Return from Tortuguero (by Cindy)

This is the last post in the Tortuguero trip series. (We promise!)

The night before our return home from Tortuguero, we went to bed ready for a good night’s sleep before our early morning breakfast and departure.

Almost as soon as we went to bed, we heard a noise outside the cabin. The noise was from an animal, and when we compared notes the next morning, we both used the word “distressed” to describe the sound. John thought it might have been a baby bird, and I thought maybe an insect, but “distressed” we both agreed on.

Our cabin had screened windows all around. The windows had curtains you could pull across for privacy, but you couldn’t close the windows to shut out noise. The previous night it hadn’t been a problem – the quiet sounds of the jungle had been soothing, and the morning noises from the howler monkeys weren’t an entirely unpleasant sound to wake up to. But, this night, that distressed sound was keeping us both awake. I began to hope that whatever was causing that thing to be distressed would be relieved of its misery, either by its mother, a mate, or a predator, so it would just shut up!

I got my wish when the big storm blew in. It was fierce – pounding rain, lightning, thunder, everything!  Our cabin roof was metal, so the sound of the rain was amplified. Again, there was no way to shut the windows. I was somewhat worried the rain might come in, so I got up and checked around the cabin for possible rain infiltration. Fortunately, the angle of cabin roof was designed to keep the rain out. The electricity in the cabin never went out, but the lights on the walkways around the cabins did.

The storm turned to just rain and, in the morning, we rolled out of bed exhausted. At least we didn’t have to do anything but eat breakfast and catch our transportation home. We knew we’d be doing the journey in the opposite order from when we arrived. First, we would take the 1 ½ hour boat ride (with luggage sent on a separate boat), catch the bus when we landed, a stop at the same restaurant for another buffet lunch with rice, and then back to San José.

The rain stopped completely before the boat came to pick us up. Our lodge was the first stop for the boat pick-up, which meant that the Spanish-speaking Ken and Barbie couple and the two of us had our choice of seats. The four of us chose to sit up front, since we had been forced to be at the back on the way to Tortuguero. Bernardo, our guide, climbed aboard, also.

The boat then drove a short distance to the next lodge to pick up the remaining passengers. It looked like there was possibly two tour groups. Several people from one of the tour groups boarded the boat. The other passengers milled around the dock. There was an older couple seated on a bench. Frankly, neither of them looked in particularly good health, but the woman was leaning forward, and I heard her say she was having chest pains.

From out of nowhere, a man and woman with the words “Tourista Policia” on the back of theirs shirts magically appeared on the dock. I have no idea when/how they arrived, but they had a bag and started tending to the woman with chest pains. Other people from the tour group also were huddled around and seemed to be attempting to offer their assistance. The rest of us in the boat continued to wait. After about 15 minutes, the woman stood up, and announced that she was feeling much better. At that point, everyone in the group boarded the boat, including the woman. Our tour guide, Bernardo, went to the back of the boat to sit with the members of that group.

Before the boat departed, the guide for the last group came on board, stood next to where we were sitting, looked toward the back of the boat, and addressed his tour group. “This is for the Guide1 Group,” he started. “We just had an event. But when I say to everyone else, get on the boat, you are to get on the boat. I understand that family would want to stay and that is OK, but for everyone else, when I say to get on the boat, you need to get on the boat. It is for your safety and security.” 

That was a little awkward and uncomfortable, but then it took an even weirder turn as he went on. “If you don’t like me to be your tour guide, then that is fine. You can call the tour company and they will be happy to send another guide for you. But for now you need to please do as I request.  Does everyone understand?” There were several acknowledgements of agreement from the back of the boat.

I turned to John and whispered, “I don’t think this is the first incident with that tour guide and this group. Perhaps this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”   John nodded. On the boat ride, Bernardo continued to sit with the majority of the Guide1 group, and the Guide1 tour leader sat at the front of the boat. The guide from the other group we picked up was also seated near the front of the boat.

After that, our boat departed for the 1 ½ hour boat ride. I had mentioned to John earlier that the ride hadn’t seemed like 1 ½ hours when we came to Tortuguero. That was a jinx! The boat ride back seemed even longer than 1 ½ hours. We’d already had a departure delay and when we were on the river, it appeared muddier with a stronger current, we were heading upstream, and the driver seemed to be careful to avoid branches sticking up from the water. Maybe this was due to the storm the night before or maybe it was because we were in the front of the boat and could see more.

All of us, cameras ready, strained to see wildlife along the way. The two English ladies seated behind John and me were pointing out every bird. “Oh, look there’s a bird there,” the first would say. The second would say, “I didn’t see it, what was it?” and the first would respond, “I don’t know – it was all brown.” (Just like almost every other bird in the world, I would think to myself.)

