Back to the Big Blue

This weekend I took the long-awaited trip to Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast. Many Tico travel agents (and roadside touts) will tell you that it's difficult to get there on your own, and try to sell you a package for a three-day tour with transportation.  I'm sure these tours are nice, but they can be a little pricey, and we only had two days to make the journey.

Morgan and I made this trip alone, since the new volunteers went to Jaco for the weekend and she and I have been talking about catching the end of turtle season for quite some time. We had also made plans to meet up with our friend Lucy from the CCS house, who had left to travel on her own after four weeks.

The day started out promising- we made it to San Jose in two and half hours (a new record) and were in Cariari by 7:30 Friday night. Cariari is what Lonely Planet describes as a "rough-neck banana town,"which is about as accurate a description as they come. Besides banana plantations, the town is really only known for being a stop-over point for people on their way to Tortuguero.

The only real hotel in Cariari is called Hotel Tortuguero Central, run by the extremely friendly and helpful Patricia (aka the Mama of Cariari). When I read she was called the Mama of Cariari, I was expecting a jolly, Afro-Caribbean woman in a bright patterned dress, so I was surprised when we were greeted by a delicate, soft-spoken woman in a beige cardigan. Patricia met our taxi at the front of the hotel (in its new location by the college futbol field) and offered to drive us to a place we could get some dinner. Driving down the road, I could see why she didn't want us walking-- this was definitely not a tourist town. She dropped us in front of a restaurant and twice reminded us to make sure we got a cab back to the hotel. There was no English spoken (or written on menus), but we managed to order some good food and get our waiter to put some post-season baseball on the TV. Around 9pm it was back to the hotel for a quick, cold shower and early bedtime, so we could catch a 6am bus to Pavona.

Patricia saw us off from the bus stop, and we were off to Pavona right on schedule (ten minutes late, as per Tico Time). From Pavona, we took a boat down the river to Tortuguero Village. Right as we were pulling into the dock, Morgan pointed out a blond girl pulling up in another boat. As luck would have it, it was Lucy! She showed us around town and we checked into the hostel where she was staying (Balcon del Mar, well worth the $7 a night, with a very friendly staff and a five second walk to the beach). We dropped our stuff in the room and went straight to the beach to enjoy the sunny weather and calm waves.

Lucy told us she had seen baby sea turtles around sunset the night before, so we returned to the beach around 4:30 to troll the shore for new hatchlings. We saw newly turned nests with pieces of egg shells, and tracks leading to the water, but no turtles were in sight. Just as we were about to give up, Morgan followed a stray dog up a dune and yelled for us to follow. The dog had already made off with one baby turtle before she shooed it away and we saw that there were many more in the nest! We didn't know what we could do, since touching the turtles is illegal, but luckily a guide showed up out of nowhere (I think six out of ten people in Tortuguero are guides). He dug through the nest and found that many of the turtles were already dead, but there were at least 10 still alive. He told us to help carry them to the water, so we put them in our hands and brought them to the shore.

Baby turtles in the nest.

I had been worried I wouldn't even see any turtles, but there I was, holding them and helping them finish their journey back to the ocean. They were amazingly fast once I set them down, and they knew how to swim even though they had hatched only hours before. After a while, more people saw what we were doing, and flocked to see the turtles. But it was pretty amazing knowing that I was the first to see them--I felt like they were my turtles! Once they all made it into the sea, the guide said to us, "I'm so glad you were here. Thank you for helping save these turtles." Anytime, turtle guy.

Marveling at the little miracle.

Setting the little guy free.

 

 

 

We went for one last swim at sunset, still on a natural high from the surreal turtle-saving experience. We decided that even if we didn't see any mother turtles on the nighttime turtle walk, this had still been one of the best days of our lives. But we got truly lucky around 11pm that night when we got to see a turtle laying her eggs in the sand. After a very long wait, during which I accumulated more bug bites than I can count, the guide brought us onto the beach to watch the mother turtle fill a hole in the send with over 100 round, white eggs. She was there for almost an hour, popping out these glistening ping-pong balls, before she covered them up and made her slow trek back to the sea.

