Do you know the feeling when you are on vacation and you don’t know if you are ripped off or everything is as it should be?
Generally, Costa Rica is a safe country, you are not being hassled, bargaining really is not a thing, 10% tipping is already included in the bill and nobody expects more, communication is straight forward and reliable and whatever you paid in advance will not vanish somewhere.
What is sort of vague is the value that you get out of guide services. As mentioned above, guides for some activities, like birding or mountain climbing, definitely make sense. And I also talked about prefering more private settings compared to group approaches.
But then you have a location like Tortuguero where everything is about tourism – in a good sense as they really make an effort to do this in an eco sustainable way. On the other hand you will get a lot of offers of what you can do, but cannot really judge how good it will be. The last two days we did a canoe tour and a jungle hike with a guide who worked for the hotel we are staying in. The hotel manager warned us before that there are a lot of useless guides in Tortuguero.
We were not impressed. He made up stories that I either knew right away were wrong or were highly suspicious and later research resulted in refutation. He had a good eye for wildlife, but the missing expertise left a stale taste. But it was inexpensive.
Then we decided to go today for a specific bird tour and this time the guide really knew a bit about birds, not Jonathan level, but ok. But apart from the fact that he was 30 minutes late, he had also combined our tour with the tour of two other couples who hadn’t signed up for a bird tour. And non-birders are really not that persistent when it is about waiting half an hour to see a little green bird.
Nevertheless, one new lifer, a Sulfur-bellied Flycatcher, came out of that tour but I had to do the work of spotting and identifying.
It was an enjoyable, though expensive, tour. I think there is just no way to guarantee that everything will be perfect and the secret is to enjoy imperfections as well. And it’s definitely complaining on a high level, we saw so many birds and other animals up close again.
For the afternoon our plan was to chill at the beach and jump in the waves. We wanted to travel light and left everything but the key at the hotel. I even remarked to Chris that this is risky as in the orni world stories about birders who went out without their binoculars just to get milk around the corner are many.
The birder’s nightmare happened to me.
Chris and I had a good swim, we came out of the water, sat on a tree trunk, knutschen, and then my cruel wife asks the question, “These birds look strange, what are they?”
Dark brown, flight pattern irregular, intermediate form between a tern and a jaeger, I had no idea. Quick thinking is my strength and the priorities were clear, I dashed back to the hotel and directed Chris to convince the birds not to fly away.
Chris delivered and this is the best picture I got, but good enough to feed Merlin Bird ID amd get Brown Noddy as a result. Rarely seen at the coast as they are usually over the open ocean and breed on small islets.
Birding is stressful, but so much fun.
Anyway, I had the camera out and could shoot some more beach photos.
What a successful early afternoon.
Still one more thing to do, we wanted to rent a kayak for the sunset offer (5-6pm, 10$ for 2). On the way we got our first perfect look at a spider monkey and they are true to their name. They use their tail as a fifth extremity, for example they can hang heads down on their tail and gather food with hands and feet. Impressive! They are also the most audacious jumpers and we were treated with an acrobatic jump of at least 5 m across the street over our heads.
The good thing about the sunset offer is that you have the water and the mangroves to yourself and can float silently through the jungle without pressure.
We saw our largest caiman so far.
And then close to the end Chris discovered this beautiful heron – one that we had not seen before and actually a pretty rare or at least rarely seen one.
Finally we made our way out again and returned to Tortuguero for a nice dinner and beer – cheers to Chris for discovering two lifers for the list.
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