La Fortuna: Making Friends in High Places

Well, first of all, let me apologize for the joke in the title. It is very dumb and really should be beneath me, but clearly it’s not – I’m sorry. But that’s all in the past now, it’s time to move forward. Ahem, anyways, one of our first adventures out in Fortuna was to check out a “sloth experience” run by a local farmer. Basically, he found an abandoned baby sloth, fed it, gave it a place to stay in his garden, and now he’s got a permanent house guest.

So the experience started by learning a little about his farm and how to make juice out of sugar cane, and a sample of fresh sugar cane juice. Then we took a walk out to the garden and stood around awkwardly with several other tourists and our guide waiting for our star to make her entrance:

A little late but, you know she is a sloth after all. Her name is Badoke, which basically means chubby. Which may not be the kindest nickname, but it was fairly accurate. I guess life is pretty easy when all you have to do for your supper is hang around and be adorable. So, after a bit or waking up and a proper amount of scratching herself, it was time for breakfast. What else, flowers eagerly handed to her by her adoring fans. Here’s Elani feeding her one her favorites, avocado flowers:

More eating and posing, she makes breakfast look good:

And a bit of working the audience:

The camera loves you, Badoke:

After 20 minutes or so of showing off for the tourists she made her way off to her favorite avocado tree to finish up breakfast – which I imagine rolls neatly into lunch – in peace. It was a pretty great experience. It wasn’t the last time we saw sloths in Fortuna, there were actually some wild ones living a few blocks from our apartment that our host kindly showed us, but it was certainly the closest look we got of one. Meeting a chubby new tree-climbing friend was definitely one the highlights of our stay here.