Honeymooning around the world: Tortuguero – A Fisher village and a National Park in the middle of nowhere

After our hike to Cerro Chato and Hot Springs we left from La Fortuna around 6pm towards Cariari. We had planned to leave around 2-3pm but the hike, springs and lunch/dinner dragged out a bit. We were going to Tortuguero but had to make a pit stop at Cariari. Tortuguero is a small fishing village and National Park in the NE part of CR and it is accessible only by boat or plane. We chose car and boat. The public boat to Tortuguero leaves from La Pavona, a few house village, four times a day and the boat ride takes around one hour and it took some four hours from La Fortuna to drive there. Because of the long drive, we stayed one night in Hotel Vista al Tortuguero in Cariari.

Our hotel room at Vista al Tortuguero

Cariari is basically the closest place to La Pavona where you can overnight and from there it is still one-hour drive on dirt road to the harbor. If you come with your own car it might be difficult to find the harbor, because it cannot be found on maps (e.g. Google maps). You can find La Pavona on maps, so when you arrive there, just continue driving after the road ends on the map on the only road there is, and you will arrive to the harbor. We left our car to a secured parking place for the two nights we were planning to staying Tortuguero and the price tag was $10 a night. Basically you do not have that much of a choice where to leave the car if you don’t want to walk a long way to the harbor because there is just the road and then the $10 secured parking place.

We found a nice deal (from Tortuguero infocenter) for two nights’ accommodation, turtle watching (it is prohibited to go to the beach without a certified guide), canoe tour in the jungle rivers and a jungle walk for $90 per person. Our guide came with the same boat so we didn’t have to guess which boat we should take because there were around 10 boats on the beach. During the boat ride our guide Victor, pointed out caimans, different lizards and other animals to us. The river was winding like a snake and the boat driver had to know the river really well, because it was in many parts only 20cm deep. The boat ride was nice and we stopped to several places to drop off locals. It was nice to see how the locals move around in those places where the car is not an option.

Tourists on a boat!

We spotted a Jesus lizard on our boat ride to Tortuguero

When we arrived Tortuguero, we were shown to our hotel El Muellecito. It had also a restaurant and it was located in the middle of the village. Our room was ok, but it didn’t have any glass windows, just a net, but it was probably good because it was really hot and humid in the room. We went to check out the town before the evening’s turtle watch.

Drying machine for clothes in Tortuguero

The Main street! :D

We left around 7.30pm towards the beach with Victor and two guys from Belgium. We walked for a while next to the beach on a trail. In the end there were some “turtle guards” that checked Victors guide license before we were allowed to access the beach. Around 95% of Tortuguero is strictly protected and the beach is protected for turtles. It is not allowed to access the beach between 6pm – 6am without a guide. He told us interesting facts of the Green Turtle while we were waiting for a turtle to start laying eggs. This is because when the turtle lays eggs, the hormones make the turtle fall into a trance and it does not mind if people are watching on close range. We saw also one turtle coming from the sea to the beach and it was really amazing, but it didn’t find a good spot so it returned to the sea. We saw two turtles laying eggs and covering them. We left before the turtles “woke” up from their hormone stage so that we didn’t disturb them. We came back to our hotel around 10pm. A bit later we had again a big thunderstorm, luckily we weren’t on the beach anymore like some other groups.

Few pictures of a Green Turtle laying eggs. Sorry for the bad quality. (We were basically not allowed to use cameras but we were allowed use them if nobody sees them and without flash)

The next day we had our morning canoeing tour with Victor and two Austrian girls. The start time was at 6am! Usually that could be a small problem to wake up so early, but for some reason we have been waking up between 6-8am by ourselves so it wasn’t a problem. We paddled quickly to relatively narrow jungle rivers where only few other canoes were. It was really nice to see how all the animals had woken up in the jungle and were in full action. It felt almost like being in National Geographic crew on an exploration trip :) We saw caimans, basilisk lizards, different birds and monkeys among others. The river we were paddling was in few places really shallow and our canoe got few times a bit stuck from the bottom. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any crocodiles in the wild, so that is still on the to-do list ;) We paddled around for a bit under three hours in the morning sun.

A caiman waiting for breakfast ;)

Some lizard eating leaves

Basilisk aka Jesus lizard posing for us

Wait for it...

We had planned to have our jungle walk at 11am, but we had it at 3pm. It was a bit different jungle walk this time. We thought we would walk along the path and Victor would tell about the plants and animals we would maybe see, but no, there were no path :) Victor took us on a real jungle walk into the jungle where there were no trails. Well, Edda had some issues with that, or with all the spiders that were waiting for her. Markus enjoyed to walk in the wild but everyone has had been happier if Victor had told about the plans to go into the jungle. Edda could have done something else and Markus could have been walking around the jungle with a guide that is really passionate and excited about the wild life. However, Edda survived the walk and in the end we were probably walking on an old path because there were bridges that had almost collapsed and looked like from an Indiana Jones movie ;) We saw a hawk, spider moneys, a lot of spiders but just of 2 different species, a turtle in the middle of the jungle :D and a lot of different plants and some fruits that can be eaten. It was a very informative walk and totally different than what we expected.

One of Edda's many friends during our jungle trek

A climbing and hugging tree ;)

A small turtle (15-20cm) we found in the jungle

Angry bird!

Spider monkey climbing it the tree

Tortuguero is a small fishing and tourist village that has huge areas of protected nature. It got habited back in the days when a US timber company started to export Mahogany and other timber trees. After the trees were used the US company just left and few of the workers stayed living there mostly from the nature. Later it became a research center for wetland, jungles and especially turtles. Now most of the Tortuguero’s area is protected and they are taking good care of the turtles that are coming there for laying eggs.