Lydian – Day 56 – Tortuguero National Park: The Turtles

It’s been a little bit of time since we went and saw Tortuguero, but the time has given me the opportunity to process the whole thing (It needed processing, trust me). The whole turtle seeing thing felt a little scary to me, to be honest. We were in the middle of no where, and we were being led off in the dark to some unknown place far away from far away from civilization.

We started in the town, which was fine. I assumed we were going to go somewhere kind of close to far away from civilization, but no such luck. Once we went down the alley I decided I was a little scared. I knew it was a tour, and there were a bunch of other people. The woman leading seemed like she was friendly, but she was definitely stern. I don’t hold that against her. Leading a group of people around in the middle of the night that may or may not understand you would be a daunting task. I’m not sure if I was scared because it was dark and I just couldn’t see anything, or because I didn’t know where I was going. I’d like to think that it was just because I didn’t know where I was going.

At one point on our journey, we came close to a beach lined with palm trees. I figured that this would be our turtle watching location, and I prepared to walk onto the beach. The area had a couple of street lights (there weren’t any streets) that made it so that one could see the entire area. Everything was kind of wide open, too, which made me feel a little better. But no such luck. We were going to descend somewhere into the jungle with the creepy crawlies and the biting monkeys! Joy! So along we went, until we successfully managed to get to some shelter thing. My eyes had finally adjusted to the pitch black environment, so I was a little bit disappointed when our tour guide turned on her flashlight. It was blinding, really, but I got used to it.

While we were seated on stone benches of sorts, our tour guide told us a little bit about the turtles that we would hopefully be seeing. I say hopefully because she told us that we may or may not see any turtles, but either way, we had a two hour long tour, no matter what.

During this time that we were seated on the benches, two things happened. First, another tour group (or two, I couldn’t tell for sure) came along and sat down on the opposite side of the shelter. The second thing that happened was that the turtle finding people came. See, you don’t just go out on the beach and look for some turtles with flashlights and hope they don’t run away, there are special people that do that who tell you which way to go and stuff. They also have special red lights, and they don’t allow photography of any kind.

We got to see two turtles. One, was going back out to the sea, and the other laid her eggs in a hole that she had dug herself, and then covered back up after laying the eggs. They’re extremely cute creatures, turtles. They appear to be a little clumsy, but you can forgive them. It’s gotta suck a little to carry around that giant shell on your back all the time!

There’s a lot to think about as a female turtle in a relationship. You don’t just have to lay your eggs, but you have to dig a hole to lay them in as well. Then, after you give birth, it is vital that you cover the eggs up so that predators don’t get them. Then you camouflage the area, and go back out to sea, all in the same night. It sounds exhausting. You have to leave your own eggs behind too, which is a little… sad.

I felt a little bit sorry for the turtles. They were surrounded by people. I doubt that I would like that very much, giving birth while a bunch of giant human things stood around pointing and watching me… But turtles don’t have frontal lobes, so I suppose they maybe don’t think quite as much about it. I’m not sure.

We then walked back through the tree tunnel (as I like to call it) that supposedly had snakes everywhere (I didn’t see any, but there probably were many all around. I wouldn’t be surprised.) hanging from trees or whatnot. There was a cute little bug that everybody in the tour was huddled around. It looked like it had green glowing LEDs for eyes… Like something a person would put in a ‘bug room’ in a haunted house. It was a cute little bug, I wanted to take it home with me but I wasn’t really sure if I actually wanted to keep a bug as a pet considering there were various cockroaches and numerous ants that I could adopt if I really wanted a bug for a pet. I still want a little green eyed bug though.

I usually don’t like the word ‘tour’ anywhere in the world. It invokes both a sense of fear and annoyance into me, but this tour actually wasn’t half bad. It was casually informative, and rather interesting. Plus, I didn’t have to be stuck with all the people on the tour for a long time.

Lydian – Day 50 – Don’t Trust the Guidebooks

Now that I’ve finally gotten over my cold that I’ve had, and had time to process the whole experience of going to Tortuguero, I suppose I’ll start posting again. So, like I said, we went to Tortuguero. Driving there was bumpy. The roads were horrible after getting close to La Pavona. La Pavona is a small farm, not a town, but there are signs leading to it. You just have to look hard enough.

