Carara

When we originally planned to visit Costa Rica in March of 2020, we decided to make it a five-day, four-night affair. That trip had us landing in San Jose on day one; traveling to Tortuguero National Park on day two; coming back to San Jose on day four; and going home on day five. Since it took us two and a half years after that time to finally make it to the land of Pura Vida, we decided to reward ourselves with an extra day. I know...we are absolutely wild and crazy sometimes with our vacations.

Finding something to do for a day in Costa Rica seemed like a simple proposition. When we started planning that extra day, maybe it wasn't so simple. You know how much stuff there is to do in Costa Rica? Plenty. And that's way understating the situation and all of it seems to be absolutely incredible. We looked pretty much everywhere in the country and any of it probably would have been a great extra day to the trip. 

But there were issues with some of our ideas. Arenal? Already been to volcanoes elsewhere. Braulio Carillo? Looking for something other than just birds. Manuel Antonio? Way too far. Monteverde? Also too far. Not way too far but too far, especially considering we just came back from Tortuguero. Stay in San Jose? Not exciting enough. Sure, we needed something close to San Jose but also clearly different than Tortuguero.

After a lot of looking (and I do mean a LOT), we settled on Carara National Park, an area of primary and second growth rainforest about 30 miles west and south of San Jose towards the Pacific Ocean that was established as a national park in the late 1970s. There are pockets of Costa Rica with just unbelievable biodiversity and Carara is certainly one of those. It's a relatively small place (it's about 1/6th the size of Tortuguero National Park) but holds over 400 different species of birds, including its star resident, the scarlet macaw. And truthfully, we really, really wanted to see some scarlet macaws.

The big scarlet macaw in the cover photo of this post doesn't count. We wanted the real thing.

Welcome to the jungle. The Carara National Park rainforest.

In addition to its potential as a major birding destination, Carara National Park is bordered on the north side by the Tarcoles River, a body of water that runs from the capital city of San Jose all the way to the Pacific. Around Carara, the Tarcoles is notable as the home of the greatest collection of crocodiles in Costa Rica. We figured a walk in the rainforest followed by a trip down the Tarcoles to spot some crocs seemed like a pretty good day out.

Close to San Jose? More than birds? Walking and getting on a boat? Costa Rican lunch after the tour? Check. Check. Check. And check. Carara was the place.

We sometimes have some crazy expectations for our days on vacation, especially when it comes to wildlife. I know, I know...we should know better. But surprisingly (and admittedly I'd read ahead about Carara and knew there was a possibility of the toucan sighting that had to this point eluded me on this trip), we did actually keep our sights within the range of reasonable possibility on this trip. I thought I'd be OK with scarlet macaws and some crocodiles. It seemed like a rational and perfectly attainable expectation.

Golden orb spider (top) and some sort of millipede (bottom). Carara National Park.

I know I have said this before but I'll say it again. Never, ever, ever expect nature to be predictable or behave the way you expect. Dying to see a specific type of bird or reptile or animal in a particular place? Keep your expectations very, very low. Wild creatures are not here for your amusement. They are living their lives likely in constant peril from some sorts of danger every day. If we expected to see crocodiles or macaws, there was absolutely no guarantee of success here.

We got to Carara at about 8:30 in the morning. Maybe a touch before that time. Our boat trip on the Tarcoles was a 10:30 departure or something like that. That meant (complicated math here, I know...) that we had two hours to see what we had to see in Carara and make it to the river.

Now 8:30 may seem early, particularly because it's a two hour drive from San Jose, but by 8:30, the odds are most species of birds are probably already inactive. The best time to see birds, whether it's at home where we live or anywhere else in the world, is first thing in the morning. Like sunrise. Or maybe even a bit before. Our 8:30 arrival time was late. For birds. We hoped it wouldn't be too late.

Poison dart frog (different than the ones we saw in Tortuguero) and leaf cutter ants (difficult to see, I realize).

Let me say this: the life we saw in Carara was just incredible. Whether it was the vines wrapped around trees climbing to the forest canopy or spiders or poison dart frogs, there was something to look at everywhere. We were right there in the middle of a jungle with living things all around us. 

Many of these things that made up the life were really pretty small or really, really massive. Insects. Amphibians. Arachnids. Giant trees with enormous leaves to suck up every bit of sun (read: life) that can penetrate down to the floor of the forest. There wasn't a lot in between these two extremes. And honestly, we were sort of looking for the in between.

Although there was certainly a lot of joy in at least one of the tiniest forest residents.

I wrote in my Tortuguero post that I didn't come to Costa Rica with a species wish list, but if I had, leaf cutter ants would surely have been on this list. And they were everywhere in Carara, walking down trees or across the path we were walking with pieces of leaf representing many times the body weight of the ant itself on their backs. We had seen a leaf cutter ant nest in Tortuguero and witnessed a troop of ants transporting leaf fragments on our night excursion to see turtles, but this was the first time we managed to stop and watch worker ants obediently transport leaves back to the queen under the watchful eyes of massive soldier ants. I feel really fortunate that we got to see this. I'm sure it's common in Costa Rica but not so much for me in everyday life.

But about 90 minutes into our visit to Carara National Park, the lack of birdlife was getting to be a little concerning.

So sure, there were clearly birds in Carara. We heard them everywhere, including those scarlet macaws. But after an hour and a half of walking and with my clothes now soaked from sweat (I sweat heavily in hot, humid environments, what can I say?), the best bird looks we had were a single cinnamon becard (above, top) and three buff-rumped warblers (above, bottom). I love birds and I'd never seen either of these things before, but we did not come to Carara to see little brown or brown-and-yellow birds, even if the warblers were perpetually engaged in some butt-shaking mating dance with their buff-colored rumps.

If there was anything to exacerbate this concern (and there was, by the way) it was the enthusiasm coming from our naturalist guide, Rigo, about what we had seen so far. I was a bit concerned that he'd be OK settling for the looks at the small birds we had in the Park before moving onto the river. Rigo, to his credit, was enthusiastic about seeing pretty much everything.

