End of turtle season

Here are some pictures from the last few days at Costa de Oro. We had the giant BBQ Monday evening. At 4:30 the neighborhood kids came over to join us. It was our normal turtle release time but we didn't have any turtles to release that night. They hung out a little bit and we had so much food I gave some to them as well.

The next night we had about 300 turtles to release! We all decided that we should dig up the nests to see what was going on. From the time that an olive ridley turtle hatches to them reaching the surface is three days - they fall asleep a lot. With that being said, we thought there should be turtles in a couple nests and that would cut down what we were leaving the our locals to tend to (7 nests). After opening four nests that morning we decided to go and check a couple more just to see what was going on. We did only to find three more nests to come up that had babies hatched and ready to go.

Since it was midday and warm we couldn't release them then and saved them all for our 4:30 release with the neighborhood. During the day of packing we kept going out and checking the hatchery make sure nothing else exciting decided to happen while we were working inside the house. There was a nest we didn't think would have babies yet that we found one hatched from, though when it cooled off and we could sit on the sand we found that there was actually just that one baby that had hatched early.

When it came time for our last sunset pictures, Courtney really wanted her sand man. We were having troubles just building a regular sandman when Alvaro suggested we stick a trunk in the middle and build around it. The architect would suggest that. The kids had a lot of fun building the sandman with us and we put up some little palms for Christmas trees, Court had lights to add, and we decorated the sandman with my easily accessible bathing suit top and hat that weren't packed yet. (Mari and Jon - hope you like the sandman's Solution Surf hat).

Yesterday, Courtney and I  headed north up to Rio Celeste after the guys at the car rental agency in Liberia treating us like we were complete morons who had never been to Costa Rica. I don't think people get off planes looking as dirty as we did...

But none the less we were off and on our way into the rainforest.