Weekend Adventures (Photos)

  Manuel Brenes

   Zarcero
Puerto Viejo: shark just swam by!!
 Blue Crested Motmot ( I did not take this photo)

Weekend Adventures

Hello everyone, it has been a while since I last wrote. School is ramping up, I am working to finish up my summer internship project, and I decided I could also pull off writing an enormous scholarship all by December 6th. Busy past couple of weeks, but I have still managed to explore and have a wonderful time here in the land on endless summer. 

The weather is changing from the rainy season to the hot season, so the result is wind, and the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets in the world. My camera is coming next Wednesday, so there will be photos soon! I don't know if I talked about it before, but my technology curse continued when my camera actually broke while I was taking a photo of the LITERALLY the most beautiful bird I have ever seen in my life. Google : blue crested motmot, you will die. 

Latest adventures:

Zarcero: beautiful little dairy town in the mountains. It looked like we were in a little Alps town, and when we walked down into the dairies, it looked just like the Arcata bottoms, pine trees, fog, cow poop smell and all. Zarcero is known for their topiary, and we got to help the man who has cut those shrubs everyday for the last 50 or 60 years.

Puerto Viejo: Small beach town on the Caribbean. We stayed in a crazy art hostel with 50 hammocks that we all slept in. The beach was wonderful, but we really only had one full day, and opted to slip and slide along a mud path in the jungle for most of the day. Best memory: standing on one of the bluffs above the ocean, looking down, and seeing a shark swim by! It was not very big, but still an incredible thing to see.

Reserva Manual Brenes: This is a research base near San Ramón owned by the University of Costa Rica. It was an incredible place with the biggest insects I have ever seen. Cockroaches as large as your hand!  We went with my plant taxonomy class, and spent the day and night identifying tropical plants.

La Selva: Another incredible research base that scientists from all over the world study at. We saw so many birds. So many. Macaws, motmots, great curassow, trogons (related to quetzals), honeycreepers, manikins (the crazy dancing birds), and many more. I was in heaven at La Selva...minus the bullet ants. There were all over the trail, and were over and inch long. We think one girl in our group got stung by one, but it was never confirmed. Whatever it was, she was in a lot of pain, and I spent a lot of time looking at the ground instead of the trees when there were ants about.

Now, it is crunch time to finish everything, and then on the 6th of December I leave for Peru until the 19th of January. Feeling VERY lucky with what I have been able to see in such a short period of time, and where I am headed.

Pure Vida!