We're All a Bit Hopeless and the Rest of Costa Rica

Unfortunately, my time in Costa Rica overlapped with part of my semester at RMIT, and instead of blogging madly I had to redraft my feature film "Malevolence", which I reset in Costa Rica and wrote from the verandah overlooking the rainforest ... again. (The first draft was written from the balcony in Kuranda). Naturally, that meant I couldn't blog again until I'd done this ... you know blogs. They revel in a bit of neglect. It's a thing.

The Rio Tigre - a short walk from where we
were staying with Dad and Deanna.

One of the first things we did was take a walk through the rainforest nearby Dad and Dee's house in Dos Brazos del Rio Tigre (translates to "two arms/branches of the Tiger River). The walk descends to the river, where many locals pan for gold during the day, then crosses to wind up the hill to a backpacker's thingy that I can't remember the name of. We swam in the river for a while, and Dad was called back to the house to film army ants that had decided to cross the property for Monster Bug Wars. They got a crab for their help.

Dad and Mal filming the army ants in
our front yard. I kid you not. Places like
this actually exist.

After the nutty time we'd had getting to Dos Brazos - the flights, the countries, the early mornings and jet lag, the ferry that we almost missed because the driver forgot to tell us where to get off ... Adam and I decided it was time for a bit of chillaxing. We shamelessly marinated in the hammocks on our deck and read Jurassic Park aloud. Costa Rica has always held a special place in my heart because my favourite book is set there, so I made sure to bring it with me and keep a sharp eye out for dinosaurs. But that's another story.

Adam's scorpion - just one of many
species difficult to find until the discovery
of Bugville Rd.

Each night we went out collecting. As part of the work that Dad and Dee were doing over in Costa Rica, they had to provide the animals as well as wrangle them on set. As most of our family holidays through the years were cleverly disguised field trips, stalking through a rainforest-nestled road in pitch dark with only a dying torch to guide us was something we were well used to (and introducing Adam to quite quickly). It was a little more nerve-wracking than usual, as we often discovered a deadly Brazilian wandering spider centimetres out of our torch light, or heard a strange animal growling from the rainforest beside the road. (I maintain this was Dee's stomach).

Many large tarantulas made their burrows in the vertical
face of dirt where the road had been cut into a small hill.

The road was a recent discovery of Dad and Dee's. Setting up camp on the Osa Peninsular, research abounded that this was the most biodiverse area of Costa Rica. However, it all seemed to be hiding quite far apart, and each site yielded only one or two target species - until the road. This anonymous stretch of dirt road with rainforest on either side (like most roads) for some reason threw every species but one that Minibeast Wildlife had been looking for the entire time. Adam's first discovery was a super large scorpion on a tree that had been quite elusive at other sites, and which had been used in shooting the week before.

Returning home late at night we often
found Masked Tree frog males calling
from Tayen and Saige's blow-up paddling
pool. I found this female watching from nearby
and ... had a little accident.

As well as collecting, we drove along the bumpy, enormously potholed, one-laned horror roads of Costa Rica to reach some beautiful different habitats ... I mean ... "sight-seeing areas" (ok, so almost everything was a collection trip in disguise). One such was Playa Preciosa (Precious Beach). The beach itself is frequently used and looks a little bedraggled, but that hasn't stopped an explosive population of hermit crabs taking up residence there. The sand swims from a distance, and close-up, a thousand shells of different shapes and sizes hastily run from your huge clumsy human feet. From a hermit crab point of view, it seems odd to call a human clumsy - but these crabs are much more agile than I realised from the drab pet-shop specimens back in Australia. In Costa Rica, they feed on and live in coconuts, and climb trees with amazing ease. Their curled legs are perfect for gripping and zooming up thin branches. They are the monkeys of the crustacean world.

We amused ourselves by each picking a hermit crab and
racing them to the outside of the circle. Dee's Green Meanie
won a decisive victory.

Costa Rica can be divided into two halves when it comes to the weather. North of San Jose and the mountains (circa Tortuguero) (yes I can use it like that), Mario told us that there is the Wet season and the Wetter season. Although the south (Osa) has the Wet and Dry seasons, from what I saw I'd almost believe the first weather system for both. Every day consisted of some giggling sky giant waking up, tromping down to the ocean, filling up a bucket the size of Belgium and returning to dump it on our heads. That's the tropics, though, and it's so warm the rain really doesn't bother you. The storms were amazing - the loudest things I've ever heard - and they sometimes woke me up at night because the thunder shook my flimsy two-story house with a vengeance. Then, when the rain stopped, the mist hung in the air and the sun set and if you were lucky enough ... you got to see this:

Innnnsaaannne.

