Tortuguero

After a sequence of three long, dusty bus rides originating at 6am in Monteverde, we reached Parismina in the mid-afternoon, a little village on the Tortuguero canal system. We were the only disturbance as far as the eye could see on the still, luscious green-fringed, mirror-perfect water. The air turned from mist to rain to mist as our boatman blasted Bob Marley songs (singing along, though he probably didn't understand a word) on our one-hour atmospheric ride up to Tortuguero.


We stayed at Cabinas Tortuguero, run by a friendly family with an amusing menu for their attached restaurant. Using an automatic translator on Spanish menus seems to be popular around here, and theirs included such gems as "coffee or you" for "café o te," "everything turned into charcoal" for "carbonara," and "fragmentation hand grenade" for "piña" (maybe because the small, spiky explosives were shaped like so?). We really cracked up the day we discovered this and I think our service was slower as a result.

The prime window for wildlife-spotting was 6-9am, and both mornings we went out in canoes to try our luck. The first time we went with a spunky Afro-Caribbean guide who pointed out a river otter, howler monkeys, lizards and iguanas, toucans, and many other birds. The next day we rowed out on our own and saw white-faced squirrel monkeys and toucans. I was very pleased, as this was more than we had seen in Costa Rica thus far.




It was difficult to do much else around Tortuguero as we experienced short downpours seemingly every 15 minutes. The trails were flooded and the canoe tours didn't really go out after the 6-9am prime window for spotting wildlife. So we napped, read, played cards, and waded in the Caribbean a bit. We also had our best meal in Costa Rica at a place called Miss Miriam's. The Caribbean chicken was tasty but the real standouts were the spread of side dishes that we didn't expect (rices, salads) and the prawns, which were more the size of crawfish, fried in garlic butter.

I wish I had more pictures of my favorite place in Costa Rica, with its reggae music, kids playing soccer in the rain, and being able to walk down the one street in town and see our boatman sitting at the friendly outdoor bar, guide hanging out on the front stoop, and guy from the cabinas picking groceries at the store. It was really some kind of magical.