Located near the northeastern corner of Costa Rica, surrounded by rain forest on one side and Caribbean beach on the other, is Tortuguero National Park, whose name means “The Place of Turtles.”
Costa Rica's Tortuguero National Park is the easiest place in the world for viewing sea turtles.
Tortuguero’s 22-mile long beach is the main nesting area for Green Turtles in the Caribbean. It is also the easiest place in the world to view sea turtles.
Green Turtles mate and nest several times during a season. In mating, an amorous male holds onto a female with the sharp hook on his front flippers. If he can’t locate a female, he will improvise and substitute anything that floats, whether it be a piece of driftwood, another male turtle, or a skin diver.
An impregnated female will wait offshore until dark and then head for the beach and a nesting site. During her crawl up the beach, noise or lights will cause her to return to the safety of the sea. Once she has begun digging her nest, however, nothing will distract her. She uses her rear flippers to scoop out a hole about two-feet deep, deposits around one hundred leathery, golf-ball-sized eggs, covers the nest, tamps down the sand, and returns to the sea.
Many of the buried eggs are dug up by coatimundis, dogs, raccoons, and even humans. The remaining eggs hatch in a couple of months. The baby turtles use a temporary egg tooth to tear open their egg shell. It takes the combined power of about 100 cooperating turtles to excavate the two feet of sand which covers them.
The little turtles appear on the beach, usually before dawn, then scramble for the water. On the way many are eaten by hungry crabs and birds. If they do reach the water they stand a high chance of becoming dinner to an eagerly waiting fish. Of the hundreds of thousands who race for the sea, probably fewer than three percent survive. For the next half-century the turtles live nomadic lives, migrating over vast distances of ocean. After fifty years they reach sexual-maturity and return to the beach where they were born, to mate, nest and produce another generation.
In addition to the Green turtles, Tortuguero is also a nesting place for Leatherback, Hawksbill, Olive Ridley and Loggerhead turtles.
Let’s catch a quetzal—on camera that is. We can begin our hunt by hiking through the Monteverde cloud forest, on a California Native 
According to legend, around 1910 a farmer was suddenly inspired to spruce up the appearance of his oxcart. He painted the wheels with multi-colored designs. Others copied his designs and oxcart painting became a uniquely Costa Rican art form. At one time each district in the country had its own special design, and people could tell by looking at an oxcart what region it came from.
Tapirs are rather strange, primitive creatures. They are big animals—measuring about six to eight feet between their short little trunk and their stubby little tail, and weighing up to 700 pounds. Unlike elephants, who pick up food with their trunks, the tapirs move their trunks aside and browse like horses. Tapirs are the only animals native to the Americas which have four toes on their front feet and three toes on their hind feet.
Hanging upside-down from the branches of trees in Costa Rica’s lush rain forests, sleep the two and three-toed sloths. The Spanish word for sloth is perezoso, meaning “lazy”, and sloths, who sleep around eighteen hours a day, live up to their reputation.
Basilisks, aka “Jesus Christ lizards” refer to the legendary monsters whose breath and glances were fatal to those unfortunate enough to encounter them. Basilisks are quite large, as lizards go, up to three feet long, and the males have large crests on their heads, backs, and tails. This, and the fact that they run on two legs, makes them look like little dinosaurs.
Some say the it was the ancient Greeks, some argue that it was indigenous Americans like the Mayans of the 
