Welcome to the Jungle

July 07, 2025

We were up at the crack of dawn this morning to be picked up in front of our hotel for a journey to Tortugero National Park. There are several lodges in the park where people can stay. We really didn’t know exactly what to expect but it sounded like fun.

We finally left the city at about 7 AM after picking up others at other hotels — we traveled in a comfortable bus. The driving portion took about two hours until our first stop for breakfast, which was included in the trip. This first part of the drive took us through another national park, the Braulio Carrillo National Park, and over the continental divide as it is in Central America — the highway crosses the divide at 5250 feet in elevation. The views were quite spectacular — dense jungle covered hills among misty clouds. The picture below shows the confluence of two rivers of distinctly different colors caused by where they originate; the Rio Sucio originated from an area of volcanic rock and the Rio Honduran originates in the cloud forests.

After leaving the mountain range, we arrived to the Caribbean plains of eastern Costa Rica. This area is known for its agriculture, including banana and pineapple production, and cattle, among other things.

This second part of the drive, took us off the main highway and onto a gravel road which took us by Dole and DelMonte banana plantations. We should mention that the tour company provided a guide on the bus who gave us a lot of commentary much of the way. It made the trip a lot more interesting getting to learn about exactly where we were driving and what we were seeing.

Banana fields

This is a banana packing house.

By about 11:30 we had reached the small river port where we transferred from the bus to a boat, which would take us the rest of the way to Pachiro Lodge.

The boat ride took about 90 minutes and we felt like we were on a real life version of the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland — of course, without fake animals. We actually did catch a glimpse of a few animals and birds as we made our way. We saw a spectacled cayman, a crocodile, four great green macaws flying in formation, and at least one or two toucans.

Spectacled Cayman resting at the edge of the water.

When we finally arrived at the lodge, it felt like we were arriving to Fantasy Island, without Tatoo. They greeted us with a cool ginger lemonade, and gave us an introduction to the lodge and the activities that are included in our package. We then had lunch, settled into our room and rested a while.

After napping for a while we plan to walk around the lodge a little bit — rumor has it there are howler monkeys nearby. The lodge has a pool and bar — I’m sure we’ll be able to make use of both. So, other than lounging and having dinner, our day is essentially done. Our next scheduled activity is a cruise at dawn through the interior canals tomorrow.

So we did take a walk on a trail that’s about a half a mile long attached to the lodge. We saw a whole bunch of different kind of plants and flowers and then we started seeing some animals. Finally, we saw a cool caterpillar, a blue land crab, a flock of parrots, which we think might be mealy parrots that were flying around above the canopy, and then right before we got back to the pool area, we saw a howler monkey and a couple capuchin monkeys.