And that's when it happened.

If my memory is correct, I believe we were looking at some monkeys in the canopy which we hoped were something other than spider monkeys (we'd already seen plenty of these...) when we looked up into the trees in front of us and spotted a pair of scarlet macaws. This is what we came to see. Forget whatever else was around, these two birds became our sole focus. 

I used the word "we" a couple of sentences ago but it was really my eagle-eyed wife who has a knack for spotting wildlife who came through again in Carara.

Yes, these two photographs are incredibly similar. And yes, they are both washed out with the light shining through the leaves of the trees. Neither is the best bird photograph I have ever taken in my life. But this is why we came to Carara. We had actually seen two scarlet macaws earlier in the day at a stop near a bridge where people typically watch for crocodiles. But this sighting far exceeded the quality and duration of that one earlier in the day.

It is pretty astonishing to me that there can be any bird out there with the outrageous colored plumage that these macaws sport. We saw great green macaws in Tortuguero earlier in the week and those birds are spectacular but they also blend in with the almond trees they feed in. Not so with the scarlet macaws. They are absolutely so brilliantly colored. It's like someone has just used the brightest colored paints to invent a species of large parrot without any regard for species survival or anything like that. There's no camouflage here. They are absolutely amazing creatures. Carara was no longer any sort of candidate for being a disappointment as soon as we saw this pair. I was good with just the two. They made our day trip worth it, no matter what we might see or not see on the Tarcoles.

We did make it to our crocodile-focused boat ride on time by the way. Well, maybe a couple of minutes late. They waited, since we were three of the five total booked on the tour that day.

I have been on many wildlife tours in my life, particularly over the last nine or so years, and I have just one way to start the summary of our boat ride that day. I can't think of too many tours that were better than the couple of hours or maybe a bit less that we spent on the Tarcoles River. In fact, for its length, it may be one of the best two or three ever. I know, that's high praise, but it was well deserved.

Three things about this tour (Jungle Crocodile Safari was the company, if you must know right now). First, the variety of wildlife we saw was fantastic. Second, the guide who was with us, Hansel, was awesome; that dude knew everything that was out there and he engaged in what I thought was absolutely the right detail without dumbing things down. Third, they gave us each a bird and reptile spotting brochure to help us identify what we saw. For years, we have been carrying with us on trips a series of laminated wildlife spotting pamphlets and they have been so useful. Well done, here.

This brochure, by the way, has 58 different kinds of birds and three reptiles on it (Hansel seemed to know them all by heart) and most of the bird species depicted are super colorful and distinctive. I mean just the kind of things we can't see at home easily the way you can see in Costa Rica. All the species except the last that is, the clay colored thrush, which is literally just a small, all-muddy brown bird. It's also the national bird of Costa Rica. Yep, with scarlet macaws and toucans and all sorts of herons to pick from, Costa Rica chose the clay colored thrush. Apparently, it occurs everywhere in the country, and other birds do not.

The Tarcoles river was populated with a lot of crocodiles. There was absolutely no doubt you will see crocs on this tour if our couple of hours was any sort of typical excursion. You will also see some massive examples of these predators and can get super up close. They are the apex predator on the river and they (at least in adult form) are not really concerned by the presence of a boat full of humans. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about the crocs. They are amazing, but not super exciting. All they are doing is lying there.

Unfortunately, the Tarcoles River was also populated with a lot of trash (it will show up randomly in some of the pictures below). The story here is that for a while, the River was seen as some residents of San Jose as an easy way to get trash transported from their city to the Pacific Ocean. How this is any sort of logic that makes sense is beyond me. I mean, I can't imagine anyone thinking that trash belongs in the Ocean rather than a city. But that's what happened. Over the years or decades, there has been a ton of human-generated garbage in and around the environment that our boat took us that afternoon.

It sounded like the situation we witnessed was actually a vast improvement over years past. The trash was noticeable to us, but not everywhere we looked necessarily. Apparently, there has been and is an ongoing effort to clean up the River and get it back to being safe and habitable for the wildlife, although the need for this effort to continue suggests that there is still some pollution going on, even now. When will we ever learn?

So what was so great about the Jungle Crocodile Safari if it wasn't the crocodiles? Come on, you know the answer already and yes, I know I'm fixated a bit (or a lot) here but it was unquestionably the birds. 

Tarcoles birds (top to bottom): snowy egret, brown pelicans and black-necked stilt.

The variety and quantity of birdlife along the banks of the Tarcoles was amazing. I'm speculating a bit here when I write this but the spot where we were was probably close enough to the Pacific to draw in ocean-going birds while still clearly being a river to provide habitat for those species more comfortable in the mangrove roots inland.

Because of this, we got to see the only pelicans of the trip and the only magnificent frigatebirds close up that we saw in Costa Rica (we did see frigatebirds in the distance near Tortuguero). There were flocks of both of these birds just perched in the trees by the sides of the River.

Magnificent frigatebirds (top two) and black hawk (bottom), Tarcoles River.

We also managed sightings of egrets, spoonbills and tons and tons of herons. More types of herons than we had seen previously in the week for sure, including the night-hunting black-crested and yellow-crested night herons. I had never seen either of these last species anywhere before (although we had heard their calls when turtle-watching on the beach just a couple of days prior), nor had I seen the boat-billed herons we found by the side of the Tarcoles.

There is an inevitable thrill in finding a new species. All three types of herons we found for the first time this day were just that, as were the superior looks we got at some of the little blue herons this day. We'd seen some little blue herons along the side of the Rio Suerte on our way to Tortuguero, but we didn't really stop long enough to look much. In all, we saw five different species of heron this day one after the other. All five are shown in the photographs below: black-crested night heron, little blue heron, boat-billed heron, tiger heron and yellow-crested night heron.

We also saw a new predator: the black hawk. And not just one. If I'm remembering right we saw three of these birds. The best look we got is above, standing on one leg while the other is tucked against its body (apparently it saves energy to do this). It's always special to find birds of prey because (and I guess vultures are not applicable to this logic) there are so few of them around.

