Turtle Hunting in Tortuguero
Loading Map
Tortuguero,
Costa Rica
Thursday, September 15, 2005
We waved goodbye to Cahuita from the morning bus North, not that anyone was around, it being before noon. We stopped at the busy town of Limon, from where we hoped to catch a water taxi up the inland water ways to Tortuguero, a little village next to a beach popular with lady Turtles for egg laying.
We had missed the main water taxis, but found a boat captain from one of the big Lodge hotels at Tortuguero who was willing to take us with him on his return journey, which was quite handy as Limon didn't appeal to us as a nice place to spend a night. The journey up river was about 2 hours long, and our driver was quite the tour guide as he pointed out various bird species in the trees as he spotted them.
In Tortuguero, a strange little place on a strip of land between ocean and river, we stayed in the Zen-like hostel of a Canadian naturalist called Darryl. He was very interesting and clearly loved his life here, having moved to Costa Rica many years ago for the rainforest. He was a mine of information on all things related to the local flora and fauna. Unfortunately he was not running turtle tours that day, although we agreed to go on a trip with him around the waterways the following morning.
Instead, we booked a trip to watch the turtles with an ignorant (as it turned out) orc-like creature called Ernesto. As it got dark, we joined about 8 others for a torch-light stroll through the forest to reach the beach. Fresh from our snake-spotting experience, Andrea and I trod very gingerly, and tried to follow in the footsteps of two Dutch girls, who were handily quite tall, thus also making them shields for dangling venemous spiders.
As soon as we got to the beach we nearly stumbled over a giant turtle mid-laying. At Ernesto's instruction, we gathered round silently outside it's field of vision, and stood in awe. I had of course seen turtles laying eggs on TV, but to see one in the wild was quite moving. She was simply enormous, probably a metre and a half long in total. We felt very privilaged, and it was quite magical, although with an underlying sense that we were intruding on something which should have been very private.
We also saw turtles arriving from the sea, where we had to keep at quite a distance to avoid frightening them off, and turtles returning to the sea, once their work was done. Any torchlight on the the beach was of course banned, but luckily the moonlight lit the scene.
The magic of the whole experience was only slightly dimished by Ernesto, who simply regurgitated a learnt script, and seemed particularly disinterested in all aspects of the trip apart from taking our money, and encouraging us to come with him the following morning on a river trip. At one stage Andrea had the nerve to actually ask a question "Do they only lay eggs once a year?" or similar. She was quickly admonished by Ernesto, who said that he was explaining everything to us that we would need to know, so we must not interupt him, and only to ask questions at the end about things he may have forgotten to tell us! By the end of his drone we were all snoozing and thus couldn't remember whether he'd answered or not, so we made a note to simply ask Darryl in the morning.
The next day we were up at sunrise(!) for our river trip with Darryl. Joining us were a Dutch couple who were also staying at our B&B, and 2 ornithologists from the research station in the village. Between Darryl and the 2 bird spotters, we were given an encyclopaedic tour of the birds of the area, impressive, if slightly TOO good. As Andrea described it in an email home "we went bird spotting with Darryl and a couple of twitchers, very interesting, and a fascinating insight into the lives of dorks".
As well as birds, we also saw caymen and families of howler and capuchin monkeys, on what was an excellent trip through the rich diversity that is the Costa Rican rainforest.
The rest of that day, and half the next, we spent on a water taxi, and a number of crowded 'chicken buses' right across Costa Rica to the town of La Fortuna in the shadow of the Arenal volcano. Alas, none of the buses actually had people carrying chickens, which is quite common and from where the cheap public buses get their nickname, although they were rammed to capacity, and then picked up the next 20 people for good measure.
