Slow creatures

For the first time, travel plans have gone slightly awry, so I have a little more time than expected to catch up on the blog, but only after a wonderful day amidst the slowest creatures nature has to offer.

We left Cahuita early yesterday and made a stop off for a great tour at a sloth sanctuary. Yes, you read that correctly. About a half hour south of Limon is a little place just off the highway that has dedicated itself to preserving sloths.

After seeing a couple sloths in trees from a long way away, it was nice to be able to get up close and see them, pet them. There's some video of the babies below if I worked this right. Sloths smile — who knew? The tour also included a canoe trip down a river, where we saw one sloth and a wide variety of birds, lizards and bugs.

But the main goal of the day was to find a way to the elusive Northern Caribbean coast. Once you get a few miles north of Limon, the coast is cut off from the mainland by a river, so it requires a boat to access. After 90 minutes in the car and another hour bumping along a road, we caught a water taxi to Parismina, the less known (but more easily accessed) cousin of the more famous Tortuguero.

After about an hour in this small fishing village, which has about 400 people, we learned a few important facts. First, the turtles come to the beach to lay their eggs at night. Second, a guide is required to take you along the beach. To protect from poachers, the police patrol the beach at night to protect the turtles, and they don't like to have strangers out there without someone from the town. Volunteers also come from all over the world to both Tortuguero and Parismina to help move the eggs, either to a hatchery or just around the beach, to keep them from the eager hands of the poachers.

We got extremely lucky with our guide. A young American woman (from Orcas Island, incidentally) was very helpful with information and also mentioned her boyfriend was one of the guides. It turns out her boyfriend, Jerry, is also one of the founding members of the group La Asociacion Salvemos Las Tortugas de Parismina (check out www.parisminaturtles.org for more info) and was a wealth of information during the tour.

We left shortly after 9 p.m. and, after walking along the beach (black sand, incidentally) for about an hour, we finally stumbled upon the biggest turtle I have ever seen, a leatherback looking for a place to lay her eggs. This creature was the size of a large coffee table and weighed about 800 pounds. She flopped around on the sand slowly, using her fins to dig holes in the sand. She never laid any eggs, but we spent an hour watching her until she returned to the sea.

We leave this morning on our way to Heredia.

Here is a video of some baby sloths (hit play below)