Stu and Anna's travels

After a brief trip back to Manchester (congratulations Angela and Darren!), we flew on down to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. (It´s actually embarrassing how much geography I am learning on this trip but yes, I can now name the capitals of the countries we´ve visited!) Initial impressions were that the city was fairly difficult to distinguish from Miami where we´d had a layover the night before: same restaurants, same languages, but San Jose doesn´t have a beach. We decided to head straight off to the Atlantic coast and see if we could see some of Costa Rica´s famous wildlife.

Tortuguero is a tiny town situated on a spit of land between the ocean and the network of canals and waterways that extend into the rainforest and banana plantations. There are no roads either to the town or in the town. You have to get boats over there and once you´re in the town, everyone walks or uses quadbikes. The town´s major draw though is that it sits on the edge of the Tortuguero National Park and is on a long beach (partially included in the park), which is one of the biggest sea turtle nesting sites in the world.

Unfortunately we were not there for prime nesting season, when it is possible to get guided night tours to see the turtles. Instead we had to settle for an early morning canoe trip into the park with an eagle-eyed guide who was able to show us howler, spider and white-faced monkeys, caimans, hummingbirds, herons, kingfishers, hawks, mud turtles, lizards and blue morpho butterflies. I´ve probably missed some things out but I think you get the picture. Highlights included the territorial howler monkeys screeching at each other from trees on either side of the river right above our heads and the Jesus Christ lizard, so named as it can run across the water. We also saw a caiman (a small relative of the crocodile) swimming in the river, as opposed to half-buried in the mud, which was cool.