising array of airports. But these airports are too grassy and home-made to leave the sick bag empty; while the roads have too many holes in them to be nego- tiated with a standard set of road skills.
Luckily, a Propo-Tourist visit not only allows you to tour the country for free in someone else’s car, it serves as an extremely handy advanced driving lesson for Costa Rican conditions. For instance, a few days into our trip, we came across a river that had flooded to bonnet height. To my eyes, Noah himself wouldn’t have gone in there. But the estate agent, who does this trip every day, not only negotiated the flood effortlessly, but passed on all his handy river-crossing tips while he was doing it. So, when it happened to us later — over and over again, as it happens — we knew precisely where to point.
The internet has become an invaluable resource for the Propo-Tourist. Costa Rica boasts as many property sites as it has species of butterfly, and stage one of planning the trip was to decide which of the ridiculously beautiful palm-fringed beach properties that cascaded off the downloads appeared to back onto the best hinterland. We decided to focus on the two peninsulas that droop like floppy willies off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. The one to the north is called the Nicoya Peninsula. Drive it to the end and you are in Nicaragua. It’s bigger, more developed, drier. The southern willy is the Osa Peninsula: smaller, wetter, wilder. Going south from here, you soon arrive in Panama. Thus, a crude summation of Costa Rican opportunities seemed to be possible if we first went up, then down.
The fun way to reach the Nicoya Peninsula is to take the Pan-American Highway northwards out of San José, Costa Rica’s capital, then catch a ferry at Puntarenas. The peninsula has a gulf between it and the mainland in which the Pacific calms down and forms a gor- geous watery mirror, studded with islands. The pelicans like it, and the flying fish. This is where the ferry crosses. It takes an hour or so. But ahead of you when you dock is an unpaved drive of many bumpy hours if you’re heading north, as we intended to do, towards Nosara, where the best pictures on the property sites tended to direct you. So, instead, of taking the ferry, we drove over a new bridge that’s been built across the River Tempisque at the north of the gorgeous gulf.