It is amazing to think that something as small as a baby turtle will become so big--the mother was over three feet long, and from the looks of her, very heavy. It's also disheartening to think that in 10 years, the turtle walk might not be allowed anymore. More and more people seem to come every year, and the sad truth is that the more people there are, the more likely it is that someone will try to exploit these amazing animals. Turtle eggs are very valuable, and even though it was wonderful to touch the turtles, it's something that should not be done unless absolutely necessary (as it was that day). It seems that the more people appreciate something, the more we have to appreciate it from afar. The same way you used to be able to go inside some of the Egyptian pyramids, that option is gone now, in part because of too much foot traffic and other human-related dangers. I'm so glad I got to see it in my lifetime.

Sunday morning, we went on a 5:30 canoe tour of the river, where we saw three kinds of monkeys (howler, spider and capuchin), cayman, Jesus Christ lizards and green macaws. After a big breakfast and a little more beach time, it was time to take our three buses and one boat back to San Carlos. The whole way home, I thought about turtles.

Next weekend: Cahuita and the Aviarios Sloth Sanctuary!!

Too far afield (trip)

Today I got to take a day off from work to go on a field trip with some of the students from the English class where I sometimes help out. Most of the students are around my age, and they love to have native English speakers to chat with. Sometimes they ask me questions about what words mean, or how to translate a phrase (today's highlights: an in-depth analysis of the phrase "sold me down the river" and a long search for a synonym for the word "bowels"), but mostly they just like to talk about their families and friends and ask me about mine.


I got up around 5:30am to leave at 6:30 and meet the class at their school. Tuesday was their last day of class, after studying English together for over a year. We took a van to an ecological site about 10 minutes outside of Ciudad Quesada, where the first thing I noticed was a pond full of fish. Someone asked me what kind of fish they were, and told me the Spanish name for them was trucha. I guessed that they were trout, and luckily Google tells me that I am correct in that assumption. Glad that I did not spread misinformation about fish (fishinformation?) to the whole class.

I was told that there would be lunch on the field trip, but I was not aware that these fish were it. And that we had to catch them. So with a hunk of plantain hooked onto the end of a fishing line, I attempted to reel in some lunch. It took a few attempts to finally bring one up, but I caught a fish! And as soon as I brought the line up, it made a break for it and jumped onto the ground. As weird as it is, fishing for your lunch at 8am, it is definitely weirder to have to pick up a flapping fish off the ground, only to throw it into a sink and watch a surly Tico wearing rubber boots and machete in holster on his belt unceremoniously tear its head off. I now have the happy task of trying to scrub fish blood out of my white t-shirt.

Optimistic.

Reeling one in.

Looking like a fool with my fish on the ground.

Got him!

After a very exciting morning, we segued into a very tedious hike, where the surly Tico stopped us every few meters to tell us about a different leaf. We passed a mine cut into the rocks, and when he handed me a flashlight and told me to go inside, I followed orders. I was just starting to wonder whether or not there might be bats in the cave, when the beam of my flashlight fell on a spider the size of a small dog. At home, I'm not usually one to cower in fear over a spider, but when I saw this sucker, I'm pretty sure my life flashed before my eyes (this is the second time a bug has made me scream here; a cockroach hissed at me in the shower the other day) . I saw a few of its friends skittering along the walls as I ran out of the cave, dragging several confused and panicked people in my wake. After a few braver souls went in to check it out, I saw a bat fly over their heads and out of the cave. I was still more afraid of the spiders.

A much braver soul than I managed to snap this picture of the cave-dweller. I feel completely justified in my fear.

I was glad when we walked away from the Spider Caverns, but I don't think any of us were prepared for the six hour hike that followed. Luckily, it only rained a little, and we got to take in some beautiful views.

Along the way, I talked with Carlos, a 19-year-old student who told me he hopes to use his English to become a tour guide because he loves meeting people from other countries. "If someone knows English, I just want to talk to them," he said. Carlos told me several times that he was glad we came on the trip, "because without you it would be very boring." That alone made me glad I went. He had a lot of questions about different words, and kept reminding me to correct him if he pronounced something wrong. He said to me "I think you are a very nice person. Some people I meet, they seem very proud, just because they have money. Even if I had a lot of money, I would still be the same. I think you are that way, too." It made me feel somehow guilty that when he talked about people being proud just because they have money, I knew he meant Americans. Most of the Ticos I talk to haven't had the chance to travel around their own country, because they don't have the money. But it made me feel good that he doesn't see me as privileged, even though he knows I've been traveling. It was also amazing to me that he had only been studying English for a short time, but his words could be that heartfelt and nuanced. I hope my Spanish will one day be that good.