Hermit crabs in the coconut condo.

We had many lucky/crazy animal encounters in the time we were over there. We spotted a Fer-de-lance viper (locally known as the terciopelo) on the side of the road. When Dad tried to get it to curl up so we could bring Tayen and Saige over to look, it instead did a mad hopping routine into the forest. Hopping. My mind is blown daily.

We also saw an ocelot on the side of the road, came within metres of a family of hyper-intelligent White-faced Capuchin monkeys, saw a Green and Black poison arrow frog, witnessed the awesome strength of the Golden Orb Weaving spider's web, watched a snake eat a frog, found a Smokey Jungle frog the size of a chihuaha ... there was just so much and every day was exciting and I want to tell you it all but I do not have infinite time :(

A night-jar I accidentally startled when I
walked too close. It immediately flew into the
Nephila clavipes web behind it and became stuck.
You can see the spider in the top right hand corner.
The bird hung there for a few minutes before eventually
struggling free. The spider had no inclination to go near
it and retreated to the edge of the web.

Two of the capuchins we saw beside a bridge in
Puerto Jimenez, the nearest town to Dos Brazos.

One capuchin came quite close to myself and Tayen, but as I
went to take a photo, Tayen started screaming that it was going
to bite us and attack us and eat our faces or something of the sort.
This was all I got ... and a really scared monkey.

We saw snail-eating snakes, cat-eyed snakes, something something
snakes, and I'll be damned if I can remember which one this is.

Adam had to go home to work for some reason and for some equally silly reason I stayed on for an extra five days or something ridiculously small. I was glad, because I got to see Matapalo with the family, but I think it would have been better to
a) have better shoes
b) have gone with Adam with better shoes.
Matapalo is a river walk in which you essentially walk up the river. The tricky part is all the climbing and your flimsy Australian thongs popping off and floating away and the kids bawling their eyes out at the first slight incline. Suffice to say, we did not get very far up Matapalo walk ... however, we made the "best" of a pretty damn awesome land/waterscape and we ate our biscuits up there.

Even the car park was amazing. Now THIS is
where the dinosaurs live.

Never bring thongs to a river crossing (but
always bring a banana to a party).

The beach at Matapalo is to beaches as Hercules is
to men. Buff, and throws enormous rocks at you
with very little effort. Still, that's a heck of a bubble
bath.

Bye bye Costa Rica :( I may have been a fling for you, but I will always cherish the times we shared in the September/October buckety rainy sun.

Tortuguero Day 2 and the Jaguar in my Bed

We were awoken at ...

Wait, let me start that again.

I was awoken at 4:30am to the most frightening sound I'd ever heard. An intensely loud, guttural growling was coming from somewhere outside our flimsy mesh-windowed cabina. At first, coming out of a deep, tropically-induced sleep, I thought someone was having a fight with a huge boar (or a rodent of unusual size). Then, I realised there was a Jaguar stalking through the hotel grounds, picking off the guests one by one, stripping Adam of his flesh right beside me ...

Oh. Right. I forgot. Howler monkeys.

My first introduction to the calling howler monkeys was a bit dunderheaded, I'll admit, but it can't have been worse than Adam, whom I shook and said "can you hear that?". It was a stupid question - no one in a kilometre radius could have managed to not hear it, but Adam gave me a "hear what?".

There was a band of trees connecting the rainforest on one side of the hotel grounds to the rainforest on the other side. While crossing the night before, the troupe had decided to stop there and sleep for the night. The band of trees was precisely behind our room.

Needless to say, we were up nice and early for our 5:30am departure to the canals, for our early early morning boat tour. Costa Rica is famous for its bird biodiversity especially, and it was definitely the right time to see them. And for us, it meant not being roasted in the noon sun and eaten for lunch by the caiman.

Gregory, el Capitan, navigating

the canals.

Our tour group.

Every few metres, another new species of bird would fly overhead or be perched on a nearby branch. At this time more than ever, Adam and I were ruing the day we forgot to buy binoculars, and ruing even more the day we decided we needed to eat more than buy a digital SLR.

A family of microbats. This species

commonly sleeps on trees overhanging

water, in groups of up to 15.

We were quickly "ticking" off many of the species we'd been expecting to miss out on in our short stay, including all three of Tortuguero's toucans. Please note: We're not actually keeping a list. That would be crossing over into previously unexplored territory of obsession.

A toucan. I swear.

Mario told us that when you find three toucans, you get a six-pack. It took me a while to figure out why everyone was groan-laughing (that special kind reserved for puns).

