Pirates of the Caribbean

After an uneventful breakfast at the hotel we checked out and started driving towards La Pavona, which is where the ferry to Tortuguero leaves from. This road was less interesting than the ones around Monteverde and Arenal but we passed a few trucks or followed ones that were going fast enough, and stopped a couple of times along the way, to buy snacks and use bathrooms mostly. We knew that the ferry ride would take 1-2 hours depending on the tide, over which we will not be able to relieve ourselves.

La Pavona is a farm/restaurant/parking lot/ferry dock that is located in the end of some banana fields bearing signs of “Dole Bananas.”  In the past (like last month), armed bandits would hold up the tour buses when they stop to raise the gates, rob them of all their valuables, and disappear into the banana fields. The bandits have also been known to (on at least one occasion) attack ferry boats coming back from Tortuguero, making them bona fide river pirates. So now in addition to overthrowing democratic governments, Dole is also responsible for harboring pirates. The police patrol that road in the mornings, so that’s when we went, and we saw the banana gates and fields which would be good spots for an ambush. Not sorry to disappoint you, but we were not held up by pirates on our way there, and this after ample precautions to hide our valuables in various places.

Paying for the ferry tickets and parking was handled very efficiently at the entrance to the parking. Once we parked our car we were approached by a diffident young man who asked which hotel we were going to and directed us to a tout who tried to sell us tours. He insistently recommended and tried to book us for a night walk and a canoe tour so persistently that we almost missed the 1:00PM boarding. After the ride we were taken to our cabina by a partner tout who kept trying to sell us the tours before letting us check in. We said we needed a while to decide, and ended up choosing a night tour with a more reputable company in the village.

The ferry ride to Tortugeuro village was only a little over an hour long and actually a lot more fun than expected. They had open-side, roofed long boats loaded with people and backpacks stacked up into a wall - I moved ours to make sure it was under the roof, but it did not rain. The boat next to ours was being loaded up with produce when we left. On our boat we encountered a French couple that we’d met on yesterday’s rafting tour, and we saw them again a few times later in restaurants in town. The ferry sat passengers in rows of three, and the motor could move it fast enough to splash water on those passengers in the sides. On the way we saw two crocodiles, and the pilot moved us slowly right up to one of them for a close look. We also passed by a turtle and some iguanas and herons, all just on the way to the village, not in the nature reserve.

The hostel room that we are staying at in Tortuguero is terrible: it is a concrete cell under a metal roof so it gets very hot. Inside are only two beds with cheap thin mattresses - thought we still got a good night’s sleep, and a plastic card table. There are some openings with either windows or screens, not both, so you hear everything outside. The shower is one of those that produces cold water and electrocutes you, like from our first stay. I was shown how to set it to hot water but advised not to touch it, and anyway the cold shower was refreshing. On the Caribbean, everything is hot and humid, and the mosquitoes start biting from the evening, so we couldn’t spend much time in the room and we had to sleep covered in DEET. Once in the night and again in the morning the water to our room cut out just before I could brush my teeth. The hostel owners fixed it and thought some neighborhood kids were turning off our water. Fortunately the location of the hostel is nice - at the very outskirts of the village yet walkable, right on the beach of black volcanic sand, with strong breezes, waves, and riptides so strong that you can never safely get in the water. They have plenty of hammocks arranged in the entrance for people to lounge in and watch the waves.

Our night tour started at 6:30PM so we were both hungry and tired for most of it. We had a group of 10 people, speaking French, Spanish, and English, so the guide did a bilingual tour in English and Spanish and he struggled with it, often telling us to wait while he went to hunt for an animal to show us. It was mostly looking at bushes along people’s backyards but we still saw two large, beautiful spiders - including a furry orange wolf spider, a couple of green snakes, young green iguanas, and dozens of people clustered around waiting their turn for a glimpse of the red-eyed frog. In the brief part through more of a jungle trail I found a butterfly hiding under a leaf that the rest of the group missed, brown and orange with iridescent blue “eyes” on the wings. We got a good look at a sleeping bird or two, and on the way back, we saw an adult two-fingered sloth resting in a tree, with a green head from symbiotic algae.