Tortugero

From city life to the middle of a rain forest! Tortugero is on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and is another national park, created to protect the beaches for green turtles which lay their eggs there.  This isn't egg laying season though, so I didn't see a single turtle here, but there was an awful lot of other stuff! The critter list is below, with pictures after, but first, a little more about the place.

There are no roads to Tortugero.  It's only accessible by boat (or by plane - they have a light aircraft landing strip just outside town).  The bus from San Jose took around 3 hours and then we transferred to boat. I say boat, it was a flat bottomed, roofed skiff with an outboard motor and about 40 seats inside. Specially designed for carting tourists about, and there were a fair few of them. That said, they could really shift when the pilots wanted to!

The landing area for loading and unloading tourists

Pottering gently down the river

Giving it some wellie!

We cruised down the river for about an hour in total, spotting some wildlife on the way. At the lodge, it seems very set up for groups tourists arriving, staying a few days, and then leaving again. The lodge was only one of many, but they are all hidden in the trees, all you can see  of each from the water's edge is a boat house, and possibly a bar. They have done a good job of enabling what I guess is a large number of tourists to visit, but without it feeling crowded, by having lots of smaller lodges rather than one massive hotel. Also, the area around and between the accommodation huts is very jungly too, so you really feel like you are in the middle of a rainforest, which, incidentally, you are!

It might be in the jungle, but there was still a fairly nice pool!

We arrived for lunch and that afternoon went out for a wildlife hunt in smaller boats. It was rather successful, but I'll leave the animal photos till later, I'm such a tease!

The junctions of rivers have signposts!

The following day was a little bit damper, being more what I would have expected a tropical rainforest to be. I woke up at 5am with the light and the howler monkeys and decided to go for an early morning walk while it was fine out.  I ended up doing the 'nature loop' we were to do later in the day, but I got it all to my self, and dry! 

In the afternoon we took another boat over to Tortugero town itself. It's pretty much nothing but accommodation for the people who work in the lodges, and people selling souvenirs. It was, and I don't use this term lightly, absolutely pissing it down when we were supposed to be leaving for the trip, so it was delayed for a bit.

Ha Ha!  Fooled you!  There are NO animals in this post! Weird I know, right?  It's too long already, I'm going to do another post just for the wildlife!