Tortuguero

 Today we flew to Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. All transportation in this area is by boat, along a mix of lagoons, natural canals and manmade canals.  Up until the 1960s, the area was heavily lumbered and the canals used to ship/float the logs to the sawmill. Since then the area has been included in a vast national park and the forest has mostly recovered.

We landed on a narrow runway between the Atlantic and the lagoon, then travelled by boat along the lagoon to our lodge. On that short boat trip we saw both male and female 3-toed sloths, drying out from a morning rainstorm and moving down from the canopy into denser greenery. For a sloth, the female was really book’in.  To see them so close and in motion was magical.  We could clearly see the moss that grows on them.

We ate lunch at a local restaurant that served Caribbean style food, then had a coconut demonstration — from cracking open the husk to creating coconut water, milk, oil and candy—which has been an important local industry for generations. We were somewhat distracted during the presentation by four Great Green Macaws that kept flying over with noisy acrobatics.  Green Macaws are blue, yellow and red as well as green. On an afternoon boat ride we saw monkeys (howlers and spider) many water birds (both adult and juvenile of some species), and baby caimans their mother — the mother was not overly happy with us hanging around her babies.  It was a great first day of the official trip.   We learned that a troop of  howler monkeys stays within a fairly small area.  Spider monkeys on the other hand can travel up to 10 miles a day searching for food.