Costa Rica Day 7

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Daryl's neighbor is a licensed guide and the local representative for Taca airlines. For $15, he'll take you in his black and red riverboat out to the mouth of Rio Tortuguero and guide you along the paths up the side of Cerro Tortuguero, which, in addition to being fun to say, is a very old volcano, rounded off into a large dome covered in thick secondary growth.

I think his name was Victor. His eyes are even sharper than Daryl's, and his affection for and joy at everything he sees is plain on his face. He's like a little kid, except for the big machete strapped to his leg and the scars on his arms.

Tegin and I tell him that we've come to Costa Rica not for the birds, as is typical, but for the reptiles and amphibians; specifically, the poison dart frog. He obliges by going out of his way to find for us every creepy, slimy, disgusting or just straight-up horrifying animal he can.

Like most other guides we encounter in Costa Rica, he starts us off by giving a quick capsule history of the area as we walk along a path, including information we've already heard elsewhere about the logging industry and the rise of eco-tourism as the chief economic force in Costa Rica. Then he turns to us, his face and hat covered in mosquitoes, and says, "I want to show you something." Then he pulls out his machete and walks into the jungle.

He takes us to a giant fig tree. Its roots are buttressed up to my chest. "This is one of my favorite trees," he says, "One of the only primary growth trees left. Oh look! A frog!"

Among the creatures he showed us were three species of bats (including the cutest animals in the entire world), one of those crazy butterflies that looks like an owl's face for some reason, parrots, and a bunch of arthropods too horrible to contemplate, though I am about to.

First among these were the golden orb weaver spiders - some of them larger across than a full span of my hand (8.5 inches, for those playing at home). These gigantic fuckers build complex, multilayered webs, and often cluster together, creating a mass of webbing occupied by a half dozen spiders big enough to comfortably grip the top of my head and lift me, screaming, into the trees. These things occasionally feed on birds and small bats. Thankfully, they lack the terrifying habit of building their webs directly across trails like their North American cousin the Pumpkin Spider (horrid bane of my youthful California Octobers).

Other spiders included a couple Funnel-Web Spiders and a black and white jumping spider about an inch long. Victor insisted that the area of the cerro in which these jumping spiders seemed to congregate was his favorite place to stop and rest. Indeed, the view was incredible, but my frantic efforts to keep Tegin between me and the spiders hampered my appreciation of the view.

Finally, there was my personal favorite, the Bullet Ant. These guys are dark red, and get to about an inch long, heavy enough that when one falls from a leaf to the ground, it makes an audible thud. They are famous for having the most painfully debilitating sting of any insect. Victor tells us that he has been stung once, and it was the most painful thing he has ever experienced. He says he couldn't use his right arm for about three weeks after a sting in the lower forearm, but that the really awful pain only lasted a day.

Victor wants us to see how vicious these guys are, so he finds one, and taps it on the skull until it's pissed off enough to sting the leaf it's crawling on. Then he scampers off into the jungle to show us the hollowed-out fig tree you can climb up the inside of.


God, what a cheesy note. I think I wrote it down after Tegin and I strolled through Tortugero Village and saw a hoard of tourists. About a kilometer upriver from the village are a series of resorts. Travelers with more money and less inclination to find interesting places to stay come to Tortuguero and stay at the resorts, where they can be isolated from Spanish speakers and stray dogs. Private boats deliver them to the village at a dock in front of a big souvenir shop. The dock is one of the few concrete structures in the village. At one point a decade ago or longer, it was painted bright blue, and decorated with big, bright parrot statues. Weather has beat the bright paint off the cement, leaving flecks of blue and pink on the white concrete. Local kids sell flowers, and sit around waiting to have their pictures taken.

Walking past the big souvenir shop at the right time of day, you can hear half a dozen languages. German, Russian, three brands of English, European-accented Spanish, and so on. Most other places in the village, you'll hear natives switching between English and Spanish, and the odd Dutch backpacker trying to make sense of his tour book with the help of an American father of three.


My notes for this day appear to go in reverse chronology. Earlier on in the day, Tegin and I rented a canoe and spent a couple of hours cruising around the canals that branch off the Rio Torguero, which is wide and deep enough that rowing upriver isn't too difficult.

The challenge, for us, was remembering which end of the canoe the heavier person was supposed to go in, and who was in charge of steering. Crew tension was occasionally high as we helpless rammed deadfalls along the banks of the river, and ran aground on sandbars running off the downstream edges of the many islands that cut the river in pieces. Were it not for the threat of crocodiles, there may have been a genuine mutiny.


Well, not exactly. The chickens wake up first. They make a lot of noise, which wakes up the dogs, who start barking. The barking dogs upset the iguanas and geckos. The former begin their days by plunging headlong through the trees, falling on rooftops, and the latter by chirping like an Yngwie Malmsteen bridge. This appears to wake up the engines of the larger boats out on the river. This wakes me up, which wakes up Tegin.