Just your average day saving a turtle :)

Well, quite the adventure today in Costa Rica! We decided to rent a car for the next 4 days. Hertz delivered our Toyota Avanca to our hotel, JW Marriott, and we departed just before 1:00 pm to go find Ostional Wildlife Refuge. This is where the Olive Ridley sea turtle is known for its mass annual nesting migrations called arribadas. 

So off we went with me behind the wheel. About 2 1/2 hours and a thousand pot holes - aka craters - later, we realized we must have missed the spot. We kept going, thinking that we clearly had not arrived on the right day for the nesting or there would be more tourists around so we would just head to another beach. 

The road couldn't get any worse, we thought. We were wrong. We crossed several rivers. And when I say crossed, I don't mean on a bridge. Oh no, I mean we had to drive right through the narrow rivers, a result of rainy season. The only bridges were for motorcycles with small wheel-sized paths. I managed to get the river crossings down pat, watching the direction the local driver (when there was one) in front of me took which was presumably the shallowest section. 

Then, before it started to rain, I slowed down too much for a particular bumpy section of road and got us stuck in a muddy trench on the road. Fortunately, a van was passing us at the time and had a tow rope. My husband and the two guys got us hooked up and with me still behind the wheel, a small two-car traffic jam behind us, and our daughter video blogging and shrieking in the back seat, we got unstuck. 

We travelled for a while and then decided to turn back. To make a long story not so short, we ended up at Ostional! The beach was beautiful and littered with turtle shells from the last arribada. Here's a little more about what happens:

"Turtles nest at Ostional year round, but peak time is during rainy season. From August through December arribadas occur regularly once, sometimes even twice a month, and the numbers of nesting females are in the range of hundreds of thousands. Usually the arribadas occur during the darkest nights: a few days before the new moon, when the majority of turtles arrives between 8 pm and 4 am.

The largest "arribada" thus far recorded in Ostional, took place in November 1995 when a calculated 500,000 females came ashore.

The turtles generally ride in on the high tide at night but during an arribada they start arriving soon after sunset and keep coming until 6 am the next morning.

Used to a life in the ocean, the turtles painfully drag their heavy bodies over the beach until they get over the high tide line. There, flicking clouds of sand, they dig a nest with their flippers to deposit around 80 - 100 soft-shelled, white eggs, the size of a ping pong ball.

Over the course of a five-day arribada, nesting turtles will leave up to 10 million eggs on the beach of Ostional."

We walked on the beach for about half an hour admiring the beautiful black sand and huge crashing waves. There were a lot of vultures dining on the remnants of shells or possibly unhatched eggs. My husband and I had turned back towards the car while our daughter continued up the beach. A while later I heard "Mom, mom, mom!!" We went running to discover our daughter had found a turtle in distress surrounded by vultures. 

She was exhausted and couldn't make it off the beach. We carried her part of the way and once she was closer to the water, she found the energy to drag herself the rest of the way. 

So, today we saved a turtle. It felt pretty good, I must say.

And, I kid you not, when she finally made it out past the surf, she popped her head up and gave us a wave of her flipper. 

All and all, an unforgettable day.