After the hike, we returned to the pond, where our fish were waiting for us, looking not that much different from the way we left them. Just frozen in a sort of surreal, crunchy tableau. There were lots of little bones, but it was definitely fresh. And there was yucca frita and arroz con leche (best foods ever).

Trucha tableau.

The rest of the afternoon, we hung around on the porch to stay out of the rain, playing card games and talking. I went home with severely muddy hiking boots, the aforementioned bloody t-shirt and the e-mail addresses of some new friends.

Monkey business (and the dealings of sloths)

If I may refute a popular saying, sometimes it is not about the journey, it's all about the destination. Getting there may be harrying, hellish and all-around disheartening, but once you make it to that dreamed-of place, it's all worth it.

This weekend's destination was Manuel Antonio, on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. The day started without much promise-- hazy and gray, with a rain that never let up. Making it to the San Carlos bus terminal on time seemed to be a good omen, but the ride to San Jose took longer than expected (as per usual), and we were late getting into the terminal. The North Atlantic Terminal. And our next bus was due to leave from the Coca-Cola Terminal in ten minutes. We asked a cab driver and he said it was a few blocks away and pointed us in the right direction. So we ran.  And got there just in time to see our bus pull away without us on it.

A cab driver told us the next bus to Quepos wasn't for two hours, but he could take us to catch up with the bus at its next stop. So in one regulation red cab and one suspiciously unmarked (except for several Jesus fish) white sedan, we sped after the  recently departed bus. It was like a chase scene in a movie--honking horns, frantic cell-phone screaming, collisions avoided by mere inches. The driver told us we were looking for a white bus, and when he pulled off onto a side street he said something quickly in Spanish that sounded a lot like, "you can make it if you run." So we ran. Maybe an eighth of a mile, during which my backpack came open and spilled its guts onto the side of the busy highway. So when I finally reached the bus I was panting, sweaty and clutching my open bag (thankfully with all my things back inside--minus a can of bug spray, the only casualty). But I was so glad to be on that bus that I didn't even mind not having a seat. For nearly six hours I sat on the steps between the door and the driver, hopping up every time another person came on or off the bus. It was wet and it was cramped, but we were on our way!

Co-piloting the bus to Quepos.

 And when we finally arrived, everything fell into place. The hostel had miraculously saved the reservation I had sent them by e-mail a week before, and we made it to the sushi place in town (the promise of which had kept many of us hopeful and salivating for the entire journey) just minutes before closing time. The taste of tropical rolls (crab, eel sauce, avocado and fried banana) and a cold beer is truly the taste of victory.

My survival instincts got the better of my journalism instincts for a while, but I was able to snap a picture of the tropical roll before I ate the whole thing. 

The next day I slept in until 8am before grabbing some free breakfast at the hostel (Wide Mouth Frog in Quepos, highly recommended for friendliness and cleanliness, but the location leaves something to be desired) and taking the bus to Manuel Antonio National Park. Ten dollars gave us access to the park's hiking trails, which lead up to several small beaches. A guide told us that we had arrived just in time, since most of the wildlife begin their day around 9am.

Within just a few minutes of walking down the path, I saw a guide and a few tourists stopped at the edge of the trees, looking down into the jungle at something. It took a while to spot it, but then I saw my first Capuchin monkey, with its little white face peeking out from behind the leaves.

Capuchin monkey, jumping from tree to tree.

 

 

A few more animal sightings later (iguana, tree frog and one very bold raccoon) and we were at the beach. The first thing I noticed was the blue ocean and white sand. Then I saw all the monkeys.


