The GCW Tour, Costa Rica: Embracing My New Spirit Animal

Our primary activity today was a visit to the Sloth Sanctuary. About ten miles up the road from where we're staying, the Sloth Sanctuary is a place where folks collect injured and orphaned sloths and try to return them to health. It was pretty fun, and pretty educational -- but also really challenging for me.

First, some details on sloths and the sanctuary.

Sloths are very solitary animals and live for about forty years. Baby sloths are cared for by their mothers for one year, at which point the two go their separate way. Thus, the sanctuary can only return sloths to the wild if they can be returned to full health and if they're older than one year when they're brought in. They have more than a hundred sloths that can't be returned, mostly because they were orphaned before the first year passed and so they don't know how to survive in the wild. 

The biggest threat to sloths are power lines, which will frequently kill mothers but let the baby survive.

The sanctuary tour starts with about forty-five minutes of education from the guide combined with exposure to half a dozen of the adult sloths who can't be returned. After that, you go to another room where you get to see the baby sloths, and then you climb in a boat and go out and look for wild sloths, and whatever else might appear.

At least you do if you aren't being treated for cancer. In my case, I could barely make it through the first session with the adults. Between the fact that you have to stand the whole time, which I can no longer do, and a few bouts of gastrointestinal distress, I had to bail out of the tour when the group moved to the nursery.

Happily, underneath the gift shop was a space designed for folks to sit and relax in which I found a hammock. So while everyone else went boating, I took a nap.

After hearing about sloths and watching them move -- it's almost painful how slow they are -- I've decided in all but one way cancer has turned me into a sloth. The one way? It turns out that to conserve energy, sloths only go to the restroom -- i.e., climb to the bottom of their tree, dig a hole, poop and pee into it, cover it up, and climb back up -- once a week. At this point, I can barely last an hour without a restroom break. 

Bathroom habits notwithstanding, I'm  adopting the sloth as my new spirit animal. You might notice the resemblance in these photos.