One last comment about the birds: just check out the eyes on the two night herons, especially the yellow-crested one in the bottom pic.

We spent the last part of this tour getting close to some crocodiles. Like maybe 10 feet away or something like that. The size of these big males is just immense and the jaws look incredibly powerful (the crocodiles with their mouths open in the pictures above are not males). I also appreciated the complete lack of other boat traffic on the River that day. It allowed us to linger where we wanted and how we wanted. I know I wouldn't want to meet one of these crocs out of the safety of our boat.

On our first day in Costa Rica, we were told by the guy driving us from the airport to our hotel in San Jose that it starts raining in Costa Rica at about noon or 1 in the afternoon on pretty much a daily basis. This is exactly what we had encountered in San Jose like clockwork. I took my last picture of a crocodile along the Tarcoles (it's below) at seven minutes before noon. By the time we got to our lunch place, it was probably a bit before 12:30. A few minutes later the heavens opened. Like clockwork, I'm telling you. Going to Costa Rica in the rainy season? Do what you got to do before lunch.

That's it for Costa Rica for this year. I could definitely go back, if not to Costa Rica then to central America in general. Panama, Belize and Guatemala definitely await.

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How We Did It

With no car and no plans to drive ourselves around a place like Costa Rica, we found a tour operator to take us to Carara National Park and along the Tarcoles River. We found Oropopo Experience by doing some searching on Viator and then reaching out directly to Oropopo to inquire about their specific tours. While we didn't know it at the time, they are a company founded by and led by naturalists, which was a great bonus when looking for animals in the jungle. I'd definitely consider these guys for future trips in Costa Rica. Everything went about as smoothly as it could. The stop for coconuts and fruit along the way was a great bonus. We paid $100 each for this tour for three of us. It was not necessarily a private tour but it ended up being just that.

The Tarcoles River portion of our tour was provided by Jungle Crocodile Safari. I was serious when I wrote this is one of the best tours I have ever been on. Money definitely well spent for the 90 minutes or so along the River. You will see so much. Hopefully that comes through loud and clear when looking through the pictures on this post. They actually have two more tours they offer other than the one we took. Both are 3 hours long and focus on bird spotting and photography. I'm not sure how what we took wasn't about birds and photographs but I'd certainly give these guys another shot for double the time. The cost of our boat ride was included in the $100 we paid Oropopo but it looks like as of this writing that the cost of the boat trip we went on is $35. Bargain!!!

One last Costa Rica sentence before signing off for this trip: tip your guides. It's the best way to flow your money right down to the people doing the real work in a tourist-based economy. Pura vida!

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Strange Fruit

In case it wasn't absolutely crystal clear from this blog I've been writing for over nine years now, I love traveling. I love getting away from work and everyday life and going somewhere that can change my perspective on the world. It could be to somewhere I've already fallen in love with or it could be somewhere totally brand new, although admittedly, the thrill of discovery on the totally brand new types of trips exceeds that of places I've already been to. I just can't wait to take in something new and absorb everything I can about a new country or city or continent. It's even better when I leave wanting to go back. And all of that definitely applied to Costa Rica.

I had a pretty good inkling I'd like Costa Rica a lot. It was mostly a wildlife trip to the middle of nowhere and I always relish those kinds of journeys. Sure, there was a bit of city living mixed in through our three nights in the capital of San Jose but our almost week away was mostly a chance to spend a lot of time in the jungle spotting creatures. And what could be disappointing about all that?

As it turned out...nothing. It was as awesome as I anticipated.

I try to temper my expectations when visiting a new country, but before we got on a plane and headed south through Miami to Costa Rica, I had one expectation of this trip that I felt pretty sure would come through for me, and that was that I'd end up somehow, somewhere with some incredible fruit.

I'm serious. One of the things I was super excited about on this trip was the opportunity to get some just amazing tasting fruit. I don't eat much fruit at home at all. Maybe there's a melon or two each year and I'll dabble in a few (and I really do mean a few) blueberries in the summer now and then. But take me to pretty much any place between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and I'm looking for some fruit to eat. This is some serious business. 

Lychees, anyone? A cheap and delicious snack after breakfast (trust me!).

There are typically two parts to my fruit quests in the tropics. There's very definitely the opportunity to try something I've never tasted or seen or even heard of and we for sure got some of that in Costa Rica. But I really long for fruit that I love from past trips and hope that I'll get something as good this time around. 

The attraction to the first part here is doing something different. There are an astonishing variety of fruits that people eat in this world. I'm pretty confident that if I searched in the right places in Nothern Virginia where I live that I could find some of these same fruits I find in South America, Africa or Central America. But when we travel, they are just there. We don't have to look for them; we just stumble upon them.

It's stopping at a roadside restaurant for breakfast on the way to Tortuguero National Park and finding lychees for sale. Or taking a pitstop on the way to Carara National Park at what has to be one of the most amazing fruit stalls in the world by the side of the road and asking what the funny looking purple balls with the cartoonish green stems and leaves are. Or being handed a coconut with a hole drilled in the top along with a straw (paper straw, of course, in Costa Rica) to drink the water inside.

Bananas growing in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica.

Chilled coconut water in the morning is very refreshing, by the way, and snacking on six or eight lychees to chase down a Costa Rican breakfast of gallo pinto with a fried egg, plantains, grilled salty farmers cheese and a healthy dose of salsa Lizano is a great way to start your morning. But those purple things? Not so good. They are called mangosteens and neither look nor taste either like mangos or langoustines (I mean why would they taste like langoustines?). 

After asking what they were, I was handed a fruit split in half with white citrus-looking segments and was asked to pluck a segment out and taste it. I'd say a little bitter but not so objectionable. Definitely juicy. But the texture part was all wrong. First of all, there's a massive seed in the center of the segment and it seemed impossible to get the flesh separated easily from the seed itself. I ended up spitting it out after draining the juice. Maybe it was first time jitters or something. Clearly, I didn't know what I was doing. But I'll take lychees and chilled coconuts any day over mangosteens, at least until someone teaches me how to eat them properly.

