Tortuguero

Tortuguero National Park is the home of sea turtles. The coastal area for several miles up to the Nicaraguan border is used by sea turtles, in particular green and leatherbacks, as a nesting site. In the past, the locals viewed this as a bonanza, and ate the turtles and their eggs. A naturalist, Dr. Archie Carr, studied them and came the conclusion that the harvest was unsustainable, and managed to persuade both the locals and the Costa Rican government to do something about this, and change the status of the turtles from “food” to “protected species”.

We were up at 5 o’clock to get on a dawn cruise through the National Park. This is the best time to see the various animals, apparently, because that’s also when they awake and are at their most active, looking for breakfast. It had been raining all night, on and off, as it tends to in a rain forest. Nevetheless, we were all assembled and having coffee at 5:30, in waterproof gear. We all got onto our boats, and were about to set off when a particularly heavy shower started off, and Marco made the call to delay our tour to later in the morning, when the rain had eased off a bit. So we went back, and rescheduled for 11 o’clock.

At 10:30 it was still pissing down, with no sign of let-up. Marco visited us again and said the tour would now go ahead at 2:30 instead. OK, so we were hoping that the weather would have cleared up by then. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing about which group we should go with, we were eventually attached to a tour from another resort that had space on their boat. It had stopped raining by now, so we set out into the National Park.

The park is only accessible by water – the land inside is all swampy, and there are no tracks, so there’s no other way in. After the morning’s experience, I’d decided to leave my camera behind. Cameras and water don’t mix well. As the weather remained dry I regretted this…until another shower came in, and finally prolonged rain, so in the end it was a good decision. We saw various water birds including aninga (after which our resort is named), green ibis, blue heron, macaws fling overhead, snowy egrets, and others whose names I forget. We also saw reptiles – an iguana, several caymans and emerald basilisks (also known as jesus christ lizards, because they can walk on water). We also saw and heard howler monkeys in the trees. Our guide knew what he was doing, took us to all the places where he knew animals would be hanging out – I know all the tricks of the trade now! And Freddie, the boat driver, was also good at spotting animals, in particular the basilisks. As always on such a tour, you speak about what you see, and not what you don’t, so you don’t know what you didn’t see.

Iguana

Cayman

Towards the end of the tour the rain set in in earnest, and we motored back to our respective lodges at top speed of 50km/h. There, we decamped and attempted to dry out our completely drenched items of clothing – they need to be dry for us to move on tomorrow! We may be doing one wet and one dry suitcase by morning to preserve our remaining wardrobe, particularly if this rain keeps up all night again.

Tomorrow we have a more civilised start time of 9 o’clock to get us to our next hotel.