There’s a large parking lot where you have to get a parking ticket of sorts to park in a specific place. From there, you walk to a shelter and wait for the 1 o’clock boat to arrive. You’ll see people emerging over the hill. If you need to use the bathroom, be wary, there weren’t any lights, and the doors fool you into thinking that they’re locked so that people can walk in on you. That’s what happened to me, at least. When we got to Tortuguero, I continued to see the same woman who had walked in on me in the bathroom for our whole trip. My family and I decided that I continued to see her for the rest of our trip in Costa Rica, that I should probably think about talking to her. I haven’t seen her since our trip to Tortuguero.

In this shelter place, there is food. Your tickets for the boat will be sold in the same place. If you have a group of people, you will still have only one ticket for all of them. It’s a little confusing.

While we were waiting, there was some T.V. that people were watching that was the older stuff that didn’t have words and was only video. It was kind of interesting I guess, I’ve never watched any older T.V. before. My thought was that this kind of T.V. is probably a little more active than regular T.V. watching session. When you watch a muted T.V. show, you kind of have to put the plot together. That’s what’s so cool about it, is that you can create your own story.

So anyways, soon enough we saw some people coming over the hill from where the river was. It was about 12:45ish by then. We waited till about 12:50 to go down to where the boats were, and were shocked by our discovery. There were river boats down there, and they were in the river, and there was a one handed boat captain. I was expecting something a little more like… Well, like the Strait of Gibraltar. You can see all the way across to the other side, but it’s still far enough away that you have to take a “luxury ferry” with a snack bar and tables. Yeah. Not like that at all. First of all, the river is not very wide across. Second, you go down the river, not across it. Third, I somehow doubt that this river was even wide enough to support a ferry like ones that I’m “used” to. I was scared of this “boat”. I remember looking back at my mom kind of like, “really? Yeah, I’m not doing this anymore…”, but we did get on it sometime around one. I’m really not sure what time it was exactly.

We sat in the front. The view is pretty good from there. I would recommend it. The boat ride is about an hour and a half to two hours. There are lots of stops that the boat will probably take when you get close to Tortuguero. One of these is a town named San Francisco, but don’t let the name fool you, it’s so small it barely looks inhabited. You’ll know when you stop at Tortuguero, trust me. There’s a large, bright pink, cardboard karaoke bar, and a small boat dock.

That’s the trip there, it’s the waiting for nightfall that’s difficult. When we got to our hotel we asked about the turtle tours that they had, and got told that we would have to basically wait for a little while until they knew when they were going out for sure. We found out that they were going out at 9 o’clock that night. We stayed in Casa Marabella by the way. It’s actually a really nice hotel that’s clean and only has a few bugs. When you’re in Costa Rica, you totally can’t guarantee no bugs. There’s gonna be at least one everywhere even if a place is really clean.

So we went for a walk. On our walk we discovered various things. One of my favorites was the aloe vera juice that we found at one of the abastecedors. It was really good, and if you find it, get some of it. Another thing (or should I say person) that we found was a man selling coconuts. Two men were selling coconuts in Tortuguero, actually, but this dude was unique. He had this weird pointy hat that he was wearing that reminded me of something that one would put on a scare actor, and his demeanor was extremely grumpy. The other guy kept shouting about one dollar coconuts. He seemed very not grumpy. Me and my parents decided that if we were to buy any young coconuts, that we would purchase them from the grumpy hat man.
It was really hot out, so we decided that we were going to try and take refuge in one of the hopefully air-conditioned tourist shops that were lining the one occupied street that didn’t look like some scary alley. It wasn’t anything special really. On the walkway outside there were these circles printed on the pavement, they were kind of neat actually. Right outside of the tourist shop there was a sort of a park that had these big statues of sorts. There was this one toucan one and some other ones too, but I can remember them all. There were a number of them.

Inside of the tourist shop there were various items from hackeysacks to local artwork. Everything a person could possibly want was in that store, even Pringles and wine. Now, me and my family have a lot of food allergies, so we couldn’t eat anything there except for the regular Pringles. They were a nice treat later on.

As I was wandering around the store, I decided, hey, why don’t I go try to find the jewelry section. The back of the store was arranged where there were, well, cubicles of sorts, that each had different things in them. One of them was almost (ALMOST) completely devoted to jewelry. As I had just taken a slightly stumbled step into the “cubicle”, I noticed that a woman working at the store had decided to ‘hide out’ in this little area that I was hoping to look through. I stared for a couple of moments as she texted grumpily before deciding that even if she really hadn’t taken much notice to me, it would look weird just to walk away. So I walked in, and, nonchalantly, looked at the jewelry for about five seconds, and left. Then she stared at me. I tried to make the whole thing causal, but I guess that that didn’t work very well.

