We woke up around 10am and made breakfast and tea and coffee, as is our tradition when we can on vacation. Our plan was to head to the Sloth Sanctuary today, and then see what the rest of the day held. It’s about a 20 minute drive from Puerto Viejo and we left with 30 minutes to spare.
Driving through PV is a pain. The road is narrow, there are potholes everywhere, pedestrians will walk off what random sidewalks there are. Oncoming traffic is brutal, cyclists are coming at you and behind you, and sometimes when cars will try to pass you when they think you don’t know how much space you actually have. It takes all your attention to keep it together. No bad stories yet, just relating an experience. 🙂
We picked up 2 hitchhiking tourists on our way, a couple, one from Poland and the other from Australia. They were standing just outside one entrance to the Cahuita national park and wanted a lift 5km up the road to the next entrance. They almost came to the Sanctuary with us, but decided to do that later in the day still. We saw them as we left, which was fun.
We barely made the 11am tour, paid our $25USD each and off we went. We both decided that this tour was well worth the money. There can be some sketchy animal zoos and sketchy handlers, but this place looked and seemed really on the up and up. Our tour guide was super knowledgeable and friendly, and we saw tons of space for rehabiliated sloths to climb and learn to be slothlike in the forest again. Here are some photos!
This sloth, named Toyota because he’s Toyota Tough, has only 1 arm. Miranda and I had seen a documentary about this a few months ago, and apparently he lost his arm after being electrocuted by a power line. An electrician found him badly wounded and the sanctuary had to take his arm off and nurse him back to health. He looks pretty happy to be alive, and has survived 5 years with them.
Fun sloth facts: they don’t drink water, they only get liquid through eating plants. They only go down to the ground once a week to take a poop and urinate – once a week, only. They eat every day though, and it takes a month for the food to be digested – 1 week per chamber of their stomachs. They aren’t lazy, they’re just super efficient. They can move super quickly if they have to, they just don’t have to right now.
This is a baby sloth in a cage. They can rehabilitate adults, but they haven’t figured out how to help babies. Baby sloths don’t learn any of the skills they need to survive in the wild, as they need a year with their mothers to learn it all, and if they are abandoned or orphaned they can’t survive on their own.
After looking at sloths for an hour, we had a little boat tour down a river that had been cut off from it’s source.
A baby alligator.
There were lots of monkeys climbing around, and I managed to use my 100-300mm lens to get some good photos of them in the trees.
Wild bananas.
This isn’t a road, it’s the river with a ton of little leaves in it.
Unedited, the shadows just worked with the green leaves and orange leaves.
Miranda is such a kidder.
We had lunch at one of the local bars in PV, some pasta, some fajitas and more Imperial and then decided to go back to the place to rest. It’s super hot and super humid and we didn’t sleep great. We ended up spending enough time here that I managed to get my photos edited (I did crop down and lighten the monkeys, they were all in shadows…) and uploaded and write this.
I’d hoped to go snorkeling, but the waves are so huge that there’ll be nothing to see around the silt. I’d like to go swimming anyway, but we’ll see how the energy levels manage for the evening. The sun will be going down really soon, so we may have to take a quick dip before we leave PV tomorrow, on our way to La Fortuna.
