mattbell

After Santa Elena, we entered the totally unstructured plan-as-you-go portion of the trip. We decided to make a very trnasportation-intensive trip out to Paquera, the Curu Reserve, and Tortuga Island.

Tortuga Island (not to be confused with Tortugero, the gathering place of the sea turtles) is a small island with an idyllic sandy beach. On the weekends it's apparently overrun with day-trippers from San Jose, but during the week it's very sparsely populated. The water there was welcomingly warm, at least for the first couple of meters, and the surrounding landscape was beautiful. However, I made the shocking discovery here that unless I hold my lungs very full, I no longer float in water... not even seawater. Apparently I have very little body fat now.

We got the chance to do some snorkeling there as well. The variety of fish life was stunning but the water was too murky to make viewing conditions ideal. The water's murkiness also made diving while snorkeling a bit disorienting because it was impossible to see the surface of the water as I was coming back up.

On land, we extensively explored a mangrove swamp and rainforest. The adaptation of the mangrove is fantastic -- it can grow in shallow salt water, enabling an ecological process that turns shallow tide pools into land. They also make for some nice abstract art. The Curu reserve also contains several colonies of monkeys and the pet monkey mentioned in an earlier entry.