Jaguarundis and a Kinkajou

Breakfast at Bread and Chocolate, Florence pronounces her eggs and bagel the best of the trip so far. My fruit and granola is pretty good too.

We have a full day with three activities today. First is the Jaguar Rescue Centre. The centre was set up in 2008, the name was chosen to help raise their profile but they take in any wild animals that need rescuing or rehabilitating and try to re-introduce them back to the wild. They haven’t had a Jaguar for a while; there are believed to be as few as 200 left in Costa Rica, numbers are reducing primarily because of habitat removal. They do have plenty of other beautiful creatures that we can get a good look at close up. Most of the staff are volunteers. We’re given a guided tour by Rachel who came for three weeks 18 months ago and hasn’t left yet, it’s easy to see why. First stop on the tour is the Sloth garden, the low trees and bushes have a number of juvenile sloths hanging from them, we can’t touch them but we can get very close. Nearby a volunteer is feeding a baby Kinkajoo with a syringe of goat milk, this the best general substitute they have for maternal milk. There are sad stories of babies being orphaned or otherwise separated from their parents. A crocodile is recovering from injuries it received when it was captured, bound in barbed wire and beaten by somebody trying to prove their strength. The crocodile is slowly recovering, the man is awaiting trial – these things are rightly taken very seriously in Costa Rica. It’s illegal to keep wild animals as pets in Costa Rica, the police often bring in animals they’ve seized, particularly snakes and lizards. Marley is a tiny orphan sloth, he has had a chest infection for a while but is slowly recovering, he needs to keep warm so spends his days sleeping on a blanket in the sun on a volunteer’s lap. One sloth has a mutation which means he only has one claw on each foot instead of the usual two or three – this is believed to be unique. This organisation is doing a fantastic job, please help them with any donations you can here: http://www.jaguarrescue.foundation/support-us/

Next stop is lunch, a buffet restaurant with surprisingly tasty dishes, the usual rice and beans and plantains. We’re now in the heat of the middle of the day so we go to a waterfall to swim and cool down. The water is lovely, as you get nearer the bottom of the falls the current gets stronger, enough to hold you up and give you a back massage if you lean into it.

Final stop is the Cahuita National Park, this covers a narrow strip of land about 8 miles long that follows the coastline. Because of the shape of the park and the atraction of the cool sea breezes to the animals, the wildlife is particularly easy to spot here. Within a few 100m we see a sloth and some basilisk lizards. The path is a few meters in from the sea so the sight and sound of waves is always with us, overhead there are capuchin, howler and spider monkeys. Along the path there are large spiders, iguanas, a raccoon and many others. A branch just over our heads is a highway for leaf cutter ants, these amazing creatures shuttle back and forth carrying pieces of leaf bigger than their bodies back to their colony; there are even inspector ants that quality control the leaves and reject any pieces that aren’t suitable.

The path ends after about a mile. The rest of the park is left wild, we retrace our steps as the sun goes down. Don’t feel like dinner so make do with cocktails and a snack at Koki Beach, a very good end to a very good day.