Tortuguero

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The land of turtles

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Photos

The beach at Tortuguero.
Looks like a storms coming.
We walked down to this beach at night with a guide and watched giant green turtles lay their eggs on the sand. The turtles are about 1.5 metres long and they are an endangered variety (the green turtle) so we felt really lucky to see them. They came up from the sea and slowly made their way up to the top of the beach (it took them so long to move along the sand and they had to keep stopping to rest along the way. It probably took them 10 mins to go 30 metres. Then they dug holes and laid about 100 eggs. Lastly they covered and camouflaged their nests and then returned to the sea. It was amazing to see.

Giant beetle
The guy on the left was selling coconuts with holes in them to drink. He had this huge beetle sitting on his cart and he said it was his pet and that since he feeds the beetle it is tame and never leaves his side. The girl on the right asked to hold it but I think she is regretting it at this moment when the photo was taken.

Big bird nests
This tree was a long way away on the edge of the canal so it is hard to tell how big these bird nests are. They look like bats hanging from the tree but they are actually nests for a certain type of bird that I have forgotten the name of- so lets call them 'big birds'. Well they were big.

Our way home
This was the plane we flew back to San Jose in (Tortuguero is only reachable by boat or plane and since the boat trip there took us 6 hours, we thought we would opt to fly back. We were a little nervous when we saw how small the plane was, but it was all part of the adventure so we jumped on.

Goodbye Tortuguero
This is a view of the Tortuguero area as we have taken off and are about to head for San Jose. You can see the beach on the right (where we watched the turtles) and on the left is the canal which we stayed on the banks of and travelled along to get to Tortuguero by boat. In between the canal and the sea you can see the Tortuguero airport. Not very impressive really ;) Just a strip and a shed with giant plane fuel tanks stored inside (locked away of course).

A banana plantation that we visited in the area
These women are sorting the bananas. Apparently different countries want different numbers of bananas in a bunch. So if they have 4 in a bunch they go to one country and 5 in a bunch to another.

Banana Plantation
I asked how much the workers here get paid and I was told they were well paid as they got about US$1 an hour. Costa Rica is more expensive than the rest of Central America from what I know, and I don't know how a person could live there on a few dollars a day.