Day 9

This day another boat trip was scheduled in an area with many crocodiles (on average about 80 per km), although we also got to see many other animals again. River banks in Costa Rica are protected from human activities by law, but a couple of meters away from the rivers, crops are being grown. This causes the flora to still be amazing when seen from the river and the fauna to be pretty concentrated along the river banks. Sometimes the rivers however meander into the sugar cane fields behind the protected strip, which may cause the occasional worker to be attacked or killed by the crocodiles. While in Africa we would often hope to witness a big kill during our game drives, this time we were lucky to get to see a number of crocodiles, without an unfortunate human kill. And as Dirk knows where to go, we were the only tourist boat on the river, getting to enjoy nature to its fullest extent.
We went to a very nice place along the Pan-American highway for a late lunch. We had a nice view over a river with a rapid that resembled the river that we would be able book a rafting trip on later that week. It looked quite intense to me already, but I happen to love water and boats, so I stayed set on rafting. I asked Tonnie if she would join as well, but her reaction was a bit passive. That surprised me a bit, but after a while I asked her if she even knew what rafting is and she had to admit that she didn’t. When I explained she started to meet expectations again. Her face lit up. She had seen it on TV once and yes, it was definitely something she wanted to do! The seed for more excitement for the next few days was planted.
The rest of the afternoon was reserved for relaxation again. During my sudoku activities, deer and some guinea pig-like animals passed by and same time as the day before, the howler monkeys passed overhead. About half an hour later I heard loud and excited screams in the distance. My untrained ear could not even tell whether it was birds or monkeys (and later I even heard frogs or toads making similar sounds), so I went to check out what it was. I did not find out in the end, but I decided to walk around the grounds of the hacienda some more looking for wild life. My interpretation of this ‘game walk’ was a bit different from the interpretation the mosquitos seemed to adhere to. We were warned about the mosquitos in advance by Dirk and Chavo, but since I’m generally not too bothered by bites of non-disease-carrying mosquitos, I first went without mosquito repellant. However, I quickly changed that strategy as those buggers were driving me crazy. I probably cleared most of this repellant by the time I went on this game walk, making the mosquitos consider me to be fair game. Generally, mosquitos were so small that I would hardly ever see them and only became aware of their presence from their bites that would appear, but during this walk I had to rub my legs against each other while walking, because they would be covered in mosquitos if I did not. And when I stopped just long enough to take a picture, they would even sit and bite me on the finger that was pressing the button for the picture, with the expected poor result of the pictures. About 20 minutes and at least 15 registered bites later, I had enough and went back to get ready for dinner.