Today we visited Corcovado National Park and Caletas Wildlife Refuge, both places located in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. There is no road that will take you to these locations. The only way to get here is by boat and for this reason these places have some of the most pristine tropical rain forest left in Central America.
These places have a very healthy tropical forest with big animals, like jaguars, tapirs, pumas and jaguars. Usually places like this, with a high diversity, tend to be very disappointing from the point-of-view of a one-day visit. This is because you enter the forest with the idea of finding all this animals on the trail and walk for hours without seeing even a fly. This is typical of places with high diversity; they harbor a lot of species but in low density.
Today we experienced an exceptional day in a tropical forest. We saw three out of the four species of monkeys that are found in this forest: white-throated capuchin monkeys, mantled howler monkeys and spider monkeys. We had the joy to see white-lipped peccaries out in the open, army ants, a fer-de-lance snake, scarlet macaws, great curassows, honey creepers, tanagers, hummingbirds, tiger herons and many others species of birds. And if that was not enough, in the brief reposition from one place to the next, we got to see false killer whales and a humpback whale with a calf.
To make things even better, at the end of our day, we had a green flash and the humpback calf breaching at least seven times very close to the ship. All this beauty was seen in the surroundings of one of the most pristine tropical rain forests of this region.
