I need to give a quick shout-out to the tour guides here in Costa Rica. So far, we've gotten some really high quality guides! Donald, from our all-day tour on Tuesday, was excellent, as I had stated in my previous blog. Alberto, from our city tour, was very entertaining, and now we have Stephen, who is with us for three days.
Stephen is simply fantastic! He actually has a BA from, I think, USC in Marine Biology, and an MA, if I recall correctly, from Cornell. He didn't tell us how he ended up here in Costa Rica, but he did say that he was teaching at a university here. Then one day a friend told him, "hey, why don't you be a tour guide? It's just like teaching." Which, it is, as I can attest to, being a former tour guide myself. So Stephen did it, and now it's starting to become a full time thing.
We are now on a three-day tour to Tortuguerro, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. The tour bus, this time a "real" tour bus, complete with cushy chairs and a bathroom in the back, picked us up at the Marriott at 6 a.m. It was so hard leaving the comfort of the most perfect hotel beds that early in the morning, but now at the end of the day, I can definitely say it was all worth it.
It took us about an hour to get out of the town because we ended up having to pick up other guests at different hotels, but once we got out of the big city, it took us only about a half an hour to get to the top of the mountain range that divides Costa Rica into the Pacific side and the Caribbean side. It was all misty up there, with some variable rains.
After driving for maybe about an hour, we stopped at our breakfast station. They served us a partial "typical" breakfast...not partial in that it was small, but partial in that the typical Costa Rican breakfast consists of Gallo Pinto (rice and beans), eggs, and fried (candied?) plantains. Here's what it normally looks like:
But today the plantains were absent. And, in all the breakfasts we've had so far, the eggs have been scrambled, but today they were easy over.
We only had about 40 minutes for breakfast, so we ate quickly because we were at some kind of veranda restaurant that opened up to a path that led to a bridge that crossed a large stream, and then into the rainforest.
I didn't walk too far into the rainforest, but I was charged just by being there! It felt just like home...except that I had to look out for any dangerous critters. That's a new experience for me.
I've got a very short video of what the forest sounds like. There are these beetles that make this loud sound, and Stephen said that they're "nature's warning system," because if there is a predator near, they get silent.
[I'll insert the video when I get back home. The wifi isn't strong enough at my current hotel.]
He also said that they make the trees "rain." These beetles spend over half their lives underground, and as they progress in their growth they crawl up the tree into the branches, then cling there...and urinate. If you're standing under the tree, you might think it's rain, but actually you're getting peed on by beetles.
I'll give more fun facts in another blog. For now, I want to share with you about the rest of the bus ride. This road, that took us back down the mountain and towards the Caribbean, is full of pot holes. The first thing that Stephen did when we all got on the bus this morning was warn us about that, and let us know that our driver, Luis, is an expert at navigating this road. He was absolutely right about that. Luis was just amazing. As he weaved left to right, we hardly felt the bouncing. That guy really knows what he's doing.
On that note, we've had some superb drivers as well. The driving here is nuts - no lanes, and there seems to be no real rules either - but all of our bus drivers have been fantastic! Even with cars speeding past and cutting in front of us, even having to cross tiny bridges in big vehicles, even driving along roads with a cliff drop on one side and a car passing on the other, these drivers never made me feel like I was in danger. They made it all look easy.
Anyway, we were in a great big tour bus, and at one point we had to stop to wait for all the other tour busses for the day. Stephen made sure to tell us why: because at that point along the road, the busses have to travel in a caravan so that the tour guide in the first bus can get out, hike up his pants, and cross the bridges if they are flowed over with water, just to make sure that the bridge didn't wash away.
He said, "folks, you know Jungle Adventure in Disneyland? Well, this is the real thing."
Perhaps it was lucky that our windows in the bus were so high up that we couldn't see all the bridges we were driving over. But there were some side bridges, so I imagine this is what they looked like:
In any case, Luis never made me feel scared. He handled that great big bus AND those tiny bridges with so much ease that I even forgot that there was any danger.
With the ride seeming so treacherous, it was really surprising to get to the end of the road and find this huge bus depot. There were hundreds of people coming and going...all the tourists who were leaving on the busses that all of us arrived in, and all of us getting onto ferry boats to get to Tortuguerro.
So began the second part of our trip - the water bus.
I've been on the tour boats in the ocean before, but never on a river, so that was cool. This river was smooth today, so it was a really nice ride. Plus our new driver, I think his name was Bernardo, is from the area, and was able to spot all kinds of wildlife along the way. We saw a red-tailed hawk, which doesn't happen, so we were very lucky. We also saw a few vultures, and another bird that I think is known as the needle-nosed duck. I'll have to go look that one up.
But my favorite sight: seeing a spider monkey crawling up an 'ulu tree.
I have to download the pictures from my point-and-shoot camera, so I'll revise this post later when I can get to those.
We were on the water for maybe an hour before we finally made it to our hotel, the Mawamba Lodge. We got here right around 12 noon. We had already had such an amazing day, that I can't believe there's even more!
I'll write all about the lodge in the next blog post.
Aloha!
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