I'd never tried any of those three things before. It's important to spread your wings a little when you travel. You never know what you'll fall in love with. Also, lychees are cheap in Costa Rica: 1,000 Colones per kilogram; that's like 73 cents per pound. Who sells fruit at a profit for 73 cents per pound?

Mangosteens (top) and pejibaye (or peach palm) (bottom). No raw pejibaye on this trip but I did have it in a tamale.

So speaking of spreading your wings, it's doing exactly that which has made me a tropical fruit lover. 

I love pineapple. For as long as I can remember, it's always been my number one fruit without a doubt and it is without peer in the tropics. So juicy, sweet and acidic. Absolutely amazing! Pineapple never disappoints on these types of trips. But that's not what I crave on these vacations. 

That fruit would be papaya.

I am pretty sure it was Ecuador, but it may have been Zimbabwe or Botswana, that turned me on to papaya. I have to tell you that when it's right, it's the most delicious stuff in the world. It is also very, very difficult to explain why because it clearly doesn't have the same intense flavor as something like pineapple. But here goes anyway.

When it's right and perfectly ripe, papaya is a gorgeous, slightly muted orange color and you can slice through it with the lightest cut from the dullest knife. It's soft and silky smooth. It cuts so gorgeously. When you pop a piece in your mouth, the texture is almost flan-like; creamy and soft which almost completely dissolves with delicate pressure between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The taste is not intense and it's not that sweet but it's refreshing and indulgent in absolutely the subtlest way. I love it. This is what I crave when I head to the tropics. Forget all the other fruits (well...maybe not pineapple). Papaya (or pawpaw in Africa) is IT.

We didn't have to work hard to find papaya in Costa Rica. They had it for breakfast or lunch at our hotels in both Tortuguero National Park and downtown San Jose. But papaya is not always as perfect as I have described above and certainly that was the case at Tortuguero. It took us getting back to San Jose to find the pawpaw that I love and we found it on the breakfast buffet at the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, which, as it turns out, is a Hilton property.

Now, I realize writing about a piece of fruit on a Hilton breakfast buffet seems completely un-romantic and not what global travel discovery is all about. And I wouldn't debate that at all. But the Hilton had the most perfect papaya, I'm telling you. Fruit quest over. Drop the mic. This was the place on this trip that fulfilled my papaya desire.

The best part about the Hilton's papaya was we stayed two nights, so after a few pieces of gorgeousness on day one, I may have gotten a little extra the next morning. Hey, when else am I going to get fruit this delicious? And...it's a buffet. I can get as much as I care to eat. 

I can't say for sure when the next time I'm going to be in the tropics, but you know when I am that I'm going to be looking for some pawpaw on the breakfast table. So good.

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How We Did It

I have found that locating great tasting fruit in the tropics isn't difficult at all and that the breakfast buffets at our hotels has been one of the most reliable sources of said great tasting fruit. Costa Rica was no exception to this rule.

If you really want some amazing tasting papaya at the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, you might need to be prepared to pay for it. The breakfast buffet there is a whopping 18,000 or so Colones, which translates to about $30. That's per person. That's a lot for breakfast in a country where the average desayuno can be had for a lot less than that pretty much everywhere. I should point out that breakfast is free for Hilton Honors Gold and Diamond members when you stay at the hotel. We do have such status, so that delicious papaya (along with everything else in their amazing spread) was completely free. The pineapple was pretty amazing too.  

The rest of our fruit experience in Costa Rica was pretty much completely accidental. We didn't plan to find lychees on the way to Tortuguero or a giant fruit stand on the way to Carara. Just know that if you are heading to those places, you might be tempted to stop for some fruit on the way. I don't think you can miss the fruit stand near Carara and there seemed to be plenty of carts with lychees on the way to Tortuguero. 

And if you don't like papaya or lychees or mangosteens, try something new. You never know what you will find and fall in love with.

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Night Boat

We have spent a ton of time in our travels this year looking for wildlife. What can I say? It's a huge passion, and we have really made it a priority this year in our trips both within the United States and abroad as we've started to feel confident traveling internationally again. We hoped for (and found) roadrunners in Joshua Tree National Park in March; renewed our love of bison in South Dakota in May; spent a few days chasing down seabirds in Scotland in late June and early July; and really amped up things this month by heading to Costa Rica for a trip focused almost exclusively on wildlife.

Most all of our time searching for mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects and everything else we could find on those trips had one thing in common: we did it during the daylight hours. I mean it makes sense, right? It's a lot more difficult to find creatures at night than it is when the sun is out. But for many places in this world, there are a whole group of species that are active ONLY when it is nighttime. That is especially true of a place like Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica. So, when we were offered the opportunity to take a night boat safari, well, how could we refuse?

If it seems a little silly taking a boat into the jungle at night armed with a couple of spotlights to try to see what we could find, you might be right. After all, there are deadly poisonous snakes in the Costa Rican jungle. But we did it anyway. And we did actually find a lot, although I'm not entirely convinced that everything we found could only be found after sundown. But life and travel are about different experiences, so we were not really going to say no to the opportunity.

Agami heron, Tortuguero National Park.

I have found that the success of a tour like this, like most other searches for wildlife during any time of the day, is directly related to the skill of your guide. Luckily for us on this night, we left the dock of Turtle Beach Lodge with Don Fernando, the same guide who escorted us on all the other walks and boat rides from the Lodge during our two days on property. And it did not take Don Fernando long to spot something. 

I have to say that we were on this boat trip for about 90 minutes intently gazing into the dark as illuminated by the spotlights that both Don Fernando and our pilot were waving into the jungle and honestly, I have no idea how they found anything. The narrative we were fed here was that the spotlights would show eyes reflecting in the light against the dark of the night. I never saw any, but somehow they did. If that's what they were doing, it worked. But I never saw what they were telling us to look for. Experience counts, I guess.

