My husband and I are on our first Costa Rican adventure together. He is a biologist and spent two summers here about 32 years ago; he has not been back since he did his graduate field work here. The first week of our trip was on the Windstar, from which we took numerous excursions. Tomorrow we head off to Drake Bay for six nights at La Paloma.
One of our excursions was to Curu National Wildlife Refuge. I almost canceled this excursion due to the negative reviews here, but I am so glad that I did not do so. Note that
this review is for my day in the park - we did not overnight here so I can not speak to the
condition of the accomodations or the quality of the food.
The wildlife, however, was outstanding. Our two hour tour (arranged by the ship through a local tour operator) started at 7:30 am, early enough for the birds and other animals to be
active. And active they were! After the tour we hiked an extra two hours on our own. So over
4 hours, we saw a bare throated tiger heron, a migrant Baltimore oriole (gorgeous!), several
orange fronted parakeets, two Lineated woodpeckers, three deer, two agouti, a spider
monkey, a couple of howler monkeys, three kinkajous, several large ctenosaur lizards (spiny
tailed iguanas), a basilisk lizard running across a small stream, a couple of small lizard species we have not yet identified, and best of all, we were surrounded by two huge white faced capuchin monkey troops. The first was around 8:15 in the morning and there were at least 20 monkeys, some toting young. They were crossing the road on which we were traveling, so they were jumping from tree to tree over our heads - it was fantastic! Later in the day we ran across a smaller troop (maybe 8?) and then even later we ran across two monkeys on their own. In all of the places that we traveled during the first week of our
Costa Rican adventure, this was our best encounter with monkeys that were seemingly
really wild.
Our guide was quite knowledgeable. Although my husband and I are biologists and enjoy being on our own in such environments, we do appreciate that a good guide can help find animals that we would have missed (for example, the kinkajous, agouti, and deer). The
habitat at Curu is great, a combination of secondary forest and mango groves that provide
enough visibility to actually see the animals. December was a great choice for a visit - dry
season and not so hot that hiking was too difficult.
Overall Curu National Wildlife Refuge far exceeded our expectations and is on our list of stops for our next trip to Costa Rica. The wildlife viewing really was that good.