Tortuguero, Costa Rica: Wednesday 17 February

Today was another early start as we were travelling to Tortuguero, where we are staying for the next 2 nights.

The first leg of the journey was a 3.5 hour ride in a mini bus to Pavona, with a stop for breakfast on the way. We travelled through the mountains and cloud forest and, at times, there was very little visibility because of the weather (imagine driving through a wet cloud!) - I was glad I wasn't driving! Once through the mountains we drove through acres of banana plantations until we arrived at the dock for the next part of our journey which was a 45 min boat ride as there are no roads to Tortuguero.

Our boat journey to Tortuguero

On our way there it rained quite hard so we didn't see much wildlife, but we did come across a constrictor snake which is apparently quite a rare sight, so much so that even our guide was taking a photo!

We are staying at a small resort just off one of the canals which only has 12 rooms - the rooms are set up like little individual chalets.

Our room

Tortuguero and its National Park is a mixture of rainforest, marshy lands, long stretches of beach and wide open canals with diverse wildlife. This afternoon, after we had lunch at the hotel, our guide took us to see Tortuguero village (which is literally one street!) and the Caribbean coast.

On the beach!

The 'high street'

When we got back to our hotel we were walking back to our room looking out for wildlife - the couple who we arrived with were telling us how they had seen monkeys, toucans and lizards at the hotel since we had arrived and all we had seen was a tiny lizard and some ants...! I am pretty oblivious to most things, and I am married to the King of oblivious, so even if a group of monkeys went past singing and juggling there is a good chance we wouldn't notice so I wasn't expecting much. I was standing by a tree looking around when there was a bit of commotion up the tree, and a big lizard jumped out of the tree, scurried past me and shot up another tree whilst very handily stopping for a photo opportunity (Peter said it was playing dead but I think it was posing :-) )

Lizard alert!

Just before dusk we decided to go for a walk to see if we could spot anymore wildlife, but somehow we ended up in the bar where I had the largest cocktail ever!

 

Posted with Blogsy