I then proceeded to find my mother, who was looking at the artwork. I noticed some neat coconut shell purses, and held one up to my dad: The indestructible purse! I waved my mom over, and we took a look at them. My mom opened one up, and can you guess what was on the inside? Ants! I think that they were dead, but I’m not sure, really. Maybe they were just playing dead.

We bought some bug spray here too, accidentally. We had to go return it. The little thing of OFF! was thirteen dollars by itself, not including any of the few other items (Pringles included) we had bought. It felt a little bit like an ordeal to return it, but we did return it, and peace was restored to the Tortuguero tourist shop.

After going back to the hotel, we took a long and refreshing nap on relatively comfortable beds. One thing that I’m beginning to find here is the one cannot have both a comfortable pillow and a comfortable bed at the same time. For instance, in Alajuela, the bed was comfy, but the pillows were thin. Here in Atenas, the pillows rock, but the beds suck. In Tortuguero, the beds were good, and the pillows were weird. If you can imagine really thick pieces of fabric stuffed messily into a pillow case then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the pillows were like. They were strange, but not necessarily bad. We did eventually get up though and go eat dinner.

We ate dinner out on deck outside of the hotel. It consisted of refried beans and salsa on tortillas on a plate, and for dessert, chocolate coconut cookies from Bio-Land. I’ve decided that these are the only things keeping me going, by the way. Our dinner actually wasn’t half bad.

We went out for another walk up and down the one street after dinner because we had an hour and a half to spare and nothing better to do. So that’s what we did. On our walk, we noticed various things from the fact that we weren’t the only ones with uncomfortable furnishings in our home, to the fact that some chick was walking down the street with an umbrella above her head when it wasn’t raining, and hadn’t been for the whole day, as far as we could tell. So this is what we did until it was nearing our time of departure for the turtle tour. Then we went on the turtle tour.

 

Green Sea Turtles at Tortuguero National Park

The family room that sleeps up to 5 people at Casa Marabella was very clean and the staff was English-speaking and very friendly. The hotel also offered a healthy breakfast in the morning. We were able to warm food in a microwave in their kitchen as well.

Our turtle tour was scheduled to start at 9:00 PM. John was coming down with a cold and he was anxious to “get it over with”. He wanted to be there and wanted to see the turtles, but a good bout of a cold is enough to make most people wish for a comfy chair and a good book, at the very least.

Our hotel was several paces to the left from where the boat docked. A man was standing at the dock with a sign that had our name on it, but he pointed us in the right direction and we took our luggage and found Casa Marabella on our own.

We were in room 11, a “family room” with a queen bed and one twin bunk over another queen. It was clean and for the first time since we’ve been to Costa Rica, the sheets stayed on the bed the whole night. There was no air conditioning and it was humid and warm, but the fans made it easy to endure. Also for the first time in Costa Rica, we did not awaken to the sounds of dogs barking.

We brought our own food on the trip due to our numerous alimentary “issues”, but there were four little grocery stores in town and we were able to buy corn tortillas and refried beans and then warm them in a microwave at Casa Marabella. We ate out by the river and watched the boats come and go from here to there along with some other people who were waiting for the tour. Across the river on the other side were the lights from another little town; likely one that had less tourist activity than Tortuguero village.

We walked back and forth through the town along the only path, which was only occasionally paved. In the unpaved areas where water had apparently pooled from the rain the night before, wet sand stayed wet throughout the entire afternoon under a thick and oppressively humid blanket of air. A collection of foot prints, shoe prints, dog tracks, and bicycle tracks in these wet and sandy areas were part of a collage that was filled with insignificant moments that led to other goings-on somewhere within the small village.

Along the path were fascinating dioramas of village life. Very few people were in their houses, but a few houses had the lights on inside. I would

This little stretch of the Tortuguero village walkway looks relatively deserted, but beyond the foliage are some weathered houses up on stilts.

hardly call these house “comfortable” with their hard floors and hard furnishings. We walked by one house where three kids were sitting on a wooden bench in a living room watching television. There was an older obese woman in the only other house in town where there was a television on and she was sitting in a padded rocking chair with her feet resting on flip flops to keep them off the hard floor. There was nothing lush or posh anywhere that I could see in the place, but I speculated that whatever soft furniture there was would be found in the more expensive tourist motels.

Each walk up and down the path revealed something new. It was a like a Renaissance festival, according to Lydian, and John and I both agreed. The little tiendas were “human-sized” and built to be observed in slow motion rather than the car-sized, fast-paced stores that we see in the United States. The smell of foreign food and the street light that kept going out and then flickering back on added to the ambience.

