Tortugero & the Journey

We (me, Brenda & Shea- let’s call it a haphazardly assembled trio- full of contradiction) arrived here yesterday evening after a semi-insane day of bus travel. Brenda & I started the day, after a little coffee & cake that is, at the Jade Museum, where we proceeded to get jaded out, a good thing of course.

We had arrived in San Jose after a lovely visit to Tortugero, where many tourists come to watch the Green sea turtles nesting. The park has worked out a pretty efficient & relatively low impact way for tourists to observe the actual nesting, park scouts are posted on the beach with their red lights, they locate the turtles & then radio guides from the town who are in charge of getting the tourists to the turtles in a polite & safe manner. The turtles will turn around & not lay their eggs if they are confronted with lights, they will also not bury the eggs well if they are interrupted in the nesting process, but they go into some kind of a trance when they are actually laying the eggs & people are generally able to gather around the “business end” without causing problems.

These turtles were pretty amazing, I think the holes that they dig impressed me the most, they are just about Volkswagen bug sized, dug with flippers that obviously (well obvious when your are watching the process) are much better suited to the sea than the land.

Brenda & I discussed the ethics of this turtle watching phenomena, as we both had some mixed feelings of a sort of invasive voyeurism etc. But these turtles were facing extinction without a different understanding & interpretation of them & their importance in the world- by Ticos & foreigners alike. They have always been important to the native people but in order to preserve the species it has been necessary to perceive the significance of & challenges to their long-term survival. In a way, the turtles support Tortugero & Tortugero supports the turtles. This is not to say that I don’t have concerns about this tiny town on the canal & it’s impacts, with the heavy tourist traffic. Two-stroke engines abound on the canals & I don’t feel too assured that the sewage treatment facilities of this narrow strip of land are equipped for the amount of traffic present. But this is all constantly a work in progress & Costa Rica & its people have shown an amazing concern & ability to adapt & work in order to protect its amazing natural wealth.