In Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica, a three-toed sloth is climbing a monkey-pot tree with its baby clinging on. It’s a slow-motion ascent, like watching an astronaut take first steps on the moon, as it stretches a long arm, curls a clawed hand around a branch, and then stops. “Ah, it’s nodded off again,” our guide explains. “In Costa Rica, things take time. This animal may be slow, but in conserving energy it increases the chance of survival.” Turns out that even the sloth’s metabolism is sluggish, with the animal only going to ground level to defecate once weekly so that it can remain safe in the treetops away from predators (a fact delivered enthusiastically by all Costa Rican tour guides).
This small Central American country (at 19,700 square miles, it’s a little smaller than West Virginia) cradles five percent of the earth’s biodiversity. It’s home to several types of tropical rain forest, including mangrove and cloud, inhabited by around 500,000 animal species. Watching the sloth, I’m reminded of my pledge to practise slow travel by connecting to this country and culture in an unhurried way.
Life, Steady and Pure
To curb my teenage sons’ instincts to race at breakneck speed, we go deeper into Tortuguero National Park by kayak to explore smaller tributaries only wide enough for slender craft. We glide through a topsy-turvy world of black reflective water (the color comes from tannin leaked by the vegetation) and it’s just our happy laughter, the call of a yellow-crested night heron, and the splash from a disappearing otter to break the peace.
Juan, our guide, is thrilled at this rare sighting of an otter. “To see it so deep in the park tells us that the ecosystem here is thriving. Pura vida!” he exclaims.
You hear the saying “pura vida,” meaning “pure life,” all the time in Costa Rica: used as a greeting, to wish someone well, and as an exclamation of joy. I’m soon uttering the phrase like a local and nowhere more so than on the beach after dark as we wait for the arrival of green and loggerhead sea turtles; some 22,000 come annually to nest on this stretch of coastline as they have done for a millennium. It’s both a humbling sight and a moving reminder of how, post-pandemic, the world continues to turn.
The green turtle’s flippers appear cumbersome instruments for the digging of a large pit in which to deposit the eggs, bringing a new dimension to word labour. Then, exhausted, she returns to the sea as the park ranger imparts these wise words: “She may be slow in the sand, but in the sea she’s a marathon swimmer, travelling over one hundred miles a day. Life is not about getting somewhere fast. It is about quiet determination. That will take you the furthest in the end.”
I sense her relief as the first wave washes over her shell.
View from Above
From our temporary home at Boena Wilderness Lodges, we travel on to Monteverde, climbing 4,600 feet to where a cloud forest clad in bromeliad waits to be explored, filled with creatures such as resplendent quetzals, giant stick insects (some more than 20 inches long), armadillos, and mot-mots, the recyclers of the forest, that build their nests in….
