Bananas, Flooded Roads and Turtles

Note: I started writing this November 9 so pretend all my references to time are from that day, not today.

Last week, we had more rain.  And by more rain, I mean a lot more rain.  Thanks to Tropical Storm Tomas, we had another round of closed roads and mudslides (can’t get to Manuel Antonio right now), full with a Red Alert and National State of Emergency.  A mudslide in Escazu, a town outside of San Jose, resulted in over 20 deaths.  Many class field trips were cancelled and ISA recommended that students stay in San Jose this past weekend, but my Ecotourism class field trip to Tortuguero was allowed to go because the Caribbean side of Costa Rica was still in pretty good shape.  I can say with certainty now that I am very glad we were able to go on our trip.  This trip is worthy of its own blog post.

At 5:45 am Saturday morning, I found myself sleepily joining my sleepy class at the university to leave for Tortuguero.  One girl’s parents decided they did not want her to go on the trip because of the weather, so she wasn’t there.  Of course, seeing as it was before 6 am on a Saturday, she was not the only one missing.  Two of the three guys in my class did not show up, so there were many girls, our professor and his wife, our guides, and Mike.  Our guide started something on this drive that he would keep up the entire trip: He would address us as “Ladies, and Mike,” then he would laugh to himself, and continue.  This got to be so expected that we all would laugh at him laughing at himself.  So there we were, bright and early and giggling, and on our way to Tortuguero.

Banana plantation

Getting to Tortuguero consists of driving to a city in Limon Province, Caño Blanco from what I could tell, and then switching to a boat to go along the Canals of Tortuguero up into the town.  While a lot of the road was nice and paved, we did eventually have to turn onto bumpy gravel roads after our breakfast stop.  We passed a lot of banana plantations, and even stopped at one to take a mini-tour, take some pictures, and buy baby coconuts for snacking.  We learned that the banana bunches are covered in blue bags to protect them from weather and bugs, and that the blue helps keep animals from trying to take them because there really is not a lot of blue in plant life.  We took some pictures of the washing stations, and said hi to some of the workers.  There was a man with a cart selling baby coconuts that some people bought for the coconut water, but the part I discovered I like is the coconut meat.  The baby ones are a little sweeter and softer than mature ones, and a lot of the people who bought them to drink didn’t like eating them so I got a lot of free coconut!  Yum :)

Cutting the bananas off to rinse them

Then we continued on our way, until we saw that the creek along the road had flooded from all the rain.  For the most part, the flood was away from the road, but then we reached a part where it covered the road.  And I don’t just mean a little bit of water; I mean enough that we were nervous we might not make it.  Well, we did.  Continuing on, we came to many more parts like this where the road was completely flooded, but we also passed cars driving the other way and would ask them how bad it was.  Since they had all made it through, we figured we could too.  At some point during all this, the juice and coffee from breakfast kicked in and I had to pee.  I asked our guide and he said we were only about fifteen minutes away.  Unfortunately, he did not take the dead van blocking the road about 500 feet from our destination into account.  We had to stop in one of the shallower parts of the flooded road because we couldn’t get around the van, and nothing seemed to be happening.  Meanwhile, my bladder was getting quite annoyed with me so I asked the guide and my professor how much longer it would be, and they did not know.  Long story short, I peed behind our van into the water flowing off the side of the road as the class waded to a van on the other side of the roadblock to take us to the boat waiting to leave.  If it weren’t inappropriate, I would have asked for a picture because it was just that interesting of an experience.  Speaking of pictures, I would love to see a picture of the place where we got on the boat on a normal day when it isn’t entirely submerged.  Our van had to drive through more water and we had to jump a little to get from the van to a dry spot on the ramp up to the dock.  We got on our boat, and headed up the river to Tortuguero.

Hmm can we make it?

Flooded boat station

After this adventure, the trip consisted mainly of touring the canals, walking around the park and the village, and seeing a lot of wildlife.  The town was adorable, possibly one of my favorites, and they were having some sort of festival that I never did figure out what it was for.  During the boat rides, we saw a toucan, a few crocodiles, a caiman, some monkeys, some sloths, and many birds.  Apparently it was migration season, so the sky was full of birds just about every time I looked up.  While we were a couple weeks too late to witness sea turtles coming onto shore to lay their eggs, we were lucky enough to see quite a few eggs hatching and the baby turtles making their way to the ocean!  The first day, we only saw a couple and I was already ecstatic because my friends had been to Tortuguero the week before and did not see any turtles, big or small.  However, the next day was amazing.

Town of Tortuguero

First, we went on a long boat ride on which we saw most of the wildlife from the weekend.  Then, to get to where we were eating lunch, we had to walk through a flooded town.  We all took our shoes off/put on flip-flops to walk through the layer of water that covered most of the streets.  That was definitely an experience.  After lunch, we stopped to take a quick walk through the National Park.  While interesting, it was also very hot and humid, the air was full of mosquitoes, and the ground was covered in ants that started climbing up our legs every time we stopped to discuss something we saw.  Overall, we were a very grumpy bunch and could not wait to get back on the boat and just head home.

These guys blend in surprisingly well

Right before it dove in the water

But then we walked out of the forest onto the beach right as what appeared to be an entire nest of turtles had just hatched and were crawling out of their ditch in the sand towards the water.  Excited beyond belief, we followed the bunch of them, cameras in hand, as they scurried to the shoreline.  I couldn’t believe I was seeing this, but I was also saddened by the amount of trash on the beach that they had to crawl over, and by the woman in our group who would pick them up and get in their way despite our guide explicitly telling us not to.  Yes, she was just helping them over tough spots, but when I asked the guide, he said that other than turning them around if they start to crawl in the wrong direction, it’s better to leave them alone because they will make it on their own.  However, despite this, it was an amazing thing to witness before we got back on the boat to head home.

I think I can...  I think I can...

Amazing