Costa Rica

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We spent a night in San Jose, where we (Cathrin, Graham, Kara, Heather, Michelle & I) went to a local restaurant called Lukas for our first sample of typical Costa Rican cuisine. I had a typical Casado dish which like many of the meals we were to have over the coming days, contained a mixture of rice and beans and also had cooked plantains, which were rich, sweet and delicious.

Early the next morning we met the remaining seven members of the group: Anita, Tony, Steve, Wendell, Dianne, Peter & Emma and boarded a coach headed for Tortuguero National Park.

We stopped for breakfast and saw our first glimpse of a sloth high in a tree, we saw two more lower down from the coach as we neared the boat dock.

Long shot view of our first sloth - they have a canny knack of concealing their heads, luckily we were to get much better views of sloths later in the trip...

Smoking volcano in the distance as we head North East...

Tortuguero can only be reached by boat or air, so we transferred to a boat and travelled the last 2 hours on the channels & canals (canos) of Tortuguero National Park.

Looking back to the jetty...

American Crocodile...

Sanderling...

 

Over the next couple of days we would see that the channels 'canals' were full of fish eating waterbirds.

Cormorants...

 

View of the jungle from the canal...

The white lump is the camouflaged view of a Potoo...

    

Potoo time - the uncamouflaged view...

    

Miche and I went exploring and were lucky to bump into one of the kitchen staff who had some over-ripe melons and suggested we should follow her. We weren't disappointed...

A large and feisty male Green Iguana...

Lovely stuff...

Melon lady and friend...

Dewlap hanging, this male was head of the pecking order and chased away any other iguanas...

This chap was on the periphery waiting to take his chance...

Impressive, large moth - 3 or so inches across...

The afternoon was spent at Tortuguero town, where we largely ignored the handicraft shops and looked at the wildlife instead.

Golden Silk Orb-Web Spider... Is it just me, or do its legs look like they're in yellow licra with 80's style (or Eric Prydz 'Call on me' video style) rolled down keep-fit leggings? No, it's probably just me. 

Abandoned logging machinery littered the town, reminders from its less than eco-friendly past...

Caribbean Sea...

Coconut...

We returned to the beach on the evening of Day 3 to see Turtles nesting; these boys, there's another under the box on the left, were playing at being turtles crawling around with the boxes for shells...

Next - Day 3 - Tortuguero