For those who wanted to see some artwork (Mom*)

from when I thought I would be studying bees for my independent project...

Esta Lloviendo!

IT'S FINALLY RAINING!

I haven't actually talked about the weather here very much as of yet but since we've been in this "rainforest"- or actually "cloud forest" we have had yet to see any rain, and very little clouds. Today thunder roared as we sat in our first few lectures and we were suddenly instructed to unplug any electronics we have because of the lightening. Towards the end of our sexual selection lecture, the rain was hitting the windows so hard, Pati had to yell to be heard over the noise. I can't wait to walk to spanish today and experience my first tropical downpour firsthand. The cloud forest is finally living up to its name.

Sunrise over the cloud forest

Last night fore Jared's birthday a group of us headed up the trail to the continental divide (My third time up there). Its a gnarly almost completely uphill hike in the daytime, and in the middle of the night with only headlamps to guide us it was quite the trek. Another one of the stray dogs joined us and decided to make the entire journey up. Half the group called him Nathaniel and the other group called him Cheeto-either way he did an excellent job of running up and down our line of hikers, either tripping us or scaring the crap out of us by suddenly leaping out of the dark. But he was so cute and genuinely excited about being part of our pack that I really couldnt be annoyed by him. By the time we reached the peak, and had sneaked past the house of the T.V. towers-guy, I was drenched in sweat and completely exhausted. We set up a little sleeping circle and talked for a few hours. Cheeto-Nathaniel slept right along side. In the morning I woke up to Nick setting up his camera to capture the sunrise and was lucky enough to be awake and looking out over the forest-covered mountains as it made its way into the sky. It was indescribably beautiful. We were all cold and wet from the morning mists but I felt amazing. We headed back down the mountain around 6 am and were back in time for breakfast and class. The clouds today are low over the hills around the station, and Erick says that it means rain could finally be on the way. I can't wait for the change of weather and the rainy season to start. Hope everyone is doing well. Pura Vida

I have my project!!

It is official! My proposal is turned in! And after much debate and inner-turmoil my final 2 week independent research project will not be on bees, or coffee plantations, as I originally thought. It will be on long-tailed manakins!!

 These little guys!

I was pretty set on the bee project that I told a couple of you about, but I decided that my heart did not lie in pinning insects...in fact I really hated it. So I'm doing birds. And I'll spend the next couple weeks out in the rainforest watching these guys do amazing things. I am finally REALLY stoked on this project!!

Vivo en Monteverde

So a huge apology for not writing for so long. I've been living at the Estacion Biologica de Monteverde for eighteen days now, and its been a whirlwind. My time here is coming to an end too quickly and I'm trying as hard as I can to just slow it down and stay in every moment. Right now I'm stretched out on the lawn behind the station underneath some bromeliad-covered trees, catching some of the last late afternoon sun while Hanna and Jessica lie beside me. Today was the first day of preliminary observations for our final independent projects. I'm pretty stressed out about it but I'm trying to just stay on top of things and not let it negatively affect my time here. At the moment my project is really up in the air, and a lot of people have theirs nailed down...but like I said I'm trying not to let it stress me out...too much.

Life here has been busy to say the least but also just incredible. I will never forget the crazy ride coming up to Monteverde. The bus hauled us up a ridiculously windy mountain road through forest like nothing we'd seen yet. At some point we switched into smaller cars because the bus could not make it up the rest of the mountain. Once we got to the station, it took about 30 seconds for me to fall completely in love with the place. We have dorm rooms throughout the building, with one extra set of dorms on a little hill behind the station. The main downstairs area is a giant dining room with one big long table that we all sit at for our three meals a day (when we dont take them to the lawn outside). Upstairs there are a few offices, labs, an insect room, and our one large classroom, lined with windows that look out onto the mountainous cloud forest. This is where we have our tropical ecology, tropical diversity, and agro-ecology lectures, along with group research projects and workshops 6 days a week. The absolute best part of the station though, is that it is literally feet away from the trailheads of a variety of paths that go straight into rain forest. I make sure to get time in the forest every single day, whether its for class, waking up early to go birdwatching with friends, or just going to climb the giant strangler fig tree that stretches out over our nearby waterfall. Essentially I'm in heaven.

The few times where we've had completely free days have been spent exploring the greater part of Monteverde. I've made two hikes to the continental divide-a mountaintop with an incredible view where a strange man who lives TV towers sells his handmade jewelry. We've also made it to a gigantic waterfall in San Luis-a rural town nearby and several other forest adventures. Many of these are accompanied by at least one local stray dog. Monteverde is full of them-but they're very well behaved, for the most part pretty clean, and will follow us across the forest all day if they can. We've made a variety of dog friends across town, and any day is made brighter by a familiar furry face. 

