In a personal account, Smithsonian photographer Laurie Minor-Penland describes her trip to Costa Rica to photograph endangered green sea turtles nesting on the beach at Tortuguero.
Sometimes it seems like I can never tell what I'll be doing next, but that's one of the things I like best about my job at the Smithsonian.
Since 1987 I've a photographer for the Smithsonian's Office of Printing and Photographic Services, working first in the National Museum of American History, and currently in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In late August of 1993 I planned to spend the end of the summer repairing the stucco on our 50-year-old house in Alexandria, Virginia. My supervisor, Carl Hansen, was on assignment in Brazil, and I was holding down the fort in our museum studio.
Then--a call came in from the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (CCC) asking if Carl was available to photograph the Green Sea Turtles nesting on the beach of Tortuguero, Costa Rica. Well shucks...since he wasn't, I volunteered. (I think my husband was somewhat releived to get out of the repair job). So off I went.
I don't speak Spanish, but with only a week's notice I was desperately trying to learn as much as I could, even though I was assured an English-speaking guide would be with me at all times. I was met at the airport in Costa Rica by CCC's National Director Tom Divney, an American who stuck with me for two days.
You can't get to Tortuguero by car. The hour-long flight was over beautiful country. Banana plantations created huge rectangles in the otherwise random wilderness of the rainforest.
There was also one mountain ridge that we had to fly over before reaching the Carribbean Coast.
As we approached this ridge the view became breathtaking, until it was lost in the thick, wet clouds which always seem to hover there.
The plane was very small, and I sat next to the pilot looking into the whiteness and wondering how we would keep from crashing right into the side of the mountain. I just knew it was there, and waited for the worst...to see a mountainside appear in the windshield just before we hit.
But suddenly the sky was clear and the mountain was behind us. Now rivers snaked below me, and I watched as they merged into bigger "snakes" until they, and we, reached the Caribbean Coast.
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