My daughter has been nagging us to go to Costa Rica ever since she was there a year ago. So now we’ve gone and come back, and I have to compliment her taste: what a wonderful country!
I can’t do show and tell about all the fascinating things we did, but here are a few:
We started at Playa Flamingo in the northwest; lovely beach, no undertow. Very lazy day, until sunset, under a gibbous moon, we set out to try and find a green turtle laying her eggs. We actually weren’t fussy; we’d take leatherbacks, too.
It took about 4 hours to find a turtle; we were about to give up when our guide motioned us over. He’d found one. Her head was in a sandbank, and she was digging a hole with her hind flippers. He placed a small infra-red light behind the hole, so we could see, and she couldn’t (her head was in the sand anyway…).
It took the better part of an hour for her to be satisfied with the depth of the hole, stop digging and begin to lay.
And here is what the eggs looked like. 
Okay, so it’s not exactly National Geographic quality. But being there that night and seeing these eggs actually being laid was more exciting than I can say.
The next day we took a riverboat ride through the Palo Verde National Park. It’s full of migratory birds, monkeys and crocodiles.
Let’s start with the capuchin monkeys, who were apparently curious about the intruders.
First, a look from afar. Floating on the river, don’t have tails, which is weird, but otherwise… Now for a closer look….
A curious monkey jumped onto the bow of the boat, bounded from human shoulder to next human shoulder, in the blink of an eye snatched a cigarette from someone’s shirt pocket and jumped back to the tree, while his cohorts from the troop scampered around on the roof of the boat.
The one with the cigarette took a taste of it, spat it out in disgust, and threw it into the river. Sure, it’s littering – but that’s a smart monkey! We were warned, incidentally, not to try howling back at the howler monkeys – they apparently take the sound as an intruder trying to horn in on their territory, and they promptly begin to mark it as theirs. You don’t really want to know how they do THAT.
And now for one of the big bad boys of the Palo Verde National Park: a three-meter crocodile!
With a smile that would make an orthodontist happy…
On the way to our next riverboat ride at Caño Negro, we stopped at a place called Restaurante Las Iguanas. And here’s why – this is only a little corner of the tree full of iguanas!
By the way, there used to be a time in Costa Rica when many people ate iguanas, both because it was custom and because they were hungry (iguana is still eaten in many parts of the Americas – but not in Costa Rica). The nickname for these reptiles is “gallo del árbol” – “chicken of the trees.”
Just one more photo of a river animal, I promise.
When this bird, an anhinga, gets wet in a rain shower, it dries off in the sun and it looks like this – kind of reminds me of Mexico’s pre-Columbian feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl… 
I could go on for hours, looking at the pictures and remembering. What a magnificent place.
Oh, and the title of this post? “Pura vida”? It’s supposed to be a flashy way of saying “things are great,” it means something like “the best of life.” Very much native tico (=Costa Rican) slang. Now used for the tourists to mean “you’re welcome;” sorry about that. I’m a Spanish speaker, and when I said thank you to a Costa Rican, they invariably replied, “Es mi gusto” – “the pleasure is mine.” ”Pura vida” is too slangy to be used to another Spanish speaker from outside the country.
Oh, well – wishing someone “the best of life” isn’t so bad, even if it’s kind of made-up…
