EC-Rider Travels

Today we head for the jungle. Once again we were in plenty of time at the airport and sat at San Jose airport (domestic side – not too many retail opportunities ) for two hours as we saw smaller and smaller planes take off with different groups of people. At last we were called to our 14 seater Cessna Caravan flown by two 12 year-old pilots who spent an alarming amount of time referring to the instruction manual! It was a short flight of about 30 mins through light cloud until we saw the Caribbean coastline and started to come down to a short runway in the trees – Tortuguero. The departure/arrival lounge was not quite like Heathrow!

Tortuguero lies between the river Tortuguero and the Caribbean sea. We were met by a boat and headed over to Tortuga Lodge which was literally on the far river bank. We were welcomed by Eric who talked us through the various activities we could do, but suggested first of all we had a very good lunch. We were then shown our nice rooms – Lottie’s and mine right on the river bank and we made a plan to do the ‘night-walk’ at 5.30pm.

This was taken by Juan who supplied us all with Wellington boots and then proceeded to literally cover himself from head to toe with bug spray saying …. ‘He knew where we were going’! We all dosed up too and headed off in single file behind him. We had a wonderful time looking for nocturnal mammals, frogs, spiders and snakes and saw quite a few. First up, was a little mammal with a very long tongue called a kinkajou moving around high up in the trees. Sometimes called a honey bear, it is nocturnal eating fruit and nectar. Very cute and we were told particularly rare to find here. We then saw two more!

We also saw a couple of orange poison dart frogs (which come in a variety of colours); the white stomach of a red-eyed tree frog (sadly too far away to see it its full glory); a wolf spider, and then an eyelash palm viper – another particularly venomous snake. Juan then spotted a two toed sloth miles up a tree with its baby. Difficult to see but a treat all the same.

We returned very hot and sweaty but having had a really lovely time. Delicious dinner then early bed before a 6am start in the morning. Tim and Emma very excited as they are still very much on UK time!