The sea turtle tour was cool. I generally shy away from things that involve the word “tour”, but this was okay. Though it still involved a group of other tourists, many of them behaving badly (like usual, of course), I wouldn’t have wanted to try to find my way through the rain foresty thickets out onto the dark beach to look for nesting sea turtles by myself. Our tour guide, a busty black woman wearing a special green “tour guide” polo shirt, admonished us to walk two-by-two through the trees to the beach because of “snakes”.

Snake bites are a major issue in these parts. Indeed, as I’m reading some of the anthropological information about the Afro-Caribbean coast out of books like What Happen: A Folk History of Costa Rica’s Talamanca Coast by Paula Palmer and Turtle Bogue: Afro-Caribbean Life and Culture in a Costa Rican Village by Harry G. Lefever, it seems that snake bites take the place of car accidents in these regions. As we were walking through the thick foliage along intersecting and meandering paths the leaves bristles ahead of us and the tour guide stopped for a moment to take a closer look at whatever caused the movement. I don’t know if it was a snake or not. All I know is that it was possible that it was a snake and I was glad to have a tour guide along, just in case it was.

The sand on the beach was dark and even though there was a quarter moon that night, it was incredibly hard to see the turtles without the help of the “spotters”. These people went out ahead of the tour groups with red lights (so that they wouldn’t scare the female turtles away with bright white lights) to find the turtles. We didn’t have to search for the turtles and risk falling into one of the giant hills that they dig on the beach or tripping over a gigantic piece of dark-colored drift wood to find them. Without the help of a guide, it would be difficult to see the green sea turtles this time of the year. They’re huge, but difficult to spot by the light of the moon.

I can’t imagine killing one of these creatures, unless of course, I was starving. They are so slow and they poor things perform such incredible feats; swimming vast distances and then crawling up on the beach to lay a bunch of eggs after digging a hole the size of a grave. They are completely harmless to humans, which I suppose is why they have been such good prey to the people in Tortuguero village and the surrounding area. I understand why people have gone to such efforts to try to promote their survival after seeing them heave themselves around on the beach and working diligently to bury their precious eggs. I also understand why they would be such an easy source of food. Falling in love with a creature like the sea turtle requires a complicated and delicate balance in an environment like this because the people here were able to survive in some part because the sea turtles were here. And arguably, when they were slaughtering them for food, they weren’t necessarily going to excess. It was when people saw the opportunity to slaughter the sea turtle for money that problems began to take shape, at least as far as I understand it.

As one of those boring family-types, I rarely go out at night except when there is some odd but palatable activity that could trump a relaxing evening reading, watching TV and regrouping for the next day. I really relish the night-time stuff that’s truly worth the while and this was definitely one of them. We spent at least 45 minutes chatting with an Israeli family with twin boys and a seven year old girl before the tour even started. They were staying in Costa Rica for a month (the kids had 3 weeks off from school due to Holy Days, apparently) and they talked with us about the differences between Costa Rica and India. I thought it was interesting and amazing that people in Israel could take 1 month of work and school off each year to travel. People in the United States often don’t even take two week vacations. They told us about the sea turtles in Israel (I didn’t know there were sea turtles in Israel). We sat outside in the Sector 4 shelter in the dark waiting for the turtle spotters to find turtles while we chatted with Jewish Israeli’s. A lot of people apparently get really impatient during this part of the turtle tour because the tour guide was especially nervous and reassuring as we sat there in our group, but I liked the wait.

Lydian and John walking back to the restaurant after the river ride back from Tortuguero National Park. Note the big bus sitting there. Most of the tourists climbed into the bus to go back to San Jose.

The Israeli man that I was talking to turned his camera on to take a picture without the flash on the beach and he was pulled aside and given a “what-for” by the busty black tour guide and two turtle spotters. They threatened to take his camera away if he had taken any pictures (which he hadn’t). John tried to make the Israeli man feel better after he got chided for the misbehavior.

Walking through the trees with only flashlights reminded me of Halloween and haunted houses and corn field mazes. There was a bug with green glowing eyes on our return from the beach. John said it looked like the kind of thing he would build out of some clay and LED lights. I agreed and again had reason to think about how fake all the real stuff at Tortuguero village looked to me.

The entire turtle tour lasted about 2 hours and 15 minutes from the time we left the hotel, but 45 minutes was spent just sitting in Sector 4 waiting. The tour guide told us that the tour could last from 45 minutes to 2 hours (not including the wait in Sector 4) depending upon how easy it was to find turtles performing the four processes that were open for public viewing (laying eggs, covering the eggs with sand, camouflaging the eggs, and going back out to sea). We weren’t allowed to watch turtles coming in from sea because this could frighten them off.