The previous night we had spotted a few things that were impossible to take photos of. One was a tree-full of fireflies displaying their flashing green lights in search of mates. The other was the orange eye-shine of a caiman in the dock. At this point, I had no idea what one looked like in comparison to a crocodile or what size I could be expecting. I only knew it had eyes. So, we were very excited to spot one in the daylight, and Gregory did his utmost to get the caiman to hang around for us.

Adam faces off with the caiman.

In fact, he did such a good job (splashing around in the water to get his attention) that the caiman decided to come all the way up to the boat and nose-bump it. Caimans grow to a maximum of 2.5m, but females are always much smaller. Unlike the Australian crocodiles, the Caiman is a member of the alligator family. They have a hugely varying diet as they grow, starting with insects, crustaceans and gastropods and moving onto fish and even small mammals as they get larger.

Ma! There's another 'gator in the house!

The caiman nose-fives the boat.

Basilisk lizards are common in the Tortuguero national park, but it was not often that we were treated to a displaying male. Easily the most impressive is the Emerald Basilisk (Basiliscus plumifrons), and we just happened to slide on by a male hanging over the water with all his junk out.

Dee was recently bitten by a

basilisk lizard, and Dad, worried

that it might have some goanna-like

venom, googled "Basilisk venom". He

freaked out when he got millions of

results and found that the only cure

was phoenix tears.

The Northern Jacana is an polyandrous

bird that uses its long, thin toes to walk

over water plants without falling in. Since

Central America seems to have Jesus on the

brain, this bird is also called the "Jesus-bird."

We were treated to many more bird sightings before we stumbled across the motherload. Gregory "parked" the boat near a little bank of tree roots, and we sat here for ten minutes and watched a troupe of White-faced Capuchins crossing the trees right in front of the boat. Interestingly, once one monkey finds a path, most of the subsequent monkeys follow the exact same one - so we were able to anticipate the exact place each monkey would appear.

The White-faced terrestrial monkey differs greatly

from the White-faced capuchin. (Expression:
Srsly I just saws monkeyz.)

This is my favourite one. White-faced capuchins

are very intelligent and use both tools and medicine.

They've apparently been trained to assist paraplegics.

This one sat there looking right at use for a minute

or so.

That concluded our foray into the canals of Tortuguero. The afternoon was taken up with a walk around the hotel gardens (which were less like gardens than a forest). Mario told us about all sorts of plants, including a fruit which Ticas once used for make-up, and a hollow tree that grows ridiculously fast and sounds like a drum. We found a two-toed sloth in a tree behind our room, and also a male and female pair of supermassive grasshoppers.

The two-toed sloth is far less common than the

three-toed sloth - about a ratio of 1:4, according

to our guide.

These guys were dark with very cool

orange antennae.

At night fall, we had dinner and then it was time to GO SEE THE TURTLES!!!!!!!!!! Our tour won the "turtle raffle", which meant we got to go in the early batch (8pm), whereas the others would have to wait until 10pm.

The view from the beach at sunset. The turtles

were on the same beach - just much further down.

Adam:

We hopped on the rocket boat and flew down the river at breakneck speed. Soon we arrived at the village and met our guide Pollo (note: he was not a chicken). Pollo led us to the beach and explained the turtle spotter program. This program, a recent development, had spotters roaming the beach in order to guide the tour groups to turtles once they had settled. We waited patiently on the beach while the spotters did their thing. After a short wait the spotters took us to the turtles. The spotters had found two green sea turtles (great whopping beasts of the sea) that had settled within two metres of each other and made their nests. For perspective each turtle was about the size of a quad-bike (not quite as tall though). When we arrived the turtles had just started to lay, and went on pushing out out eggs for about 15 minutes. Apparently of all the eggs laid (around 100) only one or two will survive to adulthood, thankfully the beach is visited by thousands of turtles and a good number will make it through. After laying, the turtles began to seal the egg chamber. This involved patting the area down with their back flippers (to get down) until they were satisfied that the chamber was secure. Once this stage was complete the real fun began...

Like this but double!

Using their powerful turtle limbs our plucky pair started camouflaging their nests. The turtles thrust great amounts of sand backwards over their nests, with ease akin to how people would splash water. Caitlin and I, standing directly behind the turtles, got to enjoy the spray of turtle-sand right in our faces (we felt privileged). After many successful sand attacks the turtles were satisfied with their handiwork and they set their sites back on the ocean. At this point Caitlin and I decided to hold a friendly wager with a game of giant sea turtle racing (no we didn't ride them). Once the turtles had set off from their nests we walked behind with silent encouragement. The turtles adopted a burst and rest strategy, making great gains followed by lengthy rests. It was painstaking but fascinating, and as the water grew nearer the heat was on. It was a pitched battle but in the end Caitlin's titanic terrific turtle took the title. From the waterline we saw another turtle making its way in to make it's nest (it was like a boulder emerging from the sea) for the turtles the night had only just begun, for us though it was time to head back. Pollo led us back through the village to the rocket boat for a leisurely ride back to the resort, what a night!

