Tortuguero (Costa Rica)

Ola all!

After our beach bums days we moved on to chase a personal dream: to see a wild sea turtle! Fortunately Costa Rica is home to the largest nesting place for the green turtles, at a place appropriatelly called Tortuguero. It's a big reserve, encompassing 70 000 hectares of jungle and beach. The great part about it is that you can only reach it by boat, involving a two hour journey along a beautiful river. There is something particularly soothing reaching Tortuguero like this but that feeling was soon washed away by the buzzing village welcoming you at the end of the trip. The Tortuguero village is surrounded by the national park and so its expansion in terms of area is impossible. However, the demands of tourism have dictated that contruction in the village still proceeds at an alarming pace, leaving Tortuguero with this packed feeling that sharply contrasts the vastness of the jungle around it. We did however manage to find a great hostel, with very friendly Nicaraguan owners. The restaurant's menu was slightly unusual, with something lost in translation in the english version which offered "shredded hand grenade!" With Costa Rica very proud of the fact they haven't had an army since the 1950s, maybe they've resorted to eating their remaining weapons?!

There isn't much to do in Tortuguero if you're not a nature lover. And yes, getting up at 5.30am to do a boat tour around the rivers does qualify us as nature lovers, or insane! Actually we've been regularly getting up at earlier hours during this trip than we did for work in London. Odd, I know... The tour was nice but we didn't see that much wild life: as the tourists increase in numbers the animals regain their peace by retreating deeper into the jungle and thus away from the river. Still, we saw some howler monkeys (noisy little black spots up in a tree), caimans (blhagh) and tucans. The best was a Jesus Christ lizard (so called because it can run on water)!

That evening we went to watch green turtles laying eggs. The park has a really great conservation program to allow us to see the turtles with the least possible interference. Park rangers on the beach radio tourist guides where there is a turtle laying eggs so that the tourists can go straight to the spot, thus avoiding big groups of people trailling along on the beach. Only the guide has lights so the turtles coming to the beach don't get scared away. For the same reason we're only allowed to approach a turtle once it starts laying, as a hormone is then released into its blood flow that puts it into a trance. A kind of an epidural for turtles, obviously necessary if you're laying 200 eggs in an hour. They are beautiful creatures, increadibly strong and at the same time so helpless when they come to the beach. The turtle further endeared itself to us by showering the pushy German woman (who had shoved her way to the front of the group) in sand when it was burying the eggs! On a good night three hundred green turtles show up to lay eggs, talk about rush hour on the beach! And what an effort it is to crawl from the sea, lay the eggs, cover the eggs and then return to the sea! I wanted to give one of them a push but wasn't allowed......

The next day we just lulled in our hostel's hamocks as we decided to give ourselves a day off from this manic life of travellers. Can you see how much we needed it?...

Bye for now,

Vania