Day 8 - Tortuga Island

Today, we woke up bright and early at 5:15 to take a trip to the beach on our free day. We definitely felt a lot like tourists today and you could tell the locals looked down on us because of it, but it was also a lot of fun. We had a long bus ride to Puntarena on the Pacific Coast of the country. From there, we boarded a catamaran and had a two hour ride to Tortuga Island, an island that has no human inhabitants except for a handful of workers living by the beach. The boat was a lot of fun. It had a pool on the upper deck and a great duo of a dancer and a singer to keep us entertained.

The entertainer showing some of the girls how to dance

Once we got to the beach, we had four hours or so to relax and enjoy ourselves. They served us a delicious lunch of chicken, fish and rice along with a glass of wine. The scenery was beautiful and the water was so refreshing and clear it would have been hard not to have a great time.

One thing I was interested in particularly was how clean the tour company kept the beaches. The first rule they told us when we arrived was to pick up after ourselves so that this remains true, and they limited us to only a small section of the island in order to disturb the ecosystem as little as possible. You could tell they were doing a good job because you could see plenty of animals and insects, mostly wild pigs and bees, throughout the beach. This environmental consciousness is consistent throughout the country, and it was not something I was expecting based on T'he Ticos. However, this seems reasonable to me because it was published in 1999, and the big push towards environmentalism was not as strong a force throughout the world at that time.