Let's Just Cut to the Good Stuff and Tortuguero, Day 1

Apologies in advance: My zoom sucks. We're doing our best.

Blah blah blah, Mexico, blah blah, didn't leave the airport, blah blah, Mexico is evil.

As far into Mexico as we dared travel after

the visitor information centre gave us a map

and said "everything's closed".

Blah blah flight. Arrived in San Jose. Adam said to the customs guy in Spanish "Do I speak English?" Caitlin laughed a lot.

Blah blah. Hotel room got upgraded to executive suite for free. Didn't know until we got inside. Blah blah. Bath robes.

Adam eating his warm cookie at check-in. It

was actually warm. They warm up their cookies.

For check-in.

The 13th, of course, was Adam's birthday. We spent it chilling out at the hotel after an exhausting succession of flights, early starts and busy, busy days. The language has been a bit of an amusement to get used to; especially as we spent the whole of Mexico trying to figure out how to order vegetarian food. When we finally did it, we realised our flight was boarding and had to eat our dinner covertly out of a bag on the plane.

I totally aced the taxi and managed to ask for a receipt as well, so we were feeling a lot better about everything by Adam's birthday (however, people at the hotel mostly speak English anyway). Then, we had a 5:40am bus to catch to Tortuguero National Park.

View over the roof of the hotel. It was supposed

to look nice. I think the computer makes photos

ugly.

Our tour guide was a hilariously enthusiastic local called Mario, and he was very knowledgeable on all things nature and spoke very good English. After picking up two Dutch guys, we started the drive to Tortuguero National Park (the area of turtles). Driving north from San Jose, we crossed the mountains and the Great Divide that splits the water drainage of the country and the seasons. The south side experiences the wet and dry seasons. The north experiences the wet and wetter seasons.

At one point, the driver madly pulled off the highway and screeched to a halt. Mario then calmly pointed out the three-toed sloth scratching itself in a tree. How either of them spotted it from a distance going that fast, I have no idea. I swear I took a photo but it seems to have gone missing.

We stopped for breakfast (desayuno) somewhere that I completely can't remember. The local dish for breakfast, lunch and dinner is rice and beans (gallo pinto if it comes mixed, casado if not). The only difference is, for desayuno you get an amazing assortment of fresh fruits that taste better than anywhere else, and I haven't yet had the same fresh fruit juice twice. Most of the time I don't even know which fruit I'm drinking.

We saw our first Costa Rican insects (and arachnids) at the butterfly house at the restaurant. There was an amazing array of butterfly species at all stages of their lifecycles. There were some big blue ones that looked like the Ulysses from Australia but also lots of other kinds we'd never seen before, caterpillars, cocoons and all!

Butterflies emerging from their cocoons

and drying their wings.

The biggest harvestman I've ever seen! It

was the size of the palm of my hand - bigger,

if it stretched its legs out. There was another

one running around on the same leaf.

After breakfast, we turned off the highway and ended up on a very rough, rocky road. Mario pointed out the pineapple plantations to us, and explained the history of the cultivation of the pineapple, and also how to choose the best ones from the shop (go for the hard, green ones, folks!). Not long after, we found ourselves driving through extensive banana plantations. The banana industry in this part of Costa Rica is huge, but they're worried that the economic situation in the US will put a dent in their exports for years to come.

A banana plantation. The blue bags are not

to protect the bananas from getting et, but

to increase their rate of growth.

Getting the bananas to the nearby open-air

packing factory is an interesting process. In

lots of about twenty, they are tied to cabling

stretching the entirety of the plantations, which

then conveys along like big blue hovering ducklings.

When they get to a road, they go straight across at eye

level, so you have to wait at the banana crossings

until they've passed.

For environmental reasons, there are no roads into the national park, so we pulled in at the dock and transferred to the boat. From this point on, it was wildlife city as we got our first taste of the biodiversity in this gem of a Central American country.

The boat we took, and Mario standing

with el Capitan, Gregory (a phenomenal

wildlife spotter, even whilst driving a boat).

We'd barely moved from the dock when we

were privy to a whole flock of Roseate spoonbills.

