carl

Today was Marcos’ birthday. He’s our bus driver, and according to our guide Paul, “The second best driver in Costa Rica. The first best is in jail.” Many times Marcos proved his skill at maneuvering the huge Mercedes bus.

Happy Birthday, Marcos!

I wish I wrote down the name of the place we stopped for lunch, the food was great plus they had a nice butterfly garden out back. It’s near the town of Guapiles, and it’s exactly here: N 10.20316667, W 83.77471000.

Butterfly

Morphos wing detail

The plant is called “Labios de Puta”, or in more polite English: “Hot Lips.” It makes more sense before the blue berries appear.

Passion Flower

Around 2pm we stopped at a Del Monte banana plantation and learned about the entire banana pipeline, from growing through picking to sorting and packing.

While on the tree, the bananas are encased in blue plastic bags. The bags protect the bananas from predators and damage, and also keep them from being sprayed by the insecticides.

Wild bananas (not at the plantation)

Tame bananas (at the plantation)

Once cut from the trees, they are hauled in trains of about 30 bunches suspended from an overhead cable system. The guys who do the pulling are among the more highly paid workers, and when you watch them do this grueling work you understand why.

Hauling bananas

Once at the processing area, the ‘hands’ are separated from the main stalk and floated down a pool to workers who cut them into smaller bunches and sort them for quality. Level 1 bananas are exported to the US and Europe, Level 2 bananas (which are smaller and may have small scars) are sold for baby food or pig food, and Level 3 bananas are discarded. You can buy a banana in Costa Rica for a few cents.

Banana staging

The ‘hands’ are cut off the stalk and thrown into a water stream, where they’re cleaned as they float to the next step.

These women cut the hands down to smaller bunches and sort them. It was amazing how fast they were.

Next to the processing area a few vendors were selling miscellaneous items, including fresh coconuts. I would guess this little guy got his share.

Meanwhile, back amongst the banana trees, the leaf cutters are hard at work.

Another hour of bus travel down country roads from the banana plantation is Parismina, where we offloaded from the bus, said goodbye (for now) to Marcos, and boarded a boat for the hour and a half ride to Laguna Lodge. We’ll be at the lodge for the next two days.

Parismina is the end of the road at the Caribbean Sea. From there, everyone travels by boat, like these locals.

The view out the window of the taxi, as we zipped up the Tortuguero River.

More locals, out for a spin.

The Princesa del Rio, chugging along.

After dinner that night, I went on a frog hike. I didn’t find any, but I almost walked into this lady. She was hanging from the canopy at about knee height. If my flashlight didn’t catch her I would have walked right into it – and that would have kind of freaked me out. Her leg span is about 4″. After I took this shot I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back she was gone. So was I.

The Princesa del Cielo, hanging around.

After breakfast this morning we visited with the resident spider, who lives on a 3 foot wide web just outside the breakfast area. She was the same type as I saw last night, which leads me to assume that they’re not too dangerous. She was busy repairing her web from, one must imagine, a busy night.

Fixing her web.

Split into three groups of about 15 each, we loaded into open tour boats for our first visit with the Tortuguero wild life. In a short amount of time we had already spotted more birds that I could keep track of, giant iguanas, spider monkeys and howler monkeys. The tour lasted about two hours, so we had time to go deep back into some of the canals and listen to the sounds of the rain forest.