Our finds started small. A butterfly. A frog in the roots of a tree. Another frog, this time on a tree. A small-ish tarantula. A rat. And in all these cases (except for the rat), the creatures pretty much froze. I suspect that they are used to moving under cover of night so that they could be invisible to predators. Having a white spotlight shone on them pretty much ruins that. 

So how were these encounters? I mean I guess frogs are cool-ish, although the frog in the tree was not one of the red-eyed tree frogs we had hoped to see in Costa Rica. It was just a regular frog. In a tree. The tarantula was cool. I've never seen one of those before in the wild but it did, in fact, look smaller than I expected. The most interesting sighting was honestly the butterfly, who seemed camped out for the night on a branch next to a spider in her web. I'd been trying to take pictures of butterflies in the daytime at Turtle Beach Lodge and they wouldn't sit still. Finally got one at night.

I didn't care about the rat, by the way. I can see rats in Washington, D.C. or New York. Not taking a picture of a rat in the jungle.

Frog no. 1 (top) and small-ish tarantula (bottom).

One of the premises of this excursion was that it would give us an opportunity to see caimans, small crocodiles that are relatively inactive during the day, but which hunt at night. And we did see caimans. Plenty of them. Well, plenty considering the amount of light available to us. But caimans hunt fish, which are of course active below the surface of the water. So while we did see caimans, we didn't see them hunting. A little disappointing there. I think there were better ways to hype up this trip.

And ironically, we saw more caimans and got better looks at caimans in the daytime each of the two days after our night boat tour. We saw one completely out of the water sunning itself on the canal bank and saw a second hanging out in the Lodge's dock area feet from the piers that the boats were tied up to.

Frog no. 2 (top; the one in the tree) and a caiman (bottom).

The remainder of our night tour was devoted to a lot of bird spotting. Maybe not exclusively chronologically, but at some point, it seemed like we ended up spotting more birds than anything else. We actually saw quite a lot of birds on the night boat ride and I swear that we were more disturbing these creatures than anything else. Some, I believe, were actually asleep until we shone a bright spotlight right into their faces. One anhinga seemed to be shuffling away from the light so it could get back to resting in piece. And it wasn't the only one. There was a ringed kingfisher that seemed none too pleased to be bothered by us also.

However, and in direct contradiction to what I wrote earlier about not being convinced we saw birds that we couldn't have very well have seen during the day, we did actually see some bird species that we only saw on this ride. We saw a lot of herons of every variety in Costa Rica, but the only agami heron we saw was roaming around the swamp in the dead of night (we actually saw two). Same for a grey-necked wood rail; daytime sightings were zero but we found one after dark on the boat ride. We also saw a green ibis which we may not have seen at any other time on our trip, although we did zoom by some similarly colored ibises on an excursion the next morning. Bird-wise, we definitely added to our species list by opting for an hour and a half in the dark in the mangroves.

Green ibis (top). Grey-necked wood rail (bottom). I know, the colors don't show.

It is not easy for someone as amateur as I am with a camera to take good photographs at night. Some of the pictures on this post are blurry (sorry...really no excuse there) and some are washed out with color. It's not all my fault. The color differential across some of the images are caused by the quality of the lighting. A spotlight definitely does not provide the best uniform light quality, especially when being directed into roots and trees. Shadows are unavoidable. I am convinced the first creature we came to yielded the best picture. I think the butterfly resting in the dark next to a spider's web (complete with spider!) is the keeper of our night trip into the jungle.

I am a firm believer in taking every opportunity to do something unique or new when I'm traveling, even if it seems to offer little real value like going wildlife spotting at night. Sometimes, you might just get surprised, especially if the alternative is grabbing a beer at the bar and looking at the iPad while doing it. I thought it might have been a bit of a long shot that this tour would pay off big time, but it did pay off small time in some big ways, even if it's only for the butterfly picture below.

Sometimes, you have to try everything you can when you are away from home. You never know what you might find. And I'd do it again.

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How We Did It

This one is not complicated. Our hotel, Turtle Beach Lodge, offered an optional night boat tour into the jungle and we took them up on it. There was an additional charge (it was less than $40 if I'm remembering right) but I'm not sure why I would pass up something like this. I mean when else am I going to get the opportunity to go on a boat ride at night in Costa Rica with an expert wildlife spotting guide?

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Welcome To The Jungle

I swear one day I'll stop writing about trips that were cancelled by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Today is not that day.

In March 2020, we were supposed to take our first trip to Costa Rica. Our plan was to journey to Tortuguero National Park on the Caribbean coast for a couple of nights and see as many toucans and sloths as we could, and maybe, if we got lucky, watch a turtle or two laying eggs or maybe a brood of new baby turtles hatching and making it the sea. Nine days before we were scheduled to depart for that trip, I started working at home so I wouldn't get sick with COVID. I figured it would be a couple of weeks long thing. Then the whole world of travel stopped. No Costa Rica in 2020.

We briefly flirted with going to Costa Rica last October. But the requirement to test negative for COVID before coming back to the United States scared us a bit and we decided to head to Portugal instead based on their pretty much world-high COVID vaccination rate. No Costa Rica in 2021 either. But the third time, as it turned out, was the charm. We finally made it this year.

Rather than get fancy with a different itinerary or second guess ourselves or something like that, we decided to pretty much match our original 2020 itinerary but with an additional day added on as some sort of emotional compensation for finally making it two and a half years after we originally intended. Now, sure, weather conditions in Costa Rica in October are not the same as weather conditions in March, but it seemed to us that temperature and rainfall and turtle activity seemed to be close enough on the Caribbean coast between those two months. Tortuguero was still the destination. We were all in!

Yes, we saw lots of monkeys in Costa Rica.

