WE FANCIED a tour of the Central American rainforests. No beach resorts, no casinos. Just pure jungle and wildlife, with the odd adrenalin-fuelled slide on a zipline canopy tour — sliding through the forest suspended from a wire cable. But was November a good time to go? “The rainy season finishes in October, you’ll be fine,” our travel company assured us.

On the flight we chatted to two people who enthused about beautiful Costa Rica and asked where we were going. Their smiles faded: “You might get a few showers.”

At San José, the rep, Walter, escorted us to the pretty Hotel Grano de Oro, where we had the “room with a golden view”. It had a wall of windows revealing a cityscape of random architectural layout, and thick cloud cover of the kind craved by Londoners during the Blitz.

We were collected at 6.30am. Mysteriously the smoke alarm in our room went off every time we ran the hot tap so we were wide awake. At 6.45am the coach (we love this about tours) parked outside another hotel. On board, we headed for the Parque Nacional Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast to see giant turtles. The place is a breeding ground for thousands of these creatures, but is inaccessible by road — unless you are an illegal logging company and have made your own — so you stay in lodges, and small boats ferry visitors through the jungle waterways.

We stopped for breakfast en route. There was a humming bird garden, but no humming. Too wet. The lush countryside was shrouded in mist. You can’t visit the rainforest without a bit of rain, we repeated chirpily and borrowed a brolly.

At a jetty, men sealed our luggage in bin bags to load on to a boat. We climbed into a second boat. The seats were wet. It took us under a tree towards larger, covered boats. Their seats were wet. How? Twisting slowly through submerged obstacles, it was impossible to avoid overhanging branches, causing large spiders and bugs to cascade through the open sides of the boat and cling stickily to the standard- issue ponchos of the passengers. They screamed and giggled; bugs ran here and there.

At Laguna Lodge, where we were staying, we opened the bin bags, took our luggage to our cabin and immediately went out again on a turtle hunt. We found Carolina, the guide, whose ecology lecture on the bus had been well- intentioned, but low on gags.

We walked three miles along the rainy beach to Tortuguero town. Not a turtle, turtle track or bit of eggshell. I wasn’t expecting a turtle village, but I’d been naively optimistic. The small town is poor, with a few bars and a covered five-a-side football pitch. I bought a Costa Rica footie shirt, before taking a water-taxi back.

Day two was sunny! Packed into a small motor-launch, we cruised around jungle waterways spotting monkeys and a crocodile floating on a log. Parrots flashed overhead. Carolina was ecstatic: “Macaws!” That evening, after a pizza in town, some locals helped to get us back to Laguna Lodge. They found two boys with a boat. They dropped off two girls as we cowered underneath an umbrella, and then sped us back through the darkness to the lodge — where everything was a bit damp.

Walter generously booked us a light aircraft to take us back over the jungle to San José. He met us. We embraced.

He provided a four-wheel- drive Land Cruiser and gave us directions to Volcán Arenal, Costa Rica’s active volcano set in a national park, but then I mentioned the rain and he frowned. We said that the cloud forest of Monteverde, which we were due to visit, might be too wet and asked about alternatives. He assured us that it would be drier there.

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