Tortuga!

Next stop in Costa Rica was the rainforest of Tortugeuro National Park. The park stretches north along the Caribbean coast up to the village of Tortuguero, which has a small population of around 500, no cars, and is located on a relatively narrow spit of land between the beach and a canal. We had an amazing 4 hour boat ride up the canals to the village spotting lots of wildlife, including another sloth! We also saw howler monkeys (a pretty standard sight now!), really big crocodiles-the biggest I´ve ever seen, lots of pretty colourful birds, toucans and a really cool Jesus Christ Lizard, aptly named because it can run on water!

We arrived at Tortugeuro village about 6pm just in time for a massive storm. It was huge. We had to grab our backpacks from the boat and follow some random guy who was taking us to our hostel. Apparently there was only one place that still had a room for us. So, shielding ourselves from the driving wind and rain, we followed him into the tempest. Before long we were soaked from head to foot, and could hardly see the person in front because of the rain. It was the biggest storm and the most amount of rain I ever seen!! We should have expected it really..we were in the rainforest now..it was crazy though! After what seemed like ages we finally arrived at the hostel - which had hot showers! Amazing!

Our main reason for visiting this part of Costa Rica was to see some turtles! Tortugero park is the most important hatchery and nesting area in the western Caribbean for green sea turtles. We were walking along the beach one day and noticed these massive tracks, at first we thought they must be boats being dragged into the sea..but there were literally hundreds of them all along the beach! We then realised they were turtle tracks! We were aso excited to see them and couldn´t wait to possibly see a turtle!

The best time to see the turtles was at night so we booked a guide for one evening. It continued to rain for about 90% of our time in the park, but we were really lucky the night we booked our guide it was a lovely clear evening. So we met our guy at 8pm and found that he spoke very little English..oh dear. So he was desperately trying to communicate to us all this wonderful facts about the turtles which we understood about half of...when he got a call from ´turtle control´telling him there was a turtle approaching the beach to lay eggs. So it was a mad rush to his boat and a very excited 5 minute boat ride to a beach the other side of the village.

We arrived in perfect time..a lovely big green sea turtle had hauled herself up the beach, picked her spot and had begun to lay the 120 or so eggs she would lay that night. We were about 2 meters away from her and it was amazing to see this giant animal so close. However the next thing we know we are being dragged by our guide to get even closer to the nesting mum, so close we could have touched her...then he gets out a special infra-red light so we could actually see the eggs being laid into the earth below! It was so bizarre, I felt terrible being so close to the huge 200 pound turtle while she was laying her eggs...normally quite an intimate moment I expect...and there we are pointing lights at her! I wasn´t expecting to get so close at all. It was a great experience to see the nesting but it also felt really wrong at the same time. We were assured that this is the norm though and all guides get that close. About half way through this turtles nesting we were called over to another part of the beach where another turtle had finished her business and was returning to the sea. We watched her shuffle back to the sea..it was such a great sight to see (and I felt much better being a few meters away!)