Probably because it was now sunny, we saw a lot of the Jesus Christ lizards basking in the sun along the banks. “Oh look, there’s a Jesus Christ lizard,” someone would say, and everyone would turn and point their cameras/phones at it.  After a while, I just turned to John and said, “Jesus Christ, it’s another lizard.”

The lady across from John and me was from the now infamous Guide1 group. She commented, “It looks like everything’s on the other side of the boat (where it was sunnier). Maybe they’re drying off.”  The other tour guide (not hers) patiently explained that lizards are cold-blooded and need to regulate their body temperature in the sun. OMG, I thought to myself, how does she not know that?  We’d already heard all about her as she talked to another woman from the group – she lived in Maryland, she had two grown children, both on the east coast that she drove to see, yada, yada, yada…  Perhaps my lack of sleep was beginning to affect my attitude?

Finally we reached the sand dirt beach and departed the boat.

I noticed that the same two “Tourista Policia” had magically appeared again, as well. They weren’t on our boat. How did they do that?

We said goodbye to Bernardo, and gave him a tip.  The main tour guide from the bus on the way to Tortuguero met us and said, “you need to get on the bus.” John and I were both dying to go to the bathroom but there seemed to be a sense of urgency in his request so we dutifully climbed aboard. Perhaps our boat’s departure delay was a problem. Well, boarding the bus right away was a mistake. No one else did, and we waited for another at least 10 minutes before everyone else got on board and we started our bus ride to the restaurant. There was a baño on the bus if it came to that, but, well, eewwh!

While the bus was driving to the restaurant, the main tour guide approached us and asked where we were going. We replied, Escazú Village in Escazú. He asked for the address, and we gave him the standard “frente al Walmart de Escazú”.  The tour guide walked a short distance down the aisle, spoke into his cell phone loud enough for us and many others to hear, and repeated Escazú Village and the address. He then went on to say, “they speak English.” Then he came back and asked again where we were going and the address. We repeated it. He then repeated it into the phone. He then came back to us and said, “the bus will meet a driver. His name is Chala (or something similar), and he speaks English.”  We nodded in understanding. We also heard him say to the person at the other end of the phone that they didn’t have a lot of passengers and they were making good time so thought we would be there around 2:00 p.m. The tour guide then returned to his seat in the front of the bus and I could hear him talking to someone, presumably the bus driver, repeating “Escazú Village” several more times, for whatever reason.

We stopped for our buffet lunch at the same restaurant that we had on our way to Tortuguero. The Spanish-speaking Ken and Barbie couple who had been with us the entire trip ate at our table – that was a first. At the lodge we were assigned table seating by cabin number, like at camp or on a cruise ship, and even though both of us were the only ones at our respective tables, we were not assigned to the same table. Up until now they had been friendly in a distant sort of way – acknowledging our presence with smiles and nods, but no conversation at all. At this point, I just had to say something. I mean we had been with them for two days now, counting all of the included and optional tours, and the zipline adventure!

I made an attempt at conversation in Spanish. As per usual, I started out with my apologies for not speaking Spanish, but said we were learning, and asked them where they were going next. “Ken” responded in English. It turns out his English was much better than our Spanish, although that’s not a high bar. He told us where they were going in Costa Rica and then the next month they were going to California and Utah in the US. We told them we moved to Costa Rica, which surprised them. And … except for an attempt to explain the dessert, that was the end of the conversation. 

Where were they from?  They never told us, but I thought I had overheard in one of their conversations they might have been from Spain. Their names?  Well, there wasn’t even that level of interest to find that out about each other, although I thought I had overheard her name was “Ana” when we were doing the zipline.  I did figure out their names after we returned home. The woman from the hotel had written the zipline phone number for us on the back of their bar tab (not a credit card receipt, just internal to the lodge), and it had their room number and names. The Spanish couple’s names were Ivan and Ana (not Ken and Barbie) . Oh, and as many times as we had walked behind them, I had noticed that they had corresponding tattoos on their ankles. Hers was a crown, the letter “Q” and a red heart, stacked one on the other. His was a crown, the letter “K” and a heart. They were an attractive couple, very photogenic, as we saw from some of the zip line pictures that got slipped in with ours, and well, maybe there was a reason why the four of us didn’t really mesh.

