Tag Archives: night tour

i spy with my little eye

09 Monday Jan 2012

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As I was saying yesterday, as much as I do not like creepy crawlies, I did a night tour around Pirate Cove in Bahía Drake, Costa Rica. My guide, Gustavo, and I were poking around the Rio Drake, looking for the glowing eyes of frogs, birds, crocs and insects, and then we walked along the road to Agujitas, spotting more frogs, spiders, owls, a toad…and, closer to the beach, a boa constrictor! You can just make it out in the photo shown above.

When I’d researched Pirate Cove, what stood out was the number of guests who’d said they’d seen boa constrictors and crocs while kakaying the Rio Drake. Now, I’m more afraid of snakes than Indiana Jones is! But the idea of seeing a boa constrictor and crocs in the wild was exciting, so I’d paddle down the Rio Drake daily, eyes peeled for a giant white boa constrictor in the trees and crocs in the murky water. I actually did see a caiman and was so rattled and panicked it would somehow manage to attack me while I was in my kayak. While my heart raced and I fumbled with my camera, it popped under the water to my right, with just its eyes peeking out, and stealthily swam a straight line to my left, passing in front of the boat. By the time I took a pic, hands shaking and heart in mouth, it ducked into the water and disappeared, and I paddled liked I’d never paddled before – faster than when I went whitewater kayaking along Palmer Rapids, up in northern Ontario!

You have to squint and use your imagination to see the caiman. In the centre of the photo, you can make out its eyes and the outline of its long snout pointing to the right. The pic's blurry because I was shaking when I took it!

And when I finally did see a large croc during a tour in Parque Nacional Corcovado (National Geographic has named the national park “the most biologically intense place on Earth”), out came the camera, and the lot of us just sat on the other side of the river, watching the croc while it slowly opened its mouth and kept it open for 10 minutes till it just as slowly closed it and slipped into the water without a splash. And we promptly realized maybe we better move away from the riverbank! You know, just in case that giant croc had decided that we would be his lunch.

Fascinating to no end! Unsettling how this croc kept his mouth open for so long. More unsettling when he slipped into the water as we sat on the bank!

As thrilling and as safe as it was to see a croc up close, I wasn’t so keen on coming face to face with that elusive boa constrictor. However, the boa turned out to be the highlight – and the last animal I saw – on the night tour I did with Gustavo, my guide, who found it on the ground near the beach beside Pirate Cove. Admittedly, the boa constrictor wasn’t a massive creature, but that didn’t stop me from squirming when Gustavo picked it up in his hands! And then he invited me to touch the snake’s skin, which I did, surprisingly after very little prompting on his part. OK, OK, in truth he had asked if I wanted to hold it, but I’m not that adventurous! I got enough kicks watching it slithering on his hands and even did pet it ever so briefly. Despite all the comments on the website, I think seeing a boa at Pirate Cove was a rarity, because Gustavo quickly pulled out his camera to take pics as well!

Did you spot the boa constrictor peeking out from behind the bamboo? Small enough to disappear in this cluster of bamboo stalks, it was still powerful: it could constrict its muscles to lift half of its weight. I can’t imagine walking past it and not realizing it’s there among the bamboo! Freaky, then, that this bamboo was only about 40 feet from where I’d eat dinner. I can’t believe I’m even posting these pictures. I shudder every time I look at them!

this isn’t kermit

08 Sunday Jan 2012

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January being an ideal time to visit Costa Rica, I’ve decided to do a few posts about my trip there last winter, when I spent about a month wandering the jungles and beaches. I started out in Bahía Drake, on the Peninsula de Osa, in the south. The area is rather undeveloped, with no bridges for vehicles to cross the rivers – you just drive right through the water and hope you don’t get stuck (four-wheel drive is a must). In fact, there aren’t even any real bridges for pedestrians, who cross the rivers on makeshift bridges, like fallen logs. It really is a jungle out there, the only “bridges” being in the treetops so the monkeys don’t have to cross the gravel road!

I stayed at the remote Pirate Cove, a tiny rustic resort in the jungle, in my own private bungalow overlooking both the Pacific Ocean and the Rio Drake. And though I’m not one for creepy crawlies, I bucked it up and did a night tour around the grounds, with just myself and my guide, Gustavo, a lovely gentleman from the nearby village of Agujitas. It wasn’t like the regular tours you get in the more touristed areas of Costa Rica, where a slew of guides line up to poke sticks in a tarantula nest. We really were just exploring the resort grounds and walking along the road to Agujitas, with Gustavo’s hearing being so in tune with his surroundings that he could figure out what leaf an insect was under based on the sound the bug was making.

Mucking about the mangrove, I came face to face with a caiman, which is basically a small croc, but it didn’t seem so small when I was knee deep in water, staring into its glowing beady eyes in the dark! The frogs we discovered were much more to my liking, at least until the one pictured here jumped onto my arm and I screamed, making Gustavo shush me for fear that someone in the distance would think he was attacking me. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been so scared of all the animals! Waiting to be accosted by a boa constrictor is not my idea of fun…but it turned out to be pretty cool (you’ll have to wait for another post for the boa pics!). Here’s one of the frogs from the mangrove. I was switching between my DSLR and point-and-shoot and took pictures of a few frogs, but I’m 99% sure all of these pics are of the same one, the famous and colourful red-eyed tree frog. Gustavo had gently placed it on his shirt so I could take some pics (the colour contrast was stronger that way), then he let it step back onto a leaf, and eventually it changed colour to camouflage itself. You can also see that it inflated itself to appear bigger and its eyes darkened too.