Puerto Viejo
Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is a tiny village on the south west of Costa Rica. It is famous for its surfing, boasting the best left break in Costa Rica, and, perhaps consequently, has a hippie feeling and lots of dope.
We stayed at a place called Pura Vida, which has a pet dog and three cats, one of which drinks from the tap.
We had the luxury of two full days here, which is nice because there was quite a lot to do, from tours to the nearby forest, visiting the sloth rehab centre, kayaking etc.
Sloth spotting
Our first day Nancy and I abandoned the group, who were doing a tour of the forest, for our own tour. We hired bikes and rode the 13 kms on a road that is mainly paved. Nevertheless, the trip took us something like three hours to complete because of all the stops we had to make to look at wildlife.
The first traffic delay was caused by some birds. The violaceous trogon was the most spectacular, with its bright yellow chest and blue back.
The next stop was the most dramatic though. There was a sloth (three-toed)hanging over the road having a good scratch, first one hand then the other, then the hind foot. All rest. Now the forearm. And the other arm. Now rest .... But it was pretty tricky to work out which end was which, because their heads don't really stick out very prominently, and their legs are quite stumpy. But the real problem here was that there were two heads. Mother and baby hanging over the road together. Took absurd numbers of photos on the assumption that none of them would work out. The problem being that anything in a tree becomes a silhouette. I have started experimenting with dramatically overexposing the photos to get some light back onto the animals. Results appear to be mixed but show potential.
We found a couple of others along the way, but they were just pretending to be feather dusters.
Saw some hawks and a spectacular bird called a collared aracaria which is similar to a toucan but the extended beak is straight instead of curved.
The biggest delay was caused by another sloth, this time climbing down the tree. This was real motion! And for the first time we could see an orange blaze on its back. (Others definitely don't have this, and you can see from other photos I have taken that there is a white patch where this one was orange. I don't know the reason for this.) We waited a long time for it to come all the way to the ground, but he was just teasing and slid around the back of the trunk to sleep.
We finally arrived at the refuge, which was initially disappointing. We thought that maybe we were on the wrong track because it seemed to disappear at a beach, so I left Nancy at an earlier beach and went looking for the other track. I thought I had found it too, even though it was much less distinct than the one I had abandoned. This one had howler monkeys in the distance, and, I soon discovered, mud up to the knee. Everywhere. I would free one leg only to swap the it for the other. I was starting to feel like one of those saps in the exploration party that gets needlessly drowned in mud, or quicksand or whatever. It was never that bad but I was seriously thinking about whether I would ever recover my sandals again which were quickly sucked off my feet in the very clinging mud (one in the mud, one out, and swap), and pit vipers (of which Costa Rica has many species, all highly poisonous). I didn't see any snakes but the guys who went with the guide did find pit vipers, so my thoughts were not absurd.
Thoroughly caked in mud I returned to the beach to clean up. On a second look, and with new-gained wisdom, the path from the beach, was extremely obvious. And I had not gone far before I came across a lovely troupe of howler monkeys feeding. I had a perfect view of one hanging from one branch only by his tail and eating leaves from the tree below. Then I was surprised by rustling in the leaves just about a meter above my head, as a monkey left that tree and scampered up the sacropia I was holding and from there to another. The force with which it pulled the sacropia towards the other tree was really surprising. The tree was really bent over and sprang back quite hard when the tail finally let go.
Well, this all required a change of approach. So I backtracked and collected the camera and dragged Nancy off her beach, and we set off looking for monkeys together. Taking a slightly different route to the same spot (without any encounters with mud this time)we saw the family moving through the trees and a great racket from an enormous tree. The family were very cute, moving along the branches to one tree 50 meters away and then back. There was no reason for the walk that I could discern. On the way back, a tiny baby caught a little branch and lifted itself off its mother's back for a moment before settling back down for the ride.
Back near the spot that we were trying to get to we were confronted by a male issuing us a challenge, huffing at us from the trees very close to by, and eventually escalating to full scale howler groaning. They are handsome beasts - dark brown, lighter when the sun strikes them, and the males at least have a mantle around their neck. He was also pretty bold; we were much bigger than he.
We continued along this little worn muddy tracks and eventually arrived at a wide path that had presumably bee used for vehicles once. Now it was a grassy gap in the forest, but we decided to follow it. The first interesting animal we saw was a kind of stick suspended from a silk thread from the trees. Once we noticed the first, we saw them all around. They were a curious cross between a stick insect and a spider. We also saw some toucans here.
We were having one of those conversations where you complain about how easy it is to see sloths here (no challenge etc), when Nancy said 'for heaven's sake!' because there was another one hanging from the branch of a sacropia tree right above the path. He also was having a thorough scratch (left front, then right front, then the back legs)but we also got to see him moving along the branch. They are fantastic to watch in all their slowness, with their funny stumpy legs enormous claws, and paws perfectly shaped for curling around branches. They pause between steps, as if closely considering the advisability of moving any further. But when we came back this way perhaps half an hour later he was gone. He wasn't anywhere in his tree and there were no other trees within reach, so we had missed the opportunity of seeing one come down from his tree. I am still surprised that he could have made such a big move so fast.
It was getting pretty late now and we pushed on just long enough to get to a coffee plantation meet some more howler monkeys and see some Montezuma's oropendulas. Photos seem to show an aracaria in the same tree as the oropendula, but neither of us saw it at the time. On the way back the howlers were still around, and we saw two high up in a tree, one with an infant clinging to her back. While we watched she just jumped off the branch of this tree into space. There were no nearby trees. She crashed into the understorey some 10m below and at least five meters out from the tree with a terrific noise, but apparently the landing was a safe one. Moments later the second howler followed suit.] There were lots of butterflies with red and black wings and Nancy even found a little frog on the track.
By now it was getting pretty gloomy in the forest and we had to get back so as not to have to make too much of the ride home in the dark, on a narrow road with bikes that had very little in the way of brakes. So we barely slowed to look at the monkeys and sloths on the way home. Nevertheless, we still got back well after dark, but safely and happy.
Fish
The next day was spent pretty lazily, mostly because I had finally managed to pick up some kind of stomach bug. But I still managed to fit in a little snorkelling of the beach in front of the town. The water was incredibly shallow, open to waves and a strong current and the coral mostly dead, but the fish life was very good and I even came across a little cave where lurked an enormous box fish, I swear that he would have been a meter long. The range of more reasonably sized fish was very good with lots of yellow and black ones, some pinkish green ones, needle fish and many others. In one of the deeper patches I found two purple fish lying on the sand next to a crevice with little cleaner shrimp (predominantly white with blue stripes)attending to them, accompanied by blue and white sucker fish. If the water had been more than a foot deep, and the visibility better it would have been easy to spend the day here.
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