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After la Fortuna, we headed to the Carribean Coast. There are two coasts in Costa Rica, one on the Pacific Ocean and one on the Carribean. The Pacific coast is probably want you think of when you think of Costa Rica beaches - white sand, blue sea and lots of weathly American tourists. Although beautiful it is very expensive and currently in 'winter' (which means its still warm but rains a lot of the day). So we decided to head to the Carribean coast, not as built up, not as pricey and also its sunnier.
Tortuguero or 'Land of turtles' is a very small villgae on an island sandbar but with a lot to see. Our first day we were up for 6am and headed out on a canoe tour of the nearby canals. I'm not a nature person but even I thought it was pretty amazing sitting 30 cm out of the water rowing around on these small canals surrounded by jungle, it is nicknamed little Amazon. We saw monkeys in the trees, a baby caimen in the water, a couple types of iguana lizards sunbathing in the trees and lots of birds, lizards and insects, and all before 9am!
That evening when it was dark we headed out on the Turtle spotting tour. The beaches in Tortuguero are a key nesting area for 4 different types of turtles and you sit and wait on the each of the beach while 'spotters' head out to the beach with red lights to find a female turtle setting up her nest. Once she has dragged herself up onto the beach, dug a little hole and then started to lay between 5-10 eggs she goes into a trance, and it's ok for us to go in and watch her, she doesn't even know we are there. I think this might be the most incredible thing I've seen, this HUGE mama turtle laying egg after egg after egg (the lay up to 180 eggs) into a perfectly sized hole in the sand. We were so close that we could have easy reached out and picked up and egg. We sat and watched for about 20/30 mins and then she used her feet to cover up the hole to keep her eggs safe from preditors. She moves the sand about with such force, a lot of us got covered in sand. We left at that point so as not to get her stressed, but she would then head back down into the sea and the wee eggs would cook for another 60 days. The turtle was over a meter long, it was huge!
In the morning we got up early again as this is the time that the wee babies break out of their shells and head down to the safety water. They don't stand much of a chance, for every 1,000 eggs laid only 2 or 3 will survive and make it into the sea. We really got a scale for how many turtles there are on this beach - there was track after track in the sand of where the mama turtles had dragged themselves up onto the beach during the night (they are huge - it looked like a tractor track in the sand), and track after track of where the teeny tiny little baby tutles had dragged themselves from the beach and into the sea.
That morning we left Tortuguero to head down the coast to Peuto Veijo. The trip was incredible - a water taxi (which was just a small speed boat) trip which lasts 3 hours to the town of Limon and a one hour taxi from there. The water taxi trip was one of the coolest thing we have done so far - we saw 2 types of Monkey, caimen, pelicans, river turtles and we were within 2-3 metres of a huge fresh water croc, it was about 4 meters long.
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