Tortuguero (Hugh)

We had a good time here, but only through conjuring up some good humour from time to time. One day, both Monty and Eliza were down with some minor ailment. A bit of sleep and both came good again, Eliza having thrown up the requisite number of times, once rather spectacularly, at lunch. Spaghetti – quite a display.



Mawamba lodge is not a bread and butter Goodfellow experience; set meal times and buffet bar food required us to queue, eat what we are given, and socialise with other people. But after some 3 weeks on our own, the necessity for social niceties came at a good time, and we enjoyed ourselves. The French/Americans were very good fun, and I had some educational chats with a very interesting Chilean gentleman. We tasked the children to find out mundane facts about various adults that we met (what’s your favourite animal that you have seen?; where do you come from?; what’s your name?; etc.) and they took to this game with some gusto. It has since proven difficult to turn this functionality off, however, and strangers are now being accosted willy-nilly, causing surprise and occasionally alarm.

The wildlife here is stunning, and we had some good safaris, both on foot and by boat. My favourite trip was a guided one that I took with Jemima in a double kayak.



With a guide, we were delivered by boat to the edge of Tortuguero lagoon, then kayaked on through a tiny canal into the depths of the forest.



Initially, I thought Jemima was going to tire of this quite quickly, but she got into it as we spotted more and more wildlife, then ultimately she asked if we could paddle all the way back to the hotel instead of taking the boat, which we did, munching manzanas de agua on the way. The highlight was sitting underneath a tree while a large troop of white-faced capuchin monkeys crossed the canal along a tree branch only feet above our heads.

One evening reinforced for the kids the lesson that things don’t always go their way, when we paid to go on a night-time tour to watch turtles laying eggs, and no turtles turned up that day. We spent a rather wet couple of hours in the dark sitting on an airstrip, while we waited for the turtle spotters to report positive sightings. When none turned up, we went back home again. By this time (10pm) all 3 kids had fallen asleep on the tarmac. Not a whole load of fun, but personally I was quite relieved not to have had to disturb the turtles in what I saw as a rather voyeuristic tourist experience. If the Costa Ricans are really concerned about saving the turtles, I think they should ban this activity and just let the turtles get on with it. Admittedly only 5 kms of the total 22kms nesting beaches are open to tourists, but those beaches are the least successful nesting sites by some distance, funnily enough. The Tortuguero town itself is 100% devoted, one way or another, to the tourist industry and I don’t think they’ve got this place quite right – the guides are a bit tired – they see people like us every day of the year, on a 2 day turn-around and you feel a bit like one tiny bit of meat in a sausage machine. When the time came to leave we were ready to go.

Thankfully we flew out this time, and so didn’t have to endure tourist buses and live commentaries on the 6 hour return trip. We were the only people on our plane, piloted by a rather racy young lady. Security precautions were amusingly lax. As the pilot was completing her final checks, a local rather lazily cycled past us down the runway. He was about halfway along the runway as we past him doing about 150 miles an hour, the wind from the propellers ruffling his hair as he pottered along.