Tea, craters, and Peru (photos)

The volcano that I could not see, I hiked the like lump next to it. Doesn't look impressive, but I was definitely sore the next day, so that volcano must be a monster.

 Ecstatic bush woman cheering my one my way.

 The trail to the lake

We made a nativity scene! A few blistered fingers and lots of moss all over the house, we made something special.

Tea, craters, and Peru

Yesterday was the last day of semester! Very bittersweet, with the majority of my wonderful friends leaving to start their lives back in the states. I got to have one last hurrah, and decided to do a solo trip over out Thanksgiving break and hike the Cerro Chato crater next to the Arenal volcano. The Arenal volcano is HUGE, and I was staying in the town right underneath it…however, it poured the entire time, and I never actually saw the volcano. 

My hike to the Cerro Chato crater was a muddy, windy, and wet event. My reward was being able to jump into the cold lake at the crater, eat some of my refried beans, and start the way back. It was most definitely one of my favorite trips I have done.

The hostel I was at was filled with Europeans, and we had a lot of fun trying to communicate with each other in a mix of Spanish, French, English, and Dutch. After a lot of hiking, I drank a lot of tea, reread The Alchemist (wonderful book), and wrote lots of goodbye letters to the good people who are flying out tomorrow!

 Saturday the 6^th of December, my friend Christina and I are Peru bound! Well, first we are taking an obscenely long bus ride to Panama City, and then flying to Peru. We have mountains, deserts, art, and lakes on the menu. However, we aren’t very sure of the order, so stay tuned for Peruvian tidbits and photos. 

Pura Vida!

Kate

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!

La Comida de Costa Rica

I have discretely been taking photos of things that I eat at home. I LOVE Costa Rican food, which is 90% rice and beans. I thought that after a summer of eating pounds of dried beans, I would be sick of them. But, no, mixed with rice, they are perfect mix of quick burning carbs and protein that keeps you full all day long. 

Lets start with dessert. This is arroz con leche, and I would eat it every single day for all meals if I could. Recipe: Rice, milk, cream, butter, butter, butter.

Every single morning my host mom has breakfast and lunch waiting on the stove. I then can  eat breakfast, fill a container with rice and beans, and I am good to go for the rest of the day.

 Mangoes! When I fist got here, we had a mango tree in the back. This was the result.

 This is the fruit basket and my lifeline.  It is conveniently right next to my room, and therefore always empty.

 Because I need more fruit, here are some pictures of strange things at the fruit market. These are wonderful, but I forget what they are called.

 Homemade tortillas! Besides rice and beans, these are by far my favorite. I put sliced up banana on them, and my whole family looks at me like I am a weirdo.

 Rice and beans in the morning! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Plus some fried cheese which very popular here. I think this is because these cheese here is not creamy, it is very bouncy, and only softens when fried.

 Well, now I am hungry and going to go eat some tortilla outside of library so that I do not get yelled at by the librarian. She has it out for me, and I get in trouble for one thing or another every week.
                                                                       Pura Vida!!!

Photos: Panama and Tortuguero

Panama and Tortuguero

My journey started at 4:23am with a phone call from my friend who I was supposed to meet at 4:20am on the street corner to walk to the bus together. My alarm didn’t go off, and I sprinted out the door past my mom who was in the middle of making me fried plantains for breakfast. Made it on the bus and started our long bus ride to the Rio Suerte. We then got on a big river boat and made our way up the jungle canal.  I swear that our tour guide had different kinds of eyes than normal beings because all of the sudden he would point to the bushes and the boat would veer over, stop, and he would point out a green lizard that he somehow saw in the green leaves from a speeding boat. Thank goodness for his keen eyes because I got to see some amazing full grown Jesus Christ Lizards. Later in the trip we were lucky enough to see the young ones running across the water.

Our hotel was surrounded by jungle and I saw an enormous amount of wildlife by just walking around the pathways between buildings. Every morning at 5:00 am we were serenaded by troops of howler monkeys outside of our windows. It sounded like a raging war zone. After that wakeup call, I would walk the paths and bird watch.

I saw:

Keel billed Toucan, Collared Aracari, Chestnut-colored Woodpecker, The Great Curassow, Little Blue Heron, Yellow Crowned Night Heron, Boat Billed Heron, Black Throated Trogon, Slaty Tailed Trogon, Northern Jacana, Anhingas, and more that I have most likely already forgotten.

We also saw quite a few sloths, both two and three-toed sloths, caimans, a porcupine, a crocodile, and the highlight of my trip…turtles. I paid to go on a night time walk with the rangers to watch as green sea turtles hauled up on shore to lay their eggs. It was a freaking magical experience to sit on the beach with these mammoth mothers (they were huge!!) as they dug their nests, laid their eggs, buried them again, and scooted back down the beach to disappear into the Caribbean ocean.

The next place we went was Bocas del Toro, Panama. To cross the border you have to get off your bus and carry all your things across a very old bridge that spanned a pretty large river. Having to walk the border just made everything more exciting. We got onto another bus and bused to the town of Almirante where we then boated for 45 minutes to the Island of Bocas del Toro.

This part of the trip was about snorkeling and pristine beaches. By boat, we island hopped and saw some incredible marine life.

We saw:

Redbilled tropic bird, Brown Boobie, Magnificent Frigate Bird, Everyone’s favorite fish (Yellowtail Damselfish, flat needle fish, Stoplight Parrot fish (my favorite), and soooo many more.

After four wonderful days, we all woke up to enjoy our last breakfast on the balcony of our hotel in Panama. It was cloudy and I was happy to see a rain front coming toward us across the bay; it would nice to get a little drizzle. The weather had different ideas. All of the sudden we were blasted with huge winds and all the plates, cups, food trays, and part of the roof of a bar next door were blown away by the wind. It started to pour and all the cleaning ladies were screaming and running around like the world was ending. The bay got really rough which was a problem because we had a 45 minute boat road off the island. Everything was delayed until there was a break in the weather and we all loaded onto a little boat and took off through the storm. It was quite a ride and there were a lot of people who looked like they didn’t think we were going to make it.

We made it too the bus, but the entire country side of Panama had been ravaged by the storm. For miles, giant trees had been snapped in two, all the power lines were down, and the bushes were beaten up. It was quite a shock to see so much damage.

Until next time,

Pura Vida!