After lunch we had time to walk around a bit before the bus took off again. We knew better than to rush onto the bus at the designated time, and the bus driver hadn’t opened it back up again, anyway. The main tour guide was looking for a sloth that hangs out in the trees around the restaurant to show it to the English bird ladies. He asked the gate guard where it might be and was pointed to its location in a tree. Maybe it was a sloth, but they could just have easily glued fur around a soccer ball, wedged it in the tree, and called it a sloth, for what it looked like to us. Still, we counted it as our second sloth sighting.

Not too many of the people from the bus re-boarded it after lunch.  They were presumably off to other destinations. There were a few other vans in the gravel parking area that must have been there for them. The bus then drove on with the remainder of its passengers to a car rental place. At this point, everyone but John and I got off the bus!  In hindsight, this was a tour, and everyone on the tour were tourists. The difference between the rest of them and us, is that they don’t live in Costa Rica. They had already been to San José and were going off to other tourist destinations. We were the only ones who cared about going back to San José because we were the only other ones besides the tour guide and the bus driver that lived in Costa Rica.

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The bus driver came back and told us that we could change seats to be more comfortable. John and I already each had a row to ourselves. We didn’t think we needed to change. He then said there was more room at the back of the bus. We found one row that was next to a wheelchair access on the bus, with an unbelievable amount of much legroom (more than the expensive seats on the airplane)!  We were thrilled and sat down and stretched our legs.

The 50-seat bus started the journey back to San José with the bus driver, the main tour guide and the two of us. The bus would have to get back to San José to bring new tourists back the next day, so it wasn’t like it was only going there for just for us, but still, it seemed a bit weird to be sitting alone in the otherwise empty bus.

We caught up with the rain in the mountains of the national park. Oh boy!  The bus driver was confident in his driving skills compared to others on the road, as we seemed to be going at a faster clip than other vehicles and passing them. We hoped that there were two lanes going each direction when the passing was taking place, so that we were just in the faster lane (rather than crossing into the oncoming traffic around curves in the mountains in the rain). Not sure if it was better or worse that we were in the back so we couldn’t exactly see everything. We buckled our seat belts.

After a while, the traffic slowed down. There was too much traffic trying to get through the mountains to pass other vehicles and the rain was coming down hard, so the bus was forced to reduce its speed to a crawl. I noticed that 2:00 p.m. came and went and wondered if the van driver was waiting somewhere in the rain for us to appear.  We continued on, finally making it through the mountains and into the San José area. At one point the bus stopped and the tour guide ran from the bus and into a waiting car, using his jacket to protect his head from the rain.

And now there were three of us on that big bus – the bus driver and us (still in the back), and on we went. At about 4:00 p.m. the bus stopped again. This was for us, obviously, as there wasn’t anyone else to drop off. We made our way to the front of the bus and met our English-speaking van driver that was going to take us back to Escazú Village. His first words were, “I don’t speak good English. Where you going?”   All I could think to myself was the number of times I had heard the main tour guide repeat “Escazú Village in Escazú” into the phone on the call over four hours ago! You can find Escazú Village in Google Maps or any other map application. They use those kinds of apps here, as they are necessary because there aren’t “real” addresses in Costa Rica. We said it was frente al Walmart in Escazú, which in the past has provided clarity to anyone else we have to explain it to. Not to this guy, who responded with, “there are many Walmarts in Escazú.”  OK, I don’t mean to know Escazú better than a native, but there aren’t many Walmarts in Escazú. There is only one with the actual Walmart name. (Interesting fact, there are three brand stores that are owned by Walmart in Costa Rica – Palí, Mas x Menos and Walmart. Walmart is actually the “high-end” store.)

 John brought up Google Maps on his phone and showed him where Escazú Village was located. The driver brightened when he saw the Wyndham Gardens hotel that was nearby. He knew where that was!  (Note that we are the only ones with a smart device. The driver did not have one.)

Our luggage was loaded onto the van, and off we went. It was still raining and getting dark as we drove through streets in downtown San José. It felt like we were driving through any other big city. In some ways it reminded me of the narrower streets in New York.

After a while we were on highway 27, and the driver took the exit for Wyndham Gardens. It would have been quicker to take the exit just before that one, that went right to Walmart, but we weren’t going to make an issue of it. Once he had exited, we needed him to take the round-about and go under the highway, then make a couple of quick lefts to get to Escazú Village. We’ve walked this route, and it isn’t that far. We were doing a lot of pointing and saying “aquí” (here).  We really need to learn how to give directions in español. Hopefully that’s coming up soon in our Spanish classes.

It was dinner time when we got back home. We capped off the trip with dinner at our Johnny Rocket’s in Escazú Village. Nothing sounded better than taking the elevator downstairs to grab a burger and fries – no buffet and no rice!