John & Allison's Adventures Down South: More Costa Rica

Well since my last blog we have walked into Tamarindo multiple times, I've gone scuba diving twice, we went on a tour in Palo Verde National Park, went to see turtles come ashore to look for nesting sites to lay their eggs, walked south on Langosta beach and had supper at a Tico diner operated by our trusty cab driver René's wife Corina. We have spent numerous hours enjoying the lovely swimming pool oasis at the condo, cooling ourselves after baking in the Costa Rican heat.
It takes us about 10 minutes to walk to our cut through path to Playa Grande which is the beach that runs in front of the small, but very tourist busy, town of Tamarindo. We walk along the road which is unpaved throughout the area called Langosta, where our condo is located. It is really dusty and many of the drivers have no problem driving quickly and kicking up plenty of dust. Cough, cough...
It had been really windy also the last few days and the dust was just awful! It would swirl up and our balcony was given a dust bath all day.
Yesterday a tanker truck came along and spread a watered down molasses mixture on the road. What a great idea! Not only does it do a marvellous job of stopping the dust, it's eco-friendly and smells pretty good too. It does stick to your shoes a little but because it's water soluble it washes off.
The tour to Palo Verde National Park was a river tour. We had about a 45 minute ride and guide told us about the park and answered any questions we had along the way. There were a family from Vancouver and a mother and son from New York with us. We stopped along the way as the guide had spotted some Howler monkeys in the trees beside the road. He could imitate the sound the males make and had them all howling in no time.
We got on one of the covered boats at the park and went down the river and then up the river a bit both ways and saw large iguanas, bats, crocodiles, and numerous shore birds.
After our boat tour we were taken to a local restaurant for a typical Costa Rican meal of chicken, rice, beans, mixed vegetables, corn tortillas with grilled beef and salad. It was really delicious. We were then served a popsicle made of sweetened condensed milk. Kind of good but kind of weird.
After lunch we stopped at a local potters workshop and store to watch a short demonstration and purchase a piece if we wanted.
A couple and their little boy (16 months old), from Yellowknife, and the husband's brother, from Ft. St. John, moved into the condo next to ours for a week and we made friends with them. I found out that the two fellows were also scuba enthusiasts and were hoping to do some diving while in Costa Rica.
We found a dive centre, Tamarindo Diving, that looked good and booked a dive. It was really good. The water was super warm and the visibility was nice. A couple on the boat that dove these waters all the time said that was the best visibility that they had ever experienced there! We saw lots of large schools of fish, a good number of rays, some morays and colourful small fishes.
The owner/operator of Tamarindo Diving is another Italian. There are plenty of Italians here who operate businesses as we have found out.
Any way, Davide is a very good dive instructor/guide and runs a safe but still really fun dive operation. I booked another dive with them and had great luck seeing my first sharks, other than Nurse sharks just laying in the sand. 6 lovely White-tip Reef sharks were seen. Also a large school of Devil rays, several Spotted Eagle rays, a Spotted moray and again some large schools of fishes. The water was quite a bit colder these dives and the visibility was markedly less but good enough to see all that we did.
Our nighttime turtle watching tour was quite an adventure. We had met a fellow on the beach that was handing out business cards about doing this activity. Daniel was his name. At this point I need to mention, in case you don't know, that John is, shall I say, thrifty.... And since the Canadian dollar's slide into the tank, and that everything touristy is priced and based on the US dollar, John is always looking for the cheapest price. We had asked about the turtle watching at the management office and their price was $45. Well Daniel's was $35 so this is who we went with. We called and made arrangements and he said he would pick us up at 5:45pm. He was there right on time in a really beat up red Toyota Corolla. Now I'm thinking, "okay, here we go". And we did. He explained where we would go and how he and a couple of other friends use two way radios to find the beaches that turtles are coming up on. We drove out of Tamarindo and through Villarreal and through another village that I think he said was Huaca and then off the paved road onto a dirt road you can hardly imagine. It was winding through the forest and hills with huge lumps and bumps. Daniel said just as we turned onto it that we would now get a free "car massage" for 9 kms..... no kidding!
We did, however, meet up, surprisingly with a lot of other vehicles heading back the other way. There were also some condos and a couple of hotels/resorts along this hideous road so, what the heck!
At the first beach we walked a little way down and then in the distance and under the nearly full moon we saw the first of several turtles that would come up the beach. None of them stopped to dig nests and lay eggs that night though. Daniel said that they are just starting to nest, the Pacific Green sea turtles, and that this was usual behaviour. The turtles will come ashore several times looking for a suitable site before they will dig and lay their eggs.
At the first beach, shortly after we got there, several vans full of people coming to watch for turtles showed up and Daniel thought we would do better at another beach. We got back into the car and drove back down the road a bit and then parked on the side and were told we would walk over the mountain (a big hill actually) for about 15 minutes to the next beach. Quite an adventure walking down a winding path through the forest at night. Talk about hot and sweaty too! We were rewarded for our efforts though as we saw 5 more lovely turtles. Daniel was truly knowledgeable about all things turtle and explained how some local people will dig up the eggs to eat at cantinas as they are considered an aphrodisiac. :( He also said the park rangers will dig up nests and hatch the babies and then bring them back to be released from the beach they were laid at. He also mentioned that depending on the temperature the eggs are incubated would determine the sex of the turtles so they tend to incubate most of the eggs so that females hatch to try to increase the numbers, as all sea turtles are on the endangered species list. :((
When we returned to the car Daniel offered us some cold drinks, John got a beer so that made everything ok. The ride back to the pavement didn't seem as far as going in and we were back at the condo by about 10pm.
We have met and chatted with most of the people who have come and gone from the condos and enjoy speaking broken Spanish with our trusty and helpful daytime groundskeeper/maintenance and all round handy guy, Armando.