At night there are a few other things to do. Santa Elena-the nearest "downtown" to the station has two bars: Mata e' Cano and Bar Amigos. So far I've only been to the former. Its pretty small, and therefore perfect to role into with a group of twenty-seven gringo college students. The couple times we've all gone out have been a blast. It basically turns into an all EAP dance party. And even when there's just a few of us its been fun. There are also a couple really good restaurants that we've been able to sneak away to. Last weekend there was also a festival of the bulls in town-this provided us with several nights of watching locals get tossed around by wild bulls, and some sorry gringo attempts at salsa dancing...

All of the teachers continue to be amazing. In our agro-ecology class with Pati, we've taken field trips every week to coffee plantations, organic farms, a quaker cheese factory, and a heart-wrenching and disturbingly typical pig farm. Our ecology and diversity classes are a little more typical-but not really all that much. We stay in the classroom but Frank is especially eccentric when teaching, and its all stuff that EVERYONE's interested in, which still blows my mind. Three days a week we all walk a little more than a mile down the mountain from the station to the Monteverde Institute for our Spanish classes. In fact we walk over a mile to get pretty much anywhere. It's pretty refreshing, and sometimes insanely tiring...and I'll definitely never complain about the distances I have to walk in Santa Cruz again. 

In summary I love living here. As excited as I am to join my host family, its going to be hard to leave this little set up. 

Send me positive vibes regarding my project. I'm really stuck. I'll try to write more. Love you all!

Guanacaste

After Isla Violines, I don't think any of us really believed that what we would see next could be any more incredible than what we had been living for the past 6 days. I didn't anyway. On the 8 hour drive from the Oso Peninsula to the northwestern-most coast of Costa Rica, for most of us the need to sleep outweighed the anticipation of seeing our new destination. To anyone looking in it probably would have appeared that our sheepish Tico bus driver was on his way to go dump the bodies of 27 american college students he'd just dealt with. It wasn't that we hadn't TRIED to sleep on the island, it just was never quite as easy as you wanted it to be. The climate was so humid and the air so heavy that a sleeping bag was never an option for me. I chose instead to be eaten alive by the bugs that inexplicably got into mine and Sarah's tent, and more than once the night rainstorms created a giant pool of warm rainwater directly under my sleeping pad. It was a small price to pay for the time we had there, but nonetheless every one of us was exhausted.

We arrived in Guanacaste, in a town that was as near to our destination as the buses could get, and were then translocated into a few very Indiana Jones-like open-air trucks, and the back of one beat up white van-(guess which one I was in). Its pretty lame to keep comparing things to disneyland rides but I dont know what else to compare that rocky ride into the forest to besides the indiana jones ride. The dirt road was practically made of potholes and we were jostled and thrown the whole way there, laughing and trying to orient ourselves to our new temporary home. We arrived at the campsite on the property of a new Tico naturalist acquaintance we made that night, Mauricio-who also happens to be an incredible cook. We set up our tents as fast as we could so as to beat the sunset, marveling at the lack of humidity, and the serious decrease in "no-see-ums"-the stealthliest of the biting bugs in Violines.
  
The seasonal dry forest of northwestern Costa Rica, at first appeared to be frighteningly reminiscent of a forest you might find in southern California. The air there is hot and dry, the ground dusty and rocky, and the amount of "tropical-looking"trees and plants are at a minimum this time of year. Unlike the rest of the tropics in Costa Rica, the dry forest has a dry season of 6 months and a rainy season of 6 months. A few months from now the area in which we camped will be incredibly lush, tropical, and extremely wet, but during our stay it was dry as a bone. However any associations I had with this place and California quickly subsided at approximately 5:20 the next morning. I was violently woken up by what sounded like a large animal being tortured directly above my tent. Sarah and i ripped open the tent door-a very similar reaction to everyone else in the little tent village. We all looked and beheld the screamer, a large male howler monkey with his family of about eight other howlers and a single white spider monkey. They gawked at us as much as we did at them, and then continued to howl at the top of their lungs. This would be our alarm clock for the next six days.

Schoolwise, the program was laid out very similarly to Isla Violines. We had several workshops and orientation walks through the forest, and one major group project. The wildlife was incredible. We had some amazing insect lessons that got me more into bugs than I've ever been. I think anyone who's scared of bees should come see the iridescent orchid bees of the dry forest. They're too beautiful to be scary.

There are a few key things I will never forget about the dry forest.
1. The wildlife: mainly the birds and the bats. Every day brought amazing bird watching, and holding a little Jamaican fruit bat in my gloved hand was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had with a wild animal.
2. The watering holes. About a 10 minute walk from our camp was a stream that connected a series of freshwater pools. They were small and filled with biting fish but we ran to them every chance we got.
3. Sitting on Mauricio's kitchen porch for dinner every night. Mauricio really is an incredible cook, and catered ridiculously well to vegetarians. Mauricio's porch was the only lit area in the park and every evening we would sit in circles on the floor and eat and talk and play card games or banana grams for hours. One night we even wrote a song our trip and performed it with Pati-which turned out interesting
4. Snorkeling. One of the best trips of my life to the nearby beach town of Cuajiniquil. I saw eagle rays, several eels, a sea horse. It was unreal.
5. Stargazing. One of my favorite evenings of this entire trip so far came on our second night in Guanacaste. A group of about fifteen of us made a long hike in the  middle of the night up to a viewpoint with a giant plastic tarp and just laid out under some of most amazing stars I've ever seen. We saw countless shooting stars, talked, and somehow got into telling as many riddles as we could think of for hours. I felt really close to everyone that night. I just kept thinking about how amazing it was to be away from everything superficial, artificial, alcoholic, etc. with all these people I hadn't known 10 days earlier.
Guanacaste was when I really started to realize just how stongly I feel that I am meant to be here right now. I love Costa Rica

Back in Civilization!

