Before visiting Tortuguero, I associated the area with turtles. Just turtles. All I wanted was to see a turtle, and so when, on my second night, I saw four nesting green sea turtles, I thought to myself, “Wow. I’ve seen the turtles, but I have four days left. Now what?”
I needn’t have worried. Though Tortuguero is known and even named for its nesting turtle populations, this northern Caribbean town has so much more to offer. I found myself enchanted by the area’s winding canals, especially the mysterious Cano Palma, where the water is so black …
Spans the northwestern part of Costa Rica, from the Nicaraguan border to Puntarenas, including the Nicoya Peninsula.
The central Pacific coast from Puntarenas south to the Baru River mouth, just north of Dominical.
Includes the southwest coast of Costa Rica and the southern part of the Puntarenas Province from Playa Dominical south to Panama.
Includes most of the border with Nicaragua, stretching south to Arenal Volcano and the northern parts of the Heredia and Alajuela Provinces.
Encompasses the Monteverde area, from the Santa Elena Cloud Forest in the north to the Monteverde Cloud Forest in the east.
Includes San Jose, the Juan Santamaria International Airport, and parts of Alajuela, Cartago and Heredia provinces.
This was my last day in Tortuguero and Vincent and I were getting up early to stroll the beach — we were hoping to see green turtle hatchlings and a beautiful sunrise. At 4:15, I turned off my alarm, hopped out of bed, and grabbed my camera.
The beach was dark and deserted when we walked out; to protect nesting turtles, Tortuguero’s beach is closed from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. Our feet in the sand, we sat and waited for 5:00 to roll around — the sky stretched out before us, deep blue in the …
When we met Elvin at 5:00 a.m. for this morning’s fishing excursion, he had good news and bad news. I asked for the bad first and he told me that the ocean was even rougher than it had been two days ago. A look of horror must have registered on my face — I had been worried about seasickness and capsizing in the “calmer” seas — because he laughed and told me the good news: we would be fishing the canals and not venturing into the ocean.
Good is relative, of course. Ocean fishing generally yields …
After yesterday’s unseasonal rains — the Caribbean is usually dry during September and October — I was happy to awake to a sunny, beautiful morning. We ate a big breakfast, packed our bags and hopped across the canal to Mawamba Lodge, our final stop in Tortuguero.
As soon as I got off the boat, I felt a tug of nostalgia — more than ten years ago, I made my first visit to Tortuguero. I couldn’t remember where I had stayed, but the question was answered as I toured the lodge: I remembered Mawamba’s wooden decks, rustic …
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