Tortuguero National Park is basically a big mangrove swamp. We'd been to mangrove swamps before, probably most notably in Florida's Everglades National Park, so we knew we'd be looking up into trees and at roots along the edges of water for a lot of reptiles, amphibians and birds, rather than the mammals that make destinations like sub-Saharan Africa so popular. That was fine with me. If there's one love I've found over the last few years traveling and staying at home for months at a time during a global pandemic, it's birdwatching. And I was fairly positive I'd see some new species of birds that I'd never seen before in Tortuguero.

And, yes, I do realize the two pictures that have appeared on this post to this point are both pictures of mammals. So, we did actually see mammals.

Tortuguero covers a pretty big area. Not Everglades big (it's about 1/6 the size of the Everglades) but certainly way big enough to keep us plenty busy for about two days over its approximately 77,000 acres of land (that's a bit more than five times the area of Manhattan for those of us who sometimes measure things in terms of New York City distances or sizes). We would definitely not run out of territory to explore in the time we were there, either on land or by boat (because we did end up spending time exploring on foot and on water). 

Our journey to the Park started out in a van in Costa Rica's capital city of San Jose but it certainly wouldn't end up in that vehicle because quite simply, you can't drive to Tortuguero. It's completely cut off from the rest of Costa Rica by water. You can only get there by boat or by plane. So ultimately, we'd have to leave the van and board a long, flat-bottomed boat and travel the rivers and canals around and within the Park over the last hour or so to arrive at Turtle Beach Lodge, our choice of lodging for the next two nights.

Boat ride: Rio Colorado and the glass-like Caño Palma.

Our jungle experience in Tortuguero really started the moment we stepped off the beach we had been driven to and onto the boat that would take us deep into the Park. Our boat ride (and it would certainly not be the last boat ride of the trip) would take us over and through the muddy and very shallow Rio Suerte to the equally muddy but maybe not so shallow (in most parts) Rio Colorado before taking a left onto the deep and deep black Caño Palma. Our trip down the Rio Suerte was an effort in switching from side to side of the river to avoid the shallows and we saw the effects of not doing that when we passed a similar boat to ours on the Colorado that had run aground and was being pushed by two of the boat's occupants who were not even waist deep in the water.

The highlight of our trip to Turtle Beach Lodge, though, came once we got off the main river and onto the canals. The water is so still on the Caño Palma and the color of the water is so black that it perfectly reflects whatever is above the water onto the surface of the canal. Intuitively, you know that the water is the thoroughfare and image on its surface is just a reflection, but when you are moving along the top of the water it feels like you are floating through a corridor where the top and bottom are identical images of each other. And when the engine starts cranking and the speed builds, it's like traveling through a kaleidoscope. It's a little freaky and impossible to represent in photographs, but it's a phenomenon uniquely created by the color and stillness of the water itself. 

Eventually, we reached our lodging. Welcome to Turtle Beach Lodge.

Iguana near the entrance to Turtle Beach Lodge.

Before we get to what we saw (and there was a lot), let me say that I know we got super lucky with our choice of properties in Tortuguero and when we visited. Sure, Turtle Beach Lodge was comfortable and safe and clean and the staff was amazing (as was the wildlife). And yes, it was also the off-season along the Caribbean coast which may have kept occupancy a bit lower at the Lodge. But the effects of the global pandemic are still being felt in parts of Costa Rica, so in a resort that can comfortably hold 120 guests, we found ourselves among ten total.

That situation gave us an un-natural amount of space and freedom on the property and got us a level of attention that we normally, I am sure, shouldn't expect. It added a ton to our experience and while I feel for the owners in terms of lost revenue and the staff in terms of lost tips, I know we benefitted a lot here. There have been times when we have traveled to places when they have been emptier of humans than we have expected, and it always works out well for us.

Having said all that, the place keeps you busy and they provide you with excellent guides for all your experiences. Our agenda for our stay included time on the property, nature walks, boat safaris (if that's the right word) and a visit to the village of Tortuguero, which I expected would be a tourist trap but which turned out to offer one of the gems of our trip in terms of wildlife sightings. Our guide for all of that, Don Fernando, was as skilled as they come and he definitely elevated our experience so much. I know I've written a long time ago about the importance of a great guide, but every time it happens, I feel fortunate to be in the care of someone skilled. Don Fernando was one of the best we've had, right up there with our guides in Africa and the Galapagos on our other great wildlife trips abroad.

Caimans. Tortuguero National Park.

I didn't visit Tortuguero with a detailed list of what I wanted to see. Yes, we had toucans and sloths and turtles on a wish list of sorts but on a first visit to this part of the world, I figured I'd take it as it came, much like we did on our first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015. When I have done that in the past, I find you end up with some sort of signature wildlife experience that sticks with you from the place you've been, and Tortuguero yielded one of these on the very first day: spider monkeys.

I expected that we would see wildlife on the hotel property (I figured lots of birds) and I expected that we would see monkeys on this trip (there are three types of monkeys in Tortuguero: spider monkeys, howler monkeys and white-faced capuchins). I just didn't expect that we would get a clear look at any sort of primates at our hotel. I was wrong. Spider monkeys were everywhere.

I love watching all sorts of creatures in the wild. Take me any place where there is wildlife more complicated than squirrels, chipmunks and deer and I'm a happy guy. But there is a more distinct thrill in watching species with more complex social interactions. Elephants and lions fall into this category, but I knew we weren't seeing any of those on this trip. So do monkeys and apes. The opportunity to see a troop of spider monkeys interact on the very property where we slept was special.

We did, by the way, get some interaction with howler monkeys on this trip, but that interaction was pretty much limited to very loud calls from those primates at 4 o'clock in the morning. We struck out on capuchins entirely.

Viewing spider monkeys in Costa Rica involves a lot of looking up. And also, looking up is sometimes a really good thing. To paraphrase Don Fernando...it may seem like it's raining but it is not really raining. Stay alert, folks. Look up!

