achievement unlocked

After five days on the Caribbean coast, we made our way back toward San Jose, stopping for a couple of nights on the outskirts of Braulio Carrillo National Park to break up the drive before dropping our friends off at the airport. Tapirus Lodge, where we booked our stay, is the third place we’ve visited in Costa Rica to be named after the Baird’s tapir, the largest land mammal in Central and South America. You’d think it’d be pretty easy to see this 300-kilo slow-moving herbivore, but you’d be wrong. We came up empty at Los Tapires Reserve and also at Dantica lodge (danta being the Spanish name for the tapirs) last year. Friends of our saw tapirs in Corcovado around the same time we visited the national park last month, but we came up empty-handed again in what was a massively underwhelming visit. We hoped against hope that our friends brought some luck.

It didn’t look like it initially; quite the contrary in fact. It rained all day during our long drive from Playa Chiquita to Tapirus. A major accident right outside Braulio Carrillo snared traffic when we were ten minutes away from our destination. By the time we arrived, checked in, and lugged our bags to our rooms through the rain, the day was done. Darkness enveloped the lodge; night falls quickly in the rainforest when the weather is inclement. We took it as a good sign, therefore, when the rain finally petered out after dinner. A lot of the other guests wandered around the property looking for frogs and moths. D went for a quick stroll after the kids were in bed and found a black-and-white owl.

With only one day at our disposal, we packed in as many adventures as we could muster. D woke up early to go birding, and after breakfast we went on a cable-car ride through the jungle. In the afternoon, S accompanied the kids on a canopy tour while D went back to the forest to try to rustle up some more bird species. While Munchkin has become a zip-lining pro, this was the first time Junebug has gone zip-lining. She is usually risk-averse, so we were pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed it.

We had arrived at Tapirus with relatively low expectations, in part because of how difficult it had proved to find any place at all that could accommodate the eight of us in this area. The lodge is a bit rustic and the restaurant at Tapirus leaves a lot to be desired, but the wildlife viewing more than made up for the drawbacks. We saw an anteater during our cable-car ride, and D found another one feasting at an ant swarm deep in the woods — that is as many anteaters as we had seen during our entire time in Costa Rica up to that point. We had excellent sloth sightings, resulting in easily the best sloth pictures we have taken in Costa Rica. The birding also was stellar. And, to top it all off, we finally found the tapirs we had been looking for all this time. D saw an adult early in the morning and roused the rest of the family before breakfast. And we got a brief view of a juvenile shortly after our cable-car ride.