Pura vida en Puerto Viejo
Trip Start
Dec 27, 2008
1
54
96
Trip End
Dec 08, 2011
Puerto Viejo, Province of Limon, Costa Rica
Thursday, July 23, 2009
At first, I wasn't that gone on the town. The prices of food and beverages at Rockin J's knocked me back initially, though it later transpired that that was the way of Costa Rica and not this place in particular. Also, the rather crappy weather we'd been having had tailed us north, and dullness and rain were once again the order of the day. Ho hum.
Shortly after arrival I made a snap decision to join Chris and some Danish folk on an excursion to a sloth sanctuary, as I knew that otherwise I would achieve nothing for the entire day, such is the way the lads and I generally operate. The entrance fee was a whopping $25 (Costa Rica, baby), though I did have quite a nice time there. I had seen sloths previously in the Bolivian pampas, but only as an indistinct blob at the top of a very tall tree. This gave me the opportunity to view some up close and personal, and by God are they cute (photographic evidence of such to follow at some stage), which I wasn't really expecting. And yes, they do move incredibly sloooooooowly, its quite comical. On the whole though, I'm not sure about the scientific value of such facilities. The vast majority of the sloths there can never be released into the wild as they are either maimed adults or else juveniles who have never learned which leaves are safe to eat from their mother (as an aside, these orphans come about because their mother drops them from the canopy and refuses to go down and retrieve them, albeit for reasons of personal safety as opposed to laziness). Therefore, the main function of the sanctuary seems to be to allow crusty hippy ladies and well-meaning volunteers to coo at the cutesy-wootsy baby sloths and to give them silly names like Floppy and Dozy and the like.
Our guide (a well-meaning retired American lady who wuvved little Spidyman, didn't she? Awwwwwwww) did, however, mention a worthwhile scheme that the sanctuary is trying to work on with some zoos. In this scheme, the sanctuary would provide the zoos with young sloths that are already accustomed to human interaction, which would be beneficial to the zoos in that the sloths wouldn't remain furtive balls of fur stuck up at the top of a tree where the visitors can't even see them properly, and which would benefit the sloths in that the zoos would no longer hire hunters to go out and trap wild animals for their exhibits. At present, however, the Costa Rican government is refusing to allow such a scheme to progress as it is unwilling to sanction the export of native fauna, so for now at least the sanctuary will continue to seek funding for its efforts which, in my opinion, would be better spent on habitat management and other initiatives to reduce the number of sloths which come to harm as a result of human developments such as road construction and electrification projects.*
Anyway, enough about sloths. The prices and the weather and the lack of daytime activities were getting me down, so I was all set to leave Purto Viejo and head for the highlands when, lo and behold, the sun appeared. And it was truly a magical transformation - I never thought a place morph so quickly from a ho-hum place into a tropical paradise with the simple addition of a few rays of sunshine! Furthermore, we also discovered the beach I mentioned previously, where the surf that Connie and I had been searching for was hiding, with some nice, challenging (yet forgiving) shoulder high waves waiting for us to put ourselves to the test. The boards there were the best we've borrowed too, and we were having so much fun all round that we ended up staying two extra days.
It wasn't totally without hazard though: I stepped on a goddamn sea urchin, embedding a number of spikes into my foot which took me a good 45 minutes to dig out with a needle (and at the time of writing, some two weeks later, I still have one chunk irritating me with every step), during which time, to make matters worse, my rented board was lying idle on the beach. Connie also got himself a lovely Doxycycline tan, coming back from the first afternoon's surfing so sunburnt that his face was purple despite plastering on the factor 50. How everybody laughed when I cited my similar experience in San Diego as a reason for splashing out on Malarone - not so funny now, Connie kaaaaa, eh? Ha ha
* I'll not totally retract what I said, but I will tone down my rhetoric regarding the usefulness of the Sloth Sanctuary somewhat: they have successfully rehabilitated and released several adult sloths, and they certainly have a useful educational function. My problem relates more to the anthropomorphisation of animals in general (March of the Penguins and its ilk) than to this institution in particular - as a Man of Science I prefer my knowledge factual and informative as opposed to warm and cuddly, thank you very much!