If you do spend time looking up at these monkeys, you will see what makes observing these creatures in the wild so rewarding. You will see playing, chasing, fighting (not serious fighting, just play fighting), eating (LOTS of eating), just general lounging around in trees and interactions between mothers and babies. Do not expect spider monkeys to drop to the ground. They are clearly more comfortable (from our very limited observations) in the safety of the trees. And I'm cool with that considering the time we had available to us to keep finding them in the trees.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching spider monkeys is how they use their tails. We have seen vervet monkeys (definitely my favorite monkey FWIW) and baboons and other kids of monkeys in Africa and have never seen the tail used as a fifth limb the way spider monkeys use their tails. They literally use these things to support their entire bodies while snacking on some leaves or just moving through the treetops. Sometimes, it's the small things about watching wildlife that make an impression.

There was a lot of snacking on leaves by the way, but in what seemed to us to be a very responsible way. There was no de-nuding of branches. Maybe leaves taste better when eaten from different spots but to me, it appeared these monkeys were smarter about resource usage than we humans. Probably no surprise there.

It also seemed like there were a lot of monkeys either pregnant or just full up on leaves. Not sure what the deal there was. I don't think we got a good picture of what was really the situation but there were some chunky monkeys in the trees at Turtle Beach Lodge for sure. 

In addition to the spider monkeys, there were a few other species at Tortuguero that we got to see in some detail that were on my radar along with others that were not really. We saw our first poison dart frogs (a variety sometimes called blue jeans frogs because of their blue legs) on our late morning nature walk in the jungle one day. We also managed to see a basilisk (sometimes known as a Jesus Christ lizard) run across the water as we cruised past its sunning location on our boat. I'd never seen either of those animals before and certainly had never seen a lizard run across water.

We also saw plenty of birds in our time on property at Turtle Beach Lodge; while skimming over the canals and rivers within the Park; and at Tortuguero village. I never would have expected to see birds of any note in our time in the village but we got a great look at a flock of great green macaws sitting in an almond tree feeding. Apparently, these birds only live in this one spot in the entirety of Costa Rica. Good thing we took the camera. Why I didn't expect to see birds in a place just because humans have set up a town in a spot is beyond me. My attitude didn't make much sense there at all.

I was also struck on this trip by how well creatures can be camouflaged in the wild. I'm all on board with natural selection and gene mutation throughout history bringing advantages to certain member of species who by virtue of their mutation have a greater chance of survival, but this idea hit home in Costa Rica. The great green macaws, for example, while noisy and very visible when they are flying, are next to invisible when they are eating almonds out of a tree. Their plumage is almost exactly the same color as the leaves of the tree. It took trying to take some closeup pictures of these birds for that fact to become obvious.

But the macaws were not the champions of camouflage on this trip. That title has to go to the two groups of long-nosed bats that we came across on our early morning boat ride on our second day in Tortuguero. 

These little grey bats are active at night and during the day they just hang out and sleep on a tree trunk by the edge of the water. Not buried deep in the jungle or in a cave or under a leaf or something. Right out in the open on the trunks of trees in the broad daylight. But here's the thing: they are pretty much impossible to see. They look like pieces of bark that are peeling off the tree all in a row. Our guide Don Fernando pointed them out to us from feet away (like two feet, not twenty feet) and I still couldn't see them. I blamed me not being able to see them from super close up on my sunglasses at first but even when I switched to my regular glasses I still couldn't wrap my head around that what I was looking at was an animal rather than a flake or two of bark.

If we hadn't been accompanied by Don Fernando, we would have missed these things entirely, which I guess is exactly their intent. I eventually understood what I was looking at by zooming in on the bumps on the tree trunk with our camera. Sure enough, they were not flakes of bark but eight or ten or however many there were just hanging out in a row on the tree. I am not going to claim I've seen all sorts of camouflaged creatures in my life but if there's anything out there better than these little bats (they are really all of like 3" long), I want to see those too.

The bats in the top picture are underneath the large trunk in the lower half of the picture.

But enough about all these wonderful random species, we came to see toucans and sloths and nesting turtles. Let's get to that.

So, the simplest species to address here is the sloths. We didn't see any in Tortuguero National Park because plain and simple they don't live there. We saw one in downtown San Jose and three on the way to Tortuguero but none in the Park itself. I guess those few were enough. There could be more trips to central America sometime in the future I guess.

Next up: nesting turtles. Yes, we saw some but no, there are no pictures because (1) we went turtle spotting at night by the light of the moon and (2) no cameras are allowed because any light, including the glow of an iPhone screen, is potentially distracting to the turtles.

I don't know quite how to capture our experience on the beach that night. We saw two adult female turtles looking to nest. We also saw some newly-hatched baby turtles making their way to the sea to get a chance at life. The babies hatching was undeniably thrilling. Watching those little turtles power their way over the sand to the water was a very uplifting experience. 

I suppose one of the first threats any hatchling will face is the prospect of predators on the beach en route to the waves. That was a non-issue on the beach that night (despite the calls of a yellow-crowned night heron in the distance) because there was a corridor of about 25 humans on either side of the turtles' path. Seeing the babies drop into the waves and disappear into the sea felt like a moment of triumph. In reality, they have just passed the first of countless threats to their lives that they are about to fight for. We were told the odds of survival were one in a thousand. I'd like to think that the little guy we saw make it to the water is still out there fighting but the math is certainly stacked against him or her.

Two kingfishers: ringed (top) and Amazon (bottom), both at Turtle Beach Lodge.

The attempts at the two turtles nesting was less uplifting. One failed to lay eggs at all. She roamed around the beach for a while trying to find a spot to nest before heading back to the water. There is a chance her failure to lay eggs that night was affected at least in part due to the 25 or so people milling around the beach, including the three of us. If that's true, I certainly don't feel good about playing a part in that failure. It was cool to see a massive adult green turtle enter the sea from the beach, but the circumstances of that act definitely dampened the excitement.