Tortuguero National Park- Part II (Being There)

This is a view to the left right after disembarking from the boat along the main/only path through Tortuguero village.

We went to Tortuguero because green sea turtles are currently nesting there, but though the turtles were nifty, they were not the highlight of the trip, at least for me. Rather, I was completely fascinated by the backwards (or perhaps sideways) culture in this place.

Basically, I couldn’t imagine living in a place like Tortuguero or for that matter, any of the places along the river leading to Tortuguero. The population was so sparse and the manner of living so simple. It was hard for me to imagine entertaining myself there. I mean, it was entertaining to me to go there and look at the place, but living there would be challenging just because of its simplicity.

Many of the residents didn’t even bother wearing shoes. There are no cars in Tortuguero though people do ride bicycles sometimes. It’s not far from one end of the community to the other. We probably walked the entire town twenty times during the 24 hours that we were there. But the culture of the place is different enough that I could probably never be able to completely understand it, even after a lifetime in Tortuguero. There were perhaps 30 books in the whole place and most of them were wrapped in plastic for the tourists. This is a place that got its first electric generator in 1982. Television is sparse and still relatively new here (though everyone had a cell phone and there was a very modern and well-lit “ICE” cell phone dealer building in the middle of town).

This photo captures the feel of the river boat to Tortuguero and back pretty well, I think. The boat trip takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes from Tortuguero to La Pavona/Rio Suerte.

On the river trip to this place, I found it hard to believe that we would end up at a tourist destination. I kept thinking that the big palm fronds and gigantic trees were fake (like I was on a ride at Disneyland). How odd, I thought, that I should think this place looks like a Jungle Adventure Ride (or something like that) at Disneyworld. Why would I think that the real place looks like a fake place. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? When at Disneyworld, should I be thinking, hey, this place looks like the rainforest in Costa Rica. Instead, sitting on the boat ride through the middle of the jungle, I felt like I was at Disneyworld, riding on a boat on tracks that would end with a big waterfall drop-off at the end where everyone would put their arms up in the air and scream and laugh.

I live in a Disneyworld type of culture where almost everything isn’t real. But Tortuguero is a place where practically nothing is “fake”. I mean, there are little tourists shops with shot glasses and fake crap just like any tourist destination, but the people don’t wear shoes and all of them leave their doors ajar when they go out at night. I only saw one person in a house watching TV on the Saturday night when we were there. Everyone else was sitting outside on benches or the ground. A group of young kids were playing monopoly on a small patch of cement outside of a house. A couple sat together on a bench on their porch looking sadly off into the distance. A little boy played with his puppy on a patch of grass (his sister angrily kicked the puppy later when we walked by a second time). Two women sat watching their kids playing in a very sad and destitute-looking playground on a bare patch of ground near the sidewalk. Boats came up to the shore and left the shore. Tourists flocked to the disco-bar building sided with cardboard that had been painted purple.

The fake stuff in Tortuguero looked garish and unreal. But at home, the fake stuff fits right in. In fact, it’s hard to distinguish what’s fake from

This scary-looking logging machinery is located adjacent to the children’s dilapidated playground in Tortuguero village.

what’s real. Disco lights in a bar that’s made of four rotting wooden posts and cardboard looks odd to me. I can easily see that the disco lights in this flimsy space don’t really “belong”.  But seeing disco lights in a cardboard building makes me wonder if disco lights are ever necessary. I know this is a rhetorical thought, but it’s a thought that I wouldn’t have at home where disco lights do belong. At home, I might complain about not having disco lights if disco lights were warranted. (Boy, they really need better lighting in here…) It seems silly to see people who live on stilted homes with thatched roves fiddling endlessly with their cell phones in the park. Shouldn’t they be playing cards or perhaps using a mortar and pestle to make corn tortillas over a log fire? Do the cell phones and disco lights make things better in this place? Or could people make do with a conch horn and candles and be just as happy?

What I’m really asking, I think, is, couldn’t I be happy with just a conch horn and candles? Anyway, simplicity is hard to find. I mean, it’s a complicated journey one must undertake to arrive at a destination where others live simply. And I believe it is an even more complicated journey to arrive at a place (emotionally and mentally) where I, myself could live simply. The chance to observe people on the brink of simplicity is what makes Tortuguero such an excellent destination, in my opinion.

And the turtles are nice too.