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After failing to see nesting turtles in El Salvador and Nicaragua we decided to head to a town called Tortuguero or 'Turtle Place'. We had to cross from the Pacific to the Caribbean Coast to get there so we spent a night in the capital, San José, on route. We hadn't heard anything good about the city so we weren't expecting much but were pleasantly surprised by the area around the University, which was where we were staying. The area had a lot of energy and we enjoyed some massive drinks and cheap food in a student bar but did feel a bit old.
The next day we caught a taxi to the bus terminal and found out that the recent rain had caused a mud slide that ended up lengthening our journey by 4 hours. Tortuguero can't be reached by road so the last leg of the journey was on a heavily ladened boat. Heavily ladened by 50+ tourists and their heavy bags - obviously ours are lighter ;-). The river was very high and flowing fast so it was actually quite a hair raising trip in parts.
We found that in Tortuguero it almost always rains in the wet season. This may sound obvious but our whole trip so far has been in the wet season and we've seen little rain. Here the rain was like bullets and soaked you right through within seconds- stronger than the vast majority of bathroom showers. The Caribbean coast here is not the same as we saw in Belize and Honduras - the sand is black, the waves are fierce and the beach is littered with branches that have been ripped from the trees. It seems to be an extension of the Miskitos Coast which I've only recently read about.
The next day we woke up at 5:20am for a canoe trip into the national park with the hope of seeing a lot of wildlife. But during the first half an hour the rain got much heavier and because we were with a Austrian family with two small kids, we turned back. The guide was nice enough to resume the tour a few hours later so we eventually saw tiger herons, blue herons and their chicks, iguanas, the Jesus Christ lizard (able to run over 30 metres of water and able to eat baby caimans), caimans, howler monkeys and a capuchin and spider monkey, nesting bats and massive spiders the size of Katy's hand. We floated under the massive spider in the canoe and if it had fallen into our boat I would almost have certainly jumped into the water despite the caimans. Our guide had an incredible eye for wildlife- at one point he saw a baby iguana the size of a leaf in a thick bush of the same colour with a background of rainforest from over 20 metres away! We liked him so much that we decided to go turtle watching with him that night.
So after a restful afternoon we met up with him at 7:30pm and our group of eight headed up a path parallel to the beach to a large shelter. We waited here for over an hour with probably another 100 people while turtle spotters combed the beach. When a nesting turtle was found and had started laying her eggs, all 100 of us were taken to the beach to watch, one group at a time. We were allowed to get very close and had four goes at watching her lay loads of eggs in a big hole (but no cameras allowed). The turtles don't mind if you stay behind them and if no white light is used so that meant only red light. Finally we saw her covering the nest with her back flippers and this sand also ended up over us. This was all observed in the heaviest of rainstorms with lighting and thunder with large waves crashing into the beach we were stood on.
We decided to spend the next day in Tortuguero (to dry off) as well so had time to visit the turtle conservation centre, where we asked lots of questions and heard that turtles have increased 500% since it was founded. The rest of the day was spent researching our next few weeks that will take us through Panama and onto Colombia.
Simon
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