Spotting monkeys in the jungle had been a challenge, but here on the beach they were everywhere! In the trees, on the sand, climbing on garbage bins. It's a sad truth that they only come so close to humans because people continue to feed them (for a list of the important reasons NOT to feed the monkeys, please click here), but it was still amazing to see so many monkeys up close.

One angry monkey.

Little did I know, I would be able to get much closer to a monkey than this.

Mother with a tiny baby riding on her back. The baby was fast asleep the whole time!

After watching the monkeys and taking a million pictures, I finally went for a swim in the ocean. Which was quickly interrupted when I noticed a raccoon had stolen my shorts from on top of my towel. I ran up the beach just in time to shoo him away and watch him drop my shorts from his tiny paws. Later that day, my friend literally played a game of tug-of-war with a raccoon over her purse, and had a monkey steal her bag of trail mix while we were busy climbing a tree in search of crabs and lizards (which we found).

One bold monkey, chowing down on some pilfered raisins and peanuts.

Curious hermit crab, checking out its surroundings. 

Then, on our way out of the park, I had possibly the most exciting animal sighting yet. After six weeks in Costa Rica, I finally saw my first sloth! It was every bit as slow, mossy and majestic as I imagined it would be.

A beautiful sloth specimen. In Costa Rica, they are called perezosos, which literally means "lazies."

After the sloth sighting, I thought it couldn't get any better, but then we went to dinner in a bar housed inside of an old army transport plane, which was "shot down by the Sandinista army, leading to a scandal that uncovered illegal CIA supply missions to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua" (Frommer's). We had heard it was a great place to see the sunset, but the hazy, blank sky meant no pinks or oranges in sight. The view was still breathtaking. Staring out into the unbelievable depth of that nothingness, the sky was absolutely white--like the perfect inverse of outer-space.

Standing outside El Avion.

Coming out of the plane that night, I couldn't imagine anything that could improve upon what had definitely been one of my best days in Costa Rica . Then some people on the street pointed out a sloth hanging from a wire above our heads. For a while I couldn't believe it was real, but then I remembered that everything in Costa Rica really is pura vida.

Urban sloth, swinging from the power lines.

Wet Paint

Another volunteer came to join me at Llevando Luz this week, so I was finally able to paint the mural Dona Karen had requested when I started my placement. It only took me two days, which is a good thing since the kids couldn't play outside while I was painting, and having them cooped up inside makes them restless.

Most of the time I was working, they all crowded around the gate to the patio and watched, asking me to add different animals. I had them come out one by one to add their hand prints, which made up the flowers. Karen's son, Sami, who was my assistant through the whole project, left his mark as well.

Hand prints are pretty much a universal theme in volunteer work, and it's no wonder. They say, quite literally, "I was here, I helped, I got my hands dirty."

Banner in the Library of Hope at the school where I volunteered in Sohag, Egypt in 2009.

Hand print leaves at Llevando Luz.

I had really wanted to paint the mural inside the house, where there is a bare concrete wall, but during the green season it's just too damp to paint inside (and somehow I doubt that even the dry season is really that dry). I think it turned out pretty well, though. Eventually I'm going to add some paintings on the floor, with hopscotch or four square patterns that the kids can use when they play outside.

The Green Mountain

We had to cancel our plans to go to Manual Antonio last weekend, since some of the roads were all but impassable due to flooding from storms. We decided to go to Monteverde instead, which is just a boat ride away from La Fortuna.

We took a bus to Fortuna after work on Friday and stayed that night at the Arenal Backpacker's Hostel, which is definitely one of the nicest hostels I've stayed in, on this trip or otherwise (clean rooms, hot showers and a great pool surrounded by hammocks). We made it an early night since we had to be up early for our 8am jeep-boat-jeep to Monteverde.

On the boat, crossing Lake Arenal.

The "jeep" turned out to actually be an air-conditioned van (much less exciting, but more practical in the event of rain, I suppose). We rode about half an hour to the lake, where we boarded the boat that would take us across to Monteverde. There are a lot of companies running jeep-boat-jeep tours, and you never really know what your experience is going to be. On the way back the next day, our van stopped mysteriously at an out-of-the-way house where we had to reload our bags and ourselves into another van, for a reason I still am not entirely clear on. The boats are also a gamble--the first one was a large, ferry-type thing that chugged along and had us to the other side in about 90 minutes, but our return vessel was a tiny, tin-can of a boat that zipped along at surprising speeds. Once we arrived on shore, we loaded into more vans for the 90 minute drive to the town of Santa Elena, which was briefly interrupted by a Costa Rican traffic jam.