The other turtle we were tracking that night did nest and she did lay some eggs. We managed to see that up close before she aborted and abandoned the nest and decided to head back to the sea. But here's the thing about that: once a turtle starts laying eggs, she has to lay them all. So the fact that she decided to leave the nest and move to the water meant that she kept laying eggs while moving and left a trail of unprotected ping pong ball-sized eggs leading from the nest site to where she met the waves. Those eggs are dead on discovery. They would have surely been eaten by a raccoon or a bird or a coatimundi as soon as one of those animals found them. There's also a good chance that the rest of the nest could have been unearthed also, meaning all of the babies are dead. This is part of the reason why the odds of survival are so low and why a single female turtle might lay 600 or more eggs in a season. The memory of that trail of eggs is honestly heartbreaking to think about.

Here again, there is a reasonable chance that the mother abandoning the next was caused by us humans. Our guide actually moved aside the rear flipper of the turtle so we could watch the eggs drop into the nest, something we were told later he wasn't supposed to do and something we didn't really need to have done for us. Sure, we did move to the edge of the nest when we were told to do so because we wanted to see the egg-laying but if someone had told us there was a chance the turtle might prematurely leave the nest due to our presence, we would have been happy to have just stayed away.

Our night on the beach with the turtles was definitely a roller coaster of emotions ranging between hope for the future and just devastation about knowing we might have participated in causing hundreds of baby turtles to lose their chance at life before they had any chance at all. As uplifting as it was to see baby turtles reach the water (and I would love to see more of that), I definitely don't need to see mother turtles nesting ever again. I think I'll leave nature alone on that one.

Basilisk (top) and slaty-tailed trogon (bottom), Tortuguero National Park.

And then we have the toucans, which were my number one species to spot in Costa Rica. I was looking forward to multiple sightings of keel-billed and yellow-throated toucans on this trip. Unfortunately, after this vacation, toucans may end up being in the same category as flamingoes and penguins. Lots of hope, but ultimately elusive in the numbers I hoped for. In our two or so days in Tortuguero, we saw one yellow-throated toucan. And that was from a great distance.

Now, we did see a number of collared aricari, which are very, very close relatives of the toucans. We had two excellent sightings of these birds, one on our morning boat ride at the tops of some trees by the side of the water and one right at Turtle Beach Lodge. In both instances, we saw a number of these birds (they typically travel in flocks; we saw up to six at one time) for a good amount of time and got some great pictures. We saw them flying and feeding with the feeding being within feet of where we were standing on our hotel property. 

These are truly gorgeous birds and it was a complete thrill to see them for the first time at a pretty good distance in the jungle and then later so close to us on our property. I actually love the last of the three photos below of these birds better than all other pictures I took on this trip. But they are not true toucans. They are smaller and, for all the shades of red, yellow, black and brown on their bodies and beaks, less spectacularly colored than the keel-billed and yellow-throated toucans that I craved.

The last planned daytime activity in our stay at Turtle Beach Lodge was a couple of hours trip to the Tortuguero village (the same trip that got us our great green macaw sighting) and it got me the toucan encounter that I was seeking. As we made our way back gently along the Caño Palma in the late afternoon, we heard a bird calling ringing out through the jungle, a call that our guide Don Fernando immediately pegged as a yellow-throated toucan. We stopped the boat and listened. And looked.

We eventually did spot one toucan and it was for sure the exact species that Don Fernando had promised. It took us a while to locate him (I'm assuming it was a him based on his calling out across the treetops) but this was probably my favorite encounter of the entire trip despite its brevity and distance. I am sure it was because this was the creature I most wanted to see but sitting there on the boat on the water just listening to the sound of one bird calling out over and over in the silence of the jungle was just an incredibly intimate experience. It forced us to listen and look and take the whole thing in, just focused on one species by sound alone until we actually spied him.

You would think it would be fairly easy to spot a bird with a bright yellow throat, a red patch on its body and an enormous brown bill in a mostly green forest canopy but it is not. Green leaves and the shade and shadow thrown by those leaves and the branches they sprout from can disguise even the most colorful bird. And it did take us a while to spot the toucan that was cawing into the jungle. Below is the best evidence of our maybe quarter of an hour listening and looking for this bird. It is not the best photograph I took on this trip but it's the hardest earned and the one that gave me the most satisfaction. In the absolute last moment we could possibly have seen a toucan on this trip in Tortuguero, we did. 

I'll take it, but it leaves me wanting more. More toucans that is.

That picture may seem underwhelming. But I still love it. It would be better for you, I'm sure, if you could have sat on the water and listened and found the bird knowing that it is exactly what you wanted on this trip. I loved Costa Rica. After two and a half years it definitely paid off spectacularly and I'm convinced our decision to go to Tortuguero for our first Costa Rica trip was absolutely the right choice.

I am also confident that there will be future opportunities to find toucans in central America. Belize, Guatemala and Panama are all still on my list and a return trip to Costa Rica is not out of the question in the future. This trip was absolutely not just about finding toucans and the variety and quality of the wildlife sightings we got should be obvious over and above all my whining about not seeing tons of toucans from feet away. 

I loved Costa Rica. Mucho gusto! Pura vida!

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How We Did It

We booked our stay at Turtle Beach Lodge as an independent adventure through G Adventures, our favorite travel company which has taken us to Peru, Ecuador, Tanzania, Kenya and Portugal in the past. From there, Turtle Beach Lodge took care of everything. They picked us up in San Jose, got to us the Park, fed us and arranged all our trips (wildlife watching and otherwise) during our stay and took us back to San Jose. They were absolutely awesome from start to finish from our guide, Don Fernando, to our bartender, Gustavo, and everyone in between. I can't say enough good things about them.

You don't have to book a stay with Turtle Beach Lodge through G Adventures. You can do it direct through them and it's probably going to be a little cheaper and you can pick your own hotel in San Jose. We didn't figure this out when we first booked this trip in early 2020 but we did between the first booking and today. We would likely have just booked direct if we had known way back three or so years ago.

Two last thoughts here: (1) it is hot and it is humid in the jungle; if you sweat remotely like I sweat, consider taking some additional shirtwear with you over and above one per day; and (2) the breakfast you will get on the way to Tortuguero is amazing; get the grilled cheese and ask for some salsa Lizano.

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