We’re already home from almost three weeks touring Costa Rica – and I can impart one revelatory observation: Costa Ricans absolutely LOVE a good fence.

By which I don’t mean a processor of illicit goods but instead, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I’m referring to their abject and wholehearted national delight in fencing. No, not with epees or cork-tipped swords – but with lengths of wire and metalwork, in all and every one of its manifestations – both as a secure boundary marker and as preventer of unauthorised access to domestic or business property; to fields; gardens; national parks; vacant lots; car parks; ponds; farms; car-washes and building sites.

In fact bloody anything which isn’t a Hotel is surrounded by the damn stuff, either barbed; razor; chain-meshed or just hunky-looking metal grilles which – in a variety of fetching colours (black, rust and oxide red alongside untreated steel and aluminium) – cover every single window and door you will EVER see if you’re fortunate enough to explore this otherwise open, welcoming and friendly country.

Since your favourite author is here on a Covid-delayed holiday, he is unashamedly too lazy to delve into the socio-economic research necessary to understand this fervoured phenomenon. From observations over very many miles and hours spent staring out of various tour-bus windows, your gallant scribe can posit no viable theories as to why Ticos would feel the need to protect themselves from their neighbours and fellows by installing such heavyweight protection across all their windows, doors and property perimeters.

What would possess the gracious and sociable inhabitants of Costa Rica (average annual ambient temperature 21°C – 32°C) to consider a national industry which involved supplementary blast-furnace temperatures (which start at about 900°C) just so they could manufacture all this stuff?

Neither can it be convincingly explained why every roadside field would need six (yes, six) strands of barbed-wire each tautly and efficiently stretched for mile after mile after mile -especially when we Brits seem to make do with a couple of rusty strands loosely stapled to wobbly rustic fence posts. Our barbs are also more often than not rendered soft, fluffy and useless by wads of sheep’s wool, torn from their poor backs as they pass unknowingly too close in their constant search for fresh greenery.

Such is the high tensile strength of Costa Rican barbed-wire strands that the above sloth was spotted by friends met while on tour, who witnessed the animal happily crawling along the fence while avoiding each and every barb as if this was its normal daily commute.

It would also, dear reader, be unwise at this stage to get me started on razor wire. I mean, there seems to be sufficient glinting coils of the stuff to add a couple of rings around Saturn, although seemingly most prevalent in the capital city of San José. Here, it is installed atop walls already of unscalable height and bizarrely mostly protecting the aforementioned vacant lots, as if some maverick construction engineer might break-in and erect yet another ramshackle building or two.

And blow-me-down, as if all the exterior protection wasn’t sufficient, tonight the local bar has several TVs running for the entertainment of its customers, where we witness them all transfixed by continuous bouts of cage-fighting, where the proponents are indeed contained inside yet more robust chain-link fencing.

Finally, while on our guided wildlife tour of Manuel Antonio’s National Park, guess where our (and every other) group took their half-way refreshment? Inside a large, rigid and secure metal cage, designed to protect us from roaming troops of semi-aggressive Capuchin monkeys who otherwise would delight in stealing our very welcome bowls of chopped tropical fruit and pillaging the gift-shop of all the enticingly dangling fluffy soft-toy sloths. The irony of our zoo-like encagement was not lost on us as we came to realise that we were the exhibits on show, as the monkeys peered curiously through the wire mesh at vulnerable and possibly endangered humans at feeding time.