My Journey through Tortuguero and the Providencia Sports Field

I have a new place to add to my list of favorite places. Tortuguero was amazing. Not everybody gets to go to a Caribbean rain forest where you have to take a boat over an hour to be able to get there. There was so much nature there. It was like seeing how a lot of the world was before we humans came and built cities over it. We saw so many animals, even more than in Manuel  Antonio. We saw toucans, macaws, sloths, monkeys, spiders, bats, lizards, basilisks and caimans. My favorite part of the trip was the first day, when we did a tour in a boat of a lot of the forest around the town. We saw a caiman on that trip and that was really, really cool. Caimans are like small crocodiles and if they bite they can bite off a few fingers or even a hand. We got super close but it didn't react. It probably saw us but it acted like it didn’t even notice us. When we kept going we got to see a spectacular show. Some white faced monkeys were moving from one side of the river to the other and we got to see them leaping from branch to branch. There were a lot on the ground too and I thought that was really interesting because I had never seen a monkey on the ground before. They’re the only kind of monkeys that go on the ground. The capuchin monkeys were jumping right over us about 20 yards! It was really amazing to see the monkeys in their natural habitat doing things that they would have done, humans or not. We were there about fifteen minutes and my favorite part was when we saw a monkey chasing a basilisk. Basilisks are bright green lizards that can run on water. I don’t know if they were playing or if the monkey was trying to attack the basilisk but either way, it was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately the basilisk didn’t run on water even though we cheered it on. The hotel where we stayed was really cool too, especially the pool because we could see a bunch of monkeys and tropical birds. The next day we had a walking tour of the little town. The town is very small, like 1200 people, and it’s really nice. It’s an island in between a huge river and the Caribbean. The ocean was beautiful. I mean, it’s a Caribbean Sea, but we really didn’t spend that much time there because the current was so strong and the waves so big and choppy. The whole trip was one of my favorites so far. Being in a Caribbean rainforest was amazing.

One of my favorite things to do here in Costa Rica is go to the plaza, a huge soccer field in Providencia, to play sports. We go at least three times a week either with the Young Dreamers or the younger kids from the school. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before but Providencia is split into two parts, well technically three. There’s a top part (the main section of town), a bottom part and a middle part. There’s a road connecting the bottom and the top and at the middle of the road there’s a split that goes to the third part. The top is where most people live, where the school is, where the recycling center is and where the plaza is. The bottom part is where my family lives. Several families live down there, and there's a restaurant, which is also our house. The restaurant is one of the only ones in town and when tourist groups come they usually eat there. The middle part is where the adventure zipline park is and where a few families live. Back to the plaza. Most days we go up to the plaza and play soccer or baseball (because we taught them how to play last year), but once a week all the host families go and bring hot chocolate (well, for me juice). Here I’ve been playing a lot more soccer and it’s been great because it’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s also great exercise because the hill to the plaza is really steep, not even mentioning the sports we play when we get to the top. Sometimes we even go up there in the morning to specifically do exercise. And now I can actually run up from the bottom to the top (25-30 minute walk and 10-15 minute run), but it’s really hard since it’s so steep. That’s one of my favorite things to do here because, besides all the fun of playing sports, we get to spend good time with the people of Providencia.