Day 5: To Sarapiquí

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05:00 am, you know the drill. Get up, curse at yourself for having to wake up this early, dress up for the canoe trip, grab a cup of coffee and wait for the dude in the boat to arrive. 05:45: Rey junior shows up and we are off!

Being in a group of 6 today instead of a private tour like we had yesterday is a little different, but the animals don’t mind. Luckily for us, they all show up to show off!
Cayman, frogs, egrets and herons, spiders, cuckoos, toucan: they all turned up and we got good looks at them. Rey junior is also very knowledgeable and even tries to crack a few jokes! Like his father, he knows an impressive amount of German words reminiscent of the number of tourists gracing their boats with their presence and foreign languages.

A quick, flying pests infested, breakfast later we are ready to leave Tortuguero NP and Evergreen Lodge altogether to start the next leg in our journey, this time by car.
The journey back is in reverse order to the one we made on the way in: first by boat, and then by coach. We stopped at Restaurant El Ceibo where the rental cars met us, and off we are.
A white Rav 4 is what we’ll call our means of transportation for the next two weeks.

The first leg of the trip is to Sarapiquí, most famous for it pineapple plantations and white water rafting, here, we will not visit the pineapple plantations, but will jump in a raft tomorrow.
Upon arrival at the Ara Ambigua Lodge, the lady at the front desk informed us a tour would start at 6 PM to find the Red Eyed Frog from the reception. We immediately signed up, because… Well, just because.

Between us checking in and 6PM however, the skies opened up big time, and we experienced our very first tropical rainstorm. Everything they told us about it is true. The rain is really heavy, it seems to go on forever and our storm even got spiced up a little with heavy thunder!
Right before 6, the skies cleared and it stopped pouring down.
So, on the trip we went and we found a grand total of 6 different species of frogs!
We found the Red Eyed Frog, Marked Frog, Hammer Frog, Bull Frog, a Camouflage Frog and an unidentifiable type of the same family as the Red Eyed Frog, and all that within an hours and about 400 square metres!

Tomorrow, we will be on a boat again, and after that we need to drive for a few hours to the next destination: Caño Negro.