Tortuguero – Costa Rica Less Traveled

By: Vern Hobbs

Article Category: Get Out Of Town

Tortuguero, my happy home…

So goes the opening line of a song, seldom (if ever) heard beyond the banks of the Parisimina River in northeastern Costa Rica. Despite the tune’s anonymity, it holds a place in my heart.

In contrast to the popular tourist destinations and expatriate havens of Tamarindo, Puntarenas, and Quepos, Tortuguero might be best described as “the Costa Rica less-traveled.” This village of 500 residents owes its relative obscurity to its relative remoteness. Located near the Nicaraguan border on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, the village is accessible only by boat or light aircraft. This forced isolation has denied — some might say, spared — Tortuguero from the flood of tourism surging across the rest of Costa Rica. There is, however, an annual deluge of visitors that continues year after year just as it has forever. It was this frenzied annual migration that brought another Central Floridian to Tortuguero some five decades before our recent visit.

Each year, beginning as early as February and continuing well into October, thousands upon thousands of sea turtles seek out the muddy expanse of beach that lies between the mouths of the Tortuguero and Parisimina Rivers. Multitudes of loggerhead, hawksbill, leatherback, and the rare green sea turtle literally flock to this isolated seashore to dig their nests and lay their eggs.

While the number of turtles nesting here today may seem staggering, it pales in comparison to the amount counted as recently as a century ago. Stories abound and photographs exist that show it was literally possible to walk the length of Tortuguero’s beach by stepping from the back of one nesting turtle to the next. It was this preponderance, and more specifically, the decline of this preponderance, that brought University of Florida Professor and Naturalist Archie Carr to Tortuguero in the 1950s. Dr. Carr was already a preeminent scientist in the field of sea turtle study, but it was here, at Tortuguero, that he set out to become a preeminent force in their preservation.

By the mid-twentieth century unregulated commercial hunting of sea turtles had reduced nesting populations dramatically in Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper Caribbean. The Green Sea Turtle teetered on the brink of extinction, and the other varieties were sure to follow. As turtle populations declined, commercial hunting began to concentrate toward the few places where nesting continued on a large scale — places like Tortuguero. Dr. Carr, a lifelong scholar and teacher, believed that while protective legislation was vital, education was the best hope for saving sea turtles. In 1959 he helped establish the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of sea turtles and their habitat through research, education and advocacy.

The long process of educating people about the plight of sea turtles, Dr. Carr reasoned, should begin right in Tortuguero, a village whose very existence relied on the hunting of turtles. Little by little, and often one by one, Dr. Carr and his associates changed the villagers’ perceptions of the turtle, convincing them over time that a live turtle was more valuable than a dead one. The message spread. In 1970, the government of Costa Rica established the 46,900-acre, Tortuguero National Park, restricting turtle hunting to a subsistence level and protecting the nesting beaches. The Caribbean Conservation Corporation soon expanded its influence, and today is the largest such organization in the Atlantic Basin.

Our journey to Tortuguero began aboard an air-conditioned motor coach in Costa Rica’s cosmopolitan capitol, San Jose. The quicker option would have been a flight on Nature Air, a regional airline serving Tortuguero. The bus ride from San Jose, however, traversed the Braulio Carrillo National Park and included a stop at the Rainforest Aerial Tramway for a thirty-minute ride through the treetops of the jungle canopy.

Since there are no roads in or out of Tortuguero, the bus ride was only the first leg of our adventure. At the village of Matina, near the industrial port of Limon, we transferred from the comfortable coach onto a pair of open boats called “pangas” by the locals. Our English-fluent guide informed us that we would, for the next several hours, be coursing our way northward through a network of rivers and waterways that roughly paralleled the Caribbean coast.

“Oh, just like the Banana River,” I remarked confidently.

WRONG! In stark contrast to our tranquil, coastal lagoons, these waterways are deep, swift rivers that drain an immense volume of water from the vast rain forests of the interior. Our intrepid boatmen carefully navigated upstream against strong currents, dodging submerged logs and other hazards while our well informed guide described the amazing bio-diversity slipping past on either shore. Curious birds, such as the architecturally-talented orapendola and the multi-colored toucan of Fruit Loops fame, were abundant. Occasionally, a troop of howler monkeys could be seen — and definitely heard — high in the treetops. As we progressed further north, the sporadically cleared lands of subsistence farmers became less prevalent as the landscape took on a much more jungle-like character.

The sign, declaring in both Spanish and English that were entering the Tortuguero National Park, was a welcome sight. Our long boat ride was almost over and our destination was near. We passed the village just as night was beginning to fall, and continued another mile or so to Laguna Lodge, our home for the next few days.

Laguna is one of seven lodges located just north of Tortuguero, all catering to the growing number of eco-tourists that come to explore the park and to witness the annual turtle nesting frenzy. Our accommodations were in cozy but spacious cabins situated around the lush, tropically landscaped, and impeccably maintained grounds. Meals, unfailingly delicious, included in the price and served buffet style, were taken under the thatched roof of the open-air dining hall. Evening entertainment consisted of gatherings around the fire pit where stories were told and friendships begun. One night, a local musical trio performed their repertoire of folk songs, including “Tortuguero, My Happy Home.”

Guided tours into the park departed the lodge twice daily with specialized tours focusing on specific types of animal and plant life. The village of Tortuguero, site of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation’s research and education center, was just a twenty-minute walk away down the famous nesting beach to which the village owes its fame.

The things we saw amazed us: exotic birds, including the rare green and vivid scarlet macaws; colorful, poisonous frogs; doll-faced capuchin monkeys, and their noisy cousins, the howlers. There were some disappointments: we arrived few weeks too early for turtle nesting and, sorry, no jaguar sightings to report. But what touched us most was Tortuguero itself: a tiny village sandwiched between a raging sea and a wide, deep river inhabited by a gentle and welcoming people who once hunted sea turtles to near extinction, but is now, thanks to the patient teachings of one dedicated Floridian, a place which has vowed to preserve them forever.

…Tortuguero, my happy home. From Tortuguero may I never roam…

To learn more, read “The Windward Road,” by Archie Carr