Greckles

Shabbat in Tortuguero
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Ahhhh... what a weekend.  Ashley (the girl from New York who I met in Puerto Viejo) and I went up to Tortuguero, a turtle sanctuary and national park on the northern end of the Carib coast, right up by the Nicaraguan border.  It was sort of a gametime decision: at first we were considering Bocas, then maybe Santa Teresa or somewhere on the Pacific side, and eventually I think we just settled on Tortuguero by default somehow.

Anyway, we left in the heat of Friday morning and took the three-hour bus to Cariari, where an hour-long bus took us to a dock in the middle of nowhere, where we were picked up by a boat and ferried for two hours all the way to Tortuguero, a tiny town that's accessible only by boat, plane, or a really, really good pair of rubber boots.  We found a great little hotel called Casa Marbella right on the Rio Tortuguero.  How did we find this place?  Well, when you get dropped off at the loading dock on one end of town and are told, "If you walk 300 meters in that direction, you reach the end of town," it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for.

What a canoe tour looks like
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At any rate, Casa Marbella comes highly recommended.  Breakfast was included--and halfway decent--and the owner, Daryl, arranged for us to have a canoe tour led by a former park ranger named Ross early the next morning.  Early meaning 6.  AM.  I couldn't possibly imagine why we needed to see foliage that early--after all, it wasn't like it was going anywhere--but reluctantly I agreed.  Ashley and I spent the rest of the evening making Shabbat, which I would have to imagine was a first for Tortuguero.  We went to the local grocery, bought two white candles, a bottle of red wine, and a sort of braided tort-cake-thing, and sat and had Shabbat out on the dock of our hotel.  It was a really cool thing to do, and one that I'm glad we made sure we did, just because after seeing so many other Shabbats around the world, we were able to take it upon ourselves to do it on our own.  I felt like an adult, I guess, and a bit of a pioneer.  Either way, it was a highlight.

Local kids eating sugar cane on "Main Street"
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The next morning, I was immediately glad we had chosen 6AM for the tour.  The heat of the afternoon would have melted us if we had been out in that canoe any later.  As it was, Ross took us out from 6 to about 8:30 or so, showing us plants, caimans (small crocodiles), birds, and describing it all to us in such complex, mind-addling scientific terms that it was just funny to listen to.  "Ah, if you look carefully at that brown lump in the water, that's an arithrospradicus mycerapod, a female by the looks of it.  That's not my favorite arithrospradicus though.  I find the glacinospores on it to be just a touch overwhelming, you know?"  All this while Ashley and I are biting our lips and trying to nod politely.  At one point, Ross actually said something along the lines of, "And that's a white-necked, long-beaked, semi-large kingfisher.  I hate common names, but unfortunately, it's the language of ornithology."  Riiiiight.

Me playing Tico soccer
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I think our favorite point was when he said, "A woman came down here to write a book on the fauna of Central America, and when I told her I had seen a greckle right outside the ranger station, she refused to believe me.  She came back three years later to visit again, and there, across my front lawn, were two greckles just humping along.  I said, 'See?  Now do you believe me?' "  You just had to hear the satisfaction in his voice at having seen three greckles and at showing up this poor author on some offhand comment she made years earlier, as if we even knew what a greckle was (we're thinking some sort of hardware adhesive).

Ashley playing hopscotch
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The tour, for all Ross's eccentricities, was terrific though.  He was very knowledgeable, and paddling silently through the canals, under the hanging vines and the sounds of the forest, was a real pleasure.  Headed back, had breakfast, and spent the rest of the day napping and wandering around town (something that took just about as long as you would expect a 300-meter town with no cars and no roads to take).  Did a quick hike through a walking portion of the park, which was impressive in its quantity of mosquitoes if nothing else, and then headed back for a local dinner and a bit of a rest.

Yesterday's travel day was pretty brutal, as we caught the 11am ferry to a 3pm Cariari to San Jose bus.  We were starving by the time we hit Cariari, and we had just enough time to grab a pizza and bring it to the bus station before we had to get on.  The thing was sweltering.  Literally must have been 110 degrees easy, and so we're sitting there, drenched in the heat and humidity, holding this steaming box of sauce and cheese, too hungry to stop ourselves from gorging and too hot to even go near it.  It was a really tough decision, but we pulled through and scarfed the pizza, wiping our fingers on the boxtop as a napkin substitute.  Certainly not me at my most refined, but it got the job done.

And so we pulled into the honking, screeching, and congested grid of San Jose once again last night, exhausted and filthy but altogether glad for such an impressive and unexpectedly adventurous and enjoyable weekend.  Almost as incredibly, I turned around today and realized that I have only eleven days left on this year-long journey.  Eleven days.  And just when I seem to be getting the hang of this traveling thing.  It's just like everything else though: the tunnel never seems as dark when you can see the light at the end of it.  High school, Colgate, Prague, it all seemed like an impossibly long and difficult road until I finished it, and then I turned around and said, "I really should have enjoyed myself more.  That was such a great time in my life, and look, it all worked out fine."  Eleven days to Snapple, Eggos, and a cell phone.  Crazy.

Oh, and pictures, as always, are up at:

community.webshots.com/user/marcswatson5