Tortuguero is not the easiest spot to get to via public transport so we booked a transfer to take us, which meant we spent most of the day on a bus before disembarking into a speed boat to take us across the small canals and rivers that separates the town from the mainland. The canals and rivers form a wetland that is host to a whole load of wildlife and we saw some of this on our journey. It was absolutely tipping it down but the driver was still able to spot and point out caimans, herons and monkeys to us.
We knew we wanted to do three tours while in Tortuguero; A guided tour through the national park, a canoe tour of the canals and rivers and a night tour. When we went to book these, they informed us that it was better to do all the tours that were inside of the national park in one day, so we would only have to pay the park entrance fee once. As the second day looked less likely to rain, we decided to chill on our first day and do the night walk in the evening and then do the rest of the tours the following day.
Our chill day was a mix of brilliant sunshine and then torrential downpours. We spent the morning by the pool. Rob, Hannah and Jess were having a great time spotting large lizards, toucans and hummingbirds in the trees and all rushing over to take a look and snap photos. Meanwhile me and Grace, who are a bit desensitized at this point, would simply glance up from our books for a quick look. The others were amazed, commenting on how, unlike me and Grace, they would never become tired or desensitized by the amazing wildlife.
In the afternoon we decided to take a stroll into the center of town, a trip that took all of 3 minutes as it is tiny, and have a look around. Tortuguero is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica and you can definitely notice the Caribbean culture in the people, the pace of life, the food and the music. We were watching some locals play dominios and eyeing up some BBQ skewers (we came to name ‘meat on a stick’), when we were hit with another torrential downpour, so we headed into a local soda and ordered a disappointing lunch. Rob and Hannah opted for the local rice and beans dish, this time with the Caribbean influenced coconut rice. Grace went for a vegetarian quesadilla which was basically some frozen veg in a tortilla and I thought I’d branch out and get some garlic bread as I wasn’t very hungry. My garlic bread turned out to be burnt toast with a basil leaf on top which Rob found hilarious. Unfortunately the meat on a stick people had also fled from the rain so I had to suck it up and eat my burnt toast.
It clearly rains a lot here as the locals have mastered riding a bike with one hand and holding an umbrella in the other. Eventually we braved the rain again and headed back to the hostel.
In the evening we headed out for our night walk, we were given torches and set off towards the forest at the edge of town, with a brief put stop as it chucked it down again for 10 minutes.
We saw a lot on the walk, but with no thanks to our guide who was particularly useless, when rob spotted a raccoon in the tree and asked what it was the guides response was ‘I don’t know, some sort of mammal I guess’ when Hannah found a spider and asked if it was dangerous, his response was ‘No idea’… a Costa Rican lady on our tour informed us it wasn’t. He was also playing frog recordings from YouTube in the forest to try and attract frogs (which you are warned not to do as it upsets the natural order) but he wasn’t paying attention and when the video skipped to the next in the queue it nearly deafened us all with an advert and scared off lots of sleeping birds, but at least the wildlife is now informed about where they can purchase low cost second hand cars.
However, with our keen eyed group (excluding me ofc, who spent much of the time almost walking into spiders webs) we managed to spot a lot of things, even the famous red eyed frog we spotted in Manuel Antonio but this time with its colours on show!
On our second day we were up at 5 am ready for our canoe tour, it’s cool but bright in the early morning so is the best time to spot the animals when they are more active. It would be our last activity with Jess before she headed back to London so she was really hoping to see a sloth.
We were all seated in the canoe and given binoculars. The guide was paddling us along and also looking for any animals he could see. Unlike our previous guide this one was brilliant, he had eyes like a hawk and could spot camouflaged animals from the other side of the river that even when he had rowed us right over in front of them, we would still struggle to see. But we saw loads of stuff, hundreds of cranes, herons, lizards, caiman, snakes and loads of spider and howler monkeys.
The guide told us they also get large crocodiles and alligators but they tended to be in the larger rivers. About 2/3 of the way through it started raining again and we didn’t see much more after that unfortunately, except monkeys and herons which the others were already bored of despite their earlier comments on not becoming desensitized.
After the morning tour we had to say goodbye to Jess who was starting her journey back to San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, to fly home. Meanwhile the rest of us grabbed a quick lunch of meat on a stick before heading off to our walk in the national park. Thankfully it had stopped raining at this point but the guides suggested we changed into Wellington boots before heading into the forest. They didn’t have any wellies in my size so I ended up tripping about in some huge size 11’s. Luckily we didn’t have to be quiet while evening up on anything!
By this point we were quite the tour connoisseurs, our guide was impressed by me knowing the number of hummingbird species in Costa Rica (52), the most photographed frog in the country and the sleeping habits of the two and three toed sloths (two toed are nocturnal, three toed are not). Luckily for us the guide knew his stuff and had many more interesting facts and information for us.
Along with the usual birds and monkeys he pointed out wild cacao (chocolate) trees, bullet ants (whose sting feels like being shot), huge terminate nests, cool plants that closed when you touched them and he also showed us a toxic frog that locals used to use to make poison darts to hunt with, he also showed us the trees they got the small dart like thorns from. It was super interesting and Rob and Hannah got to see their first (visible) sloth. Up until then we had mostly seen just grey balls of fluff far away or arms or just the movement of trees. (Jess was very gutted she had missed the sloths by a mere hour!)
He also took us to the beach to show us where the turtles that give the town it’s name come in the summer to lay their eggs. There were none there, as it is currently out of season, but we saw discarded eggs and some shells and bones of the adult turtles that had been caught and eaten by jaguars. We also saw some jaguar footprints along the beach.
It was a really fun tour, towards the end the guide gathered us all as around in a crouch near the ground and told us to sniff, and just as we had taken a big wiff explained that the puddle we were gathered around was jaguar piss. That was a less fun experience, but hey, how many people can say they have smelt jaguar piss? And I bet even fewer would admit to it!
The next morning we headed out of Tortuguero towards our next stop, Cahuita, but we had one more surprise on the way out. Our boat driver spotted a huge crocodile on the banks of one of the larger rivers. He drove over to it but, before anyone could get a photo, it quickly and very disturbingly disappeared into the shallow water without a trace. Our driver very quickly backed up and drove us out of there!
Eventually we made it to our next stop without any crocodile bites! I’ll tell you all about it soon, love Alice x