Mooooooving along- cows block the road to Monteverde.

After arriving at the hostel (Pension Santa Elena, a very friendly if slightly moldy place) we went to lunch at the Treehouse Restaurant, which is built around an old fig tree.

I read about a ranario (frog pond) in Lonely Planet, so we decided to go there to escape from the rain. It was $10 for a tour, where our guide used a flashlight to point out the frogs in their glass terrariums. For that amount of money I was a little disappointed at the laziness of the frogs, and the fact that we couldn't even hold any of them.

I definitely got my money's worth the next morning though, when I went to a coffee tasting/mini-tour for the amazing price of absolutamente gratis. We showed up right as the coffee place was opening, so they let us sample four roasts for free, and then offered us full cups of our favorite. I learned that light roast actually has more caffeine than dark roast- since the roasting actually cooks of some of the caffeine. I also got to try "natural roast", which is usually reserved just for coffee farmers, since it's made from whole sun-dried coffee berries.

Free samples :)

A lineup of the different roasts.

 
Before I left on Sunday, I knew I had to see the humming bird garden. For $5 we got to spend as long as we wanted with hundreds of hummingbirds flitting around the various feeders set up in the garden. I had seen hummingbirds in Costa Rica before, but never so many in one place. There were at least a dozen different types, from tiny green ones to huge purple ones as long as my hand.

Check out this video to see them in action!

Overall, a great weekend, pretty much planned on-the-fly. Fingers crossed for Manuel Antonio next weekend!

Crafts and cacao

As much as I love my job taking care  of the kids at Llevando Luz, it wasn't actually my first choice for placement with CCS. I was drawn to the program in San Carlos when I saw that they had a women's empowerment program called Amureci, which centers around an art co-op that makes crafts out of recycled materials. Women are certainly part of the workforce in Costa Rica, but it is definitely still a male-dominated society, where machisimo is very much a part of everyday life. It's great to see an organization put together by women for the purpose of showing other women how empowering it can be to run an autonomous business, and give back to the environment at the same time.

We are allowed to visit other placements during the week, so on Thursday I went to Amureci to check it out and help them make the crafts. The studio where they work is in the back of the store where they sell their paper goods and some jewelry made by other local artists. The store is covered in murals, and everything that is for sale is beautiful--all hand-painted with butterflies and flowers.

In the back, all the recycled materials are sorted into bags (paper, glass, plastic), and there are big tubs and screen for making the paper. They use recycled paper scraps and fiber from banana leaves to make the paper, which they turn into stationary, journals and picture frames. They needed to make 40 small journals for a church group that was coming in, so that was my assigned project for the day. After another volunteer glued the books together, I painted a design on the front cover. Mostly flowers, although I churned out a few pineapples that didn't look too bad.

Getting crafty.

Some finished products.

 I loved getting to volunteer at Amureci, but in the end it just made me appreciate my placement at Llevando Luz even more. I think I would get bored painting butterflies and flowers every day, and there is certainly no chance of that with the chaos and spontaneity of all the kids at the daycare. More importantly, it seems that the women at Amureci could benefit from some extra help, but mostly they have their duties under control. At Llevando Luz, I feel like what I do every day makes a difference, and things actually do run much smoother when I'm there.

                                                                        ..........................

Later that day, we took a field trip to a chocolate farm. But what was supposed to be a one and a half hour drive turned into a seven hour round-trip journey. Luckily chocolate improves my mood exponentially.

We took a walk through the rainforest over the longest hanging bridge in Costa Rica, which was a little unnerving, but mostly amazing.

On the hanging bridge.

After that, we saw how chocolate is made, from bean to bar. And we got to sample it in every delicious stage (ok, so cacao beans are actually not so delicious-they taste like a cross between old fruit and slimy coffee beans).

Cacao pod

Time to make the chocolate!

The freshest chocolate there is- straight from the tree!