El Norte de El Caribe de Costa Rica!

Up at the crack of dawn, with the roosters, I was loaded onto a tour bus going to Parque Nacional Tortuguero. I booked an overnight tour to this National Park where sea turtles go to lay their eggs.

The lay of the land going north is all about the banana. Banana trees were pretty much everywhere on our route. We stopped at a banana processing plant, Del Monte actually, and watched the workers process the bananas from the huge bundles off the tree, straight into large vats of water, to quality control (size and number by bunches), to the boxes that you see at the supermarket. The folks that work in this industry only make $300 a month and it is hard work. The company provides housing and supports the schools for their children so they use that $300 for food and other necessities...I had mixed feelings about this. Seems to me that the company keeps the employees close to the plant so that they can work more for the same amount of money. Hmmm...

The tour bus reached the town of Caño Blanco where we had to get all of our stuff and load it onto a boat. The boat took us a long way up the Canales de Tortuguero to the Evergreen Lodge. The Lodge was really nice, with a pool and all meals included...a very pleasant surprise! I had about an hour and decided to take advantage of the pool...ahhh!!! That afternoon, it was off to Tortuguero Village via water taxi where we went to the turtle museum and to the beach to see the turtle nests. Yup...the eggs are there in the big hole that mama turtle dug and covered. Laura, our guide, gave us some info on these turtles. Green sea turtles lay about 110 eggs 3 times a year. Of those 110 eggs, approximately 1% survive. The outlook for these turtles was not looking too good. At one point they thought that there were only about 3000 females left. Now, with all the conservation efforts, they think there are more than 20,000! Yay!

The next morning, we were off with Tomas to slowly creep through the national park in a boat. Tomas is a biologist and his knowledge of birds, plants, animals and the area is quite extensive. We saw all kinds of birds...you know "oh look, there's the 2 toed, purple feathered, long beaked, 3 legged egret thing". Can you tell I am not a big bird watcher? We did get a really cool look at a sloth that was down low in the water, doing his business, and then he climbed back up the tree. Oh and one of the funniest things I have seen so far was on this boat tour. We found a group of white faced monkeys way up high in the trees. We were hanging out under the trees watching them and one of the monkeys got mad at us, someone must have smiled at him, and walked straight over the boat and peed on us. I barely escaped being peed on. The two ladies on the other side of the boat got hit. Hilarious! Even Tomas was cracking up.

Later, we went on a nature hike that afternoon and got eaten by the world's largest mosquitoes. They will eat you through your clothes! The entire time we were on this tour, we were being filmed for a local vacation channel, destinostv...look for me on your local cable network!

After the hike, it was on to a long boat and then bus ride to the capital of Costa Rica...San Jose!