La Fortuna and a Sloth tour. 🦥🦥🦥
The drive from Jaco to La Fortuna was another descent drive. It was only 3 and half hours which is not that bad for people who are used to long Australian drives. However, the roads here in Costa Rica are very windy and sometimes the roads turn into this really bad quality gravel road which makes you feel like you are getting thrown from side to side in the back of the car. It’s not so great for my mum who sometimes gets car sick, now before any big drive we do in Costa Rica, we make sure she has her travel sickness pills before we leave.
The first night we got to La Fortuna we arrived at the place we were meant to stay for a week in the dark. Relatively late in the evening, we realised that there were only two double beds for the four of us and no dining table inside. This is not even to mention that this house had a major infestation of bugs and if you had anything in the bin these ginormous ants would come. We all decided that night before we went to bed that we were not going to stay there for the full week and would leave this place in the morning – we would also ask for our money back. That night David was on the computer trying to find us a house to stay in for a week so that we could go to in the morning.
When we woke up in the morning, we had a quick breakfast and packed up everything back into the car which was not that hard considering we had not really unpacked anything. Our new house was only going to be ready in the afternoon, so we decided to go into the town to get some traditional Costa Rican lunch and get some information on things to do in the area. We arrived at the new place with full bellies. The second place was soooo much better there were no bugs and it was super clean. It was probably the cleanest house we have been in so far after 7 months of full-time travel.
The first activity we did in La Fortuna was sloth watching tour which was so cool. We did it with an organisation who have a small forest where the sloths like to hang out. Our guide was very knowledgeable on sloths and had a very good eye for spotting them. The funny this was that the first thing we got to see on this tour was not a sloth it was a snake. It was pretty relaxed and far away we needed the telescope to see it. This tour was done in a way that we were not disrupting the sloths. We looked at them through a telescope. We saw one with a baby and we saw the baby yawn; it was so cute. We even managed to get it on video. In total we saw four sloths on the tour and one of them was very active. It was eating and moving around a lot which was cool.
I also learned new things about sloths. I learned that there are a lot of different types of sloths and Costa Rica is home to two of the six species in the world. The two different sloths that live here are the two toed sloth (Hoffman’s two toed sloth) and the three toed sloths (Brown throated sloth). Three-toed sloths have arms that are longer than their back legs, while two-toed sloths have similarly sized arms and legs. The way you can tell the difference between the two when they are up in a tree is by looking at their front arms and see how many claws they have. You have to make sure to look at their front arms, because all the different sloths do have three back toes, making it sometimes hard for even the experts to determine what type of sloth we are looking at. It is also extremely difficult to determine what gender a sloth is when they are in the trees unless they have a baby with them. Something interesting I learned is that sometimes their claws can fall of but it’s okay because they do grow back.
Sloths usually measure between 60 and 80 centimetres but are incredibly light, they only weigh between 3.6 and 7.7 kilograms. Contrary to popular belief sloths can actually move incredibly fast when they feel threatened and their claws can help them defend themselves quiet well. They have very slow metabolisms so much so that they only poop ones a week and it takes them a month just to digest one leaf. Sloths can hold up to a third of their body weight in poo. Their diet consists of eating leaves, twigs and buds and they sleep 8 to 10 hours per day, so they have to be very well hidden and they are masters at camouflaging. Sloths are solitary animals they don't live in groups.
Other things we did in La Fortuna was go on hikes; we managed to get absolutely drenched in a rainstorm twice. We also went on a coffee, chocolate and sugar cane tour which was interesting, but we were expecting to go to a real farm instead it was more of an educational tourist park. In the coffee section they only had five plants. I probably enjoyed the chocolate part of the tour the most since we got to try the coco fruit the fleshy bit kind of tasted like a mix between mango and lychee. I think the coolest part was biting into the coco seed before it got dried and see that it was purple. Coco pods grow on the trunk of the tree and turn yellow or red when they are ripe.
Stay tuned for the next blog where we go Canyoning!!! Yay
