Giant lizards and goodbye to Costa Rica

29 March 2009

Our travels in Costa Rica are coming to an end. We began today our 3-day journey home with a 3 h drive from Manuel Antonio back to Alejuela, just a few miles from the airport. We fly tomorrow to LA via Atlanta and then Tuesday drive back to the Bay Area, stopping for the night in Salinas to visit briefly with Rani.

The drive back was relatively uneventful. Two minor notes merit mention. First, I was again stopped by the transit police. This was the third time in only nine days of serious driving around the Costa Rican highways. This time, the stop was without any justification. We were in a long (conga) line of vehicles, traveling relatively slowly through the coastal plain. Speed limit = 80 kph; our speed was about 65 kph. I was in the middle of this line and really for no reason was singled out of the line and pulled over. The policeman greeted us, asked where we were going, and when Ingrid replied in fluent Spanish he commented (in Spanish of course), “Oh, you speak Spanish well! I was just checking you for seat belts. Enjoy your journey....” We are convinced that the transit police target gringo tourists and can spot their rental cars.



The second minor event was the steep drive on the secondary road from the coast up to about 4000 feet elevation (a guestimate) and then down into the high central valley of San José. This is a significant thoroughfare for people traveling from the central Pacific coast back to the capital and there was a fair amount of traffic. The striking point: the road was so steep in several places that I had to shift down to first gear to make the climb!

These final photos show some of the amazingly large and exotic lizards we saw in Manuel Antonio National Park. We encountered the lizard at the top of the post yesterday at a small beach in MA. Apparently, we invaded his “space,” as he chased off an even larger lizard (see bottom of post), which had wandered into the neighborhood. The lizard whose space we used seemed both curious and confident. He spent considerable time just a few feet away from us having a close look.

The stunning animal shown in the middle photo is informally known as the “Jesus Christ lizard.” Apparently, it can run for short distances over water! Its formal name is “basilisk.” This one we saw on our first day in the MA park. I shot it using Ingrid’s Panasonic on 10×, whereas the other two were shot with my Coolpix. (Despite beginning the process of breaking in my “new” D40, I have found that the Coolpix’s small size is such an advantage that I’ve continued using heavily throughout our time in Costa Rica.)