These birds have a widened, spoon-like end to

the bill made for catching shrimp and other

water invertebrates, giving them their pink

colouration.

One that Gregory spotted from the speeding

boat. A Howler monkey mid-nom on a leaf.

Nephila clavipes, the Golden orb-weaver. I went

nuts over this one and had the English guys we picked

up at the dock laughing at me until I realised there were

another two right next to it, and another twenty right

next to those ...

My Nephila hyperactivity occurred when we pulled up at the ranger station to buy tickets for tomorrow's rainforest tours. From there, we walked into the village. Since Tortuguero has been a national park since the 1970's, the only human residents (apart from the hotels) are in the village that existed before the change. This village originally subsisted on sea turtle hunting, but since then has made a very beautiful and inspiring story of itself that I will tell you tomorrow, when we go visit the nesting sea turtles of Tortuguero (the largest nesting site in the northern hemisphere). Consequently, you might be interested to know that Costa Rica is one of the greenest countries in the world, ranking first in the "Happy Planet Index". Go Ticos!

We arrived at the gorgeous hotel grounds and found our room to be largely made of mesh, with towels folded to look like turtles. Then it was a quick walk on the beach before dinner (cena) in an open-air restaurant, where we got our itinerary off Mario for the next few days.

That's the Caribbean you're looking at. The sand here

is black and extra clingy.

A ghost crab. My camera has the unfortunate habit

of being unable to use macro if you're zoomed more

than a millimetre, so I hope you fully appreciate how

difficult this shot was, considering how skittish crabs

are.

Aside from the canal and garden tours the next day, there were several optional tours such as a zipline canopy fly tour. We chose the sea turtle nesting tour for the following night, and the night walk around the hotel grounds with Mario's expert eyes on our side.

Adam faces off with a male basilisk, also

called "Jesus Christ lizards" due to

their ability to run across water. He was

seriously afraid it was going to claw his eyes out.

A cricket hanging about, doin' its thang.

Even the hotel grounds were alive with wildlife (though less inverts than I was hoping for!). It got to the point where it was "Oh, another basilisk". We spotted the eyeshine of a caiman in the water, and turned off our torches for a real firefly light spectacular. Mario identified a group of monkeys in the trees behind our rooms to be spider monkeys, but by 4:30am there were no doubts that they were Howlers. I woke up thinking someone was fighting a boar, then I thought there was a Jaguar in my room, then it clicked ...

The Garden orb-weavers are large an impressive. I found

this lady weaving/fixing her web for the night. She gave me

a quick "gracias" for the insects landing in it because

of my torch beam.

Rana sp? Can a frog person help?

And I guess this is a Litoria sp.

This chica was a lot more orange when I took

this, I swear.

One of the highlights of the walk was when I walked past a tree to find a baby bird sitting in front of me. I called Adam and Mario, and at first he was arguing that it was an adult until he saw the fluffy feathers, at which point he nearly wet his pants with excitement. When you get a guide of 24 years excited about something, you know it must be uncommon!

If Mario is to be believed, this is a young

Rufous-tailed hummingbird, which is another

great catch!

I also spotted a lizard in a bush which I thought was an emerald basilisk until I realised the crest was upside down (my way of saying he has a saggy chin bit - ie dewlap). We had seen a Green iguana from a distance that morning, but this was the first encounter! Green iguanas grow to quite an impressive size, so this one was only young and Mario felt quite happy to yoink it out of its comfy bush to let some annoying tourists hold it. Yay :)

Adam being all brave.

He was being a wigglepot so I had to let him

snuggle into my hand, which made for a bad

photo. Still, iguana!

To top off the night, we got back to our room to find a mudcrab nestled in our pile of floor clothes. Though hilarious, it was a merciful reminder that we should maybe not leave things on the floor, as wandering spiders are Costa Rica's answer to huntsmen, and if they bite, apparently you'll be begging the hospital staff to amputate the limb out of pain. Or you'll be dead. Sort of a toss-up. I've remembered to tap out my boots ever since.

Floor clothes crab!

This is floor clothes crab up close. He popped

in to say "Hola amigos! Aren't you glad I'm not

a wandering spider? You should probably

remember that next time you floor clothes."

And then we made him say adios and scuttle out

the door.

That's all for now, chicos! I'll be getting day two up as soon as I can, consisting of the canal tour (toucans and caiman a plenty!) and a detailed description of the sea turtles nesting, maybe with diagrams! (No cameras allowed! A bittersweet rule!) Also meet our first two-toed sloth on Tortuguero, episode two.

Blagging out!