Sorry its taken me a while to update this. I've been back in the realm of internet and cell phone service for 4 days now, but the thought of logging down everything thats happened to me over the past couple weeks just seemed way too overwhelming in my tired, unmotivated state. Giving you every little detail would be pretty obnoxious so I'm going to try to sum it all up as best I can. In fact I think I'll just break it into a few parts. Sorry if it get's a little tedious. These have been some of the best 2 weeks of my life.

Isla Violines

So on our last morning in San Jose we woke up with the stars still out to load up a huge (pretty luxurious) bus with all of the bags we would need for the field trip. The other half of our stuff, including our computers, went straight to the institute, which we wouldn't see for another 2 weeks. The bus ride was long, but it was a good way for us all to get to know each other a little better. Our first stop along the way was a bridge over the Rio Tarcoles. It's a famous tourist spot because it has an incredibly beautiful view, and because directly below the bridge, a huge group of crocodiles spend every day basking in the morning sun. This was the first time I felt like I was somewhere truly exotic. Wild spoonbills and scarlet macaws flew overhead as we snapped a million photos of each crocodile. Suddenly the excitement of what we would be witnessing over the next few weeks just filled me up. We made a few more stops after that one, at a park that held some of Costa Rica's mysterious stone spheres, and at an African oil palm plantation. Dad, the spheres made me think of you a lot. They don't know very much about the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica, but they believe these perfect stone spheres, ranging from the size of a tennis ball to the size of a car were somehow created and utilized by a group called the Diquis. Its one of those cases where the technology to make such an object seems to be far too advanced from the time period they come from.
Our final destination (by bus) was a small beach town called Sierpe on the Oso peninsula, where we grabbed a quick lunch at restaurant owned by a women who's daughters would be coming with us to cook for us for the next part of our stay, and whose sons would be our boat drivers (Pretty much every person we encounter in Costa Rica is related to at least 3 other people we have met or will meet in Costa Rica) 
Finally we loaded all our stuff into two boats driven by two new Tico friends, Chato and Mario, and took off on an incredibly beautiful boat ride through one of the world's largest mangrove forests. More macaws, tiger herons, parrots, kingfishers all flew overhead. It was like a real life Jungle Cruise. When we finally saw what would be our home for the next week I think all of our jaws dropped. A beautiful and completely isolated tropical island welcomed us to its shores. We each stepped out of the boats into the bath-warm water and just kept laughing and yelling about how incredible it was that this was school. 


On this beach on Isla Violines, right where the sand meets the forest, begins the property of Don Miguel, our host for the six days we were there. I could write an entire post on Don Miguel and I probably should someday. Don Miguel is 48 years old, though he's got a weathered look about him that makes him seem much older. He is the island caretaker and lives in his house there alone, unless being visited by a school group which I'm not actually sure happens more than once a year. There is one other man who lives on the opposite side of the island, but we had very little interaction with him. As far as we were concerned Don Miguel was the king of this island. On the first night of our stay, as we sat in the dining area getting an orientation from Frank, Don Miguel walked shyly inside with a young boa constrictor he had just caught that we were all able to hold. He then proceeded within the next 20 minutes or so to catch cane toads, a box turtle, and several huge insects for us to pass around. One of the amazing things about this group is that everyone wants to see everything, and hold it, and ask questions about it. No on is afraid of snakes, or bugs, or anything. Sometimes it feels like being around 26 versions of myself. Throughout the rest of the trip, Don Miguel would accompany us on hikes with his machete, allowing us to go anywhere we wanted. He would cut down coconuts for us, go crocodile catching, and exploring with us in the middle of the night, all with a very shy and quiet demeanor, and without a word of English.
We spent almost every day exploring the trails along the island, with several 'orientation walks' and workshops. We had one day where we climbed through the mangrove forests and got to forage for small bivalves called pienguas, we had several amazing tree frog and poison dart frog encounters, traveled across the ocean with Chato and Mario to another island, Isla de Canas to go snorkeling, went bird watching every morning, all in the name of school. 
I think my favorite thing about the island though was getting to know everyone from the trip so well. The only electricity we had came from a generator that only ran for a couple hours at night (longer if Costa Rica was playing soccer that night). We had to wash our own clothes by hand, play card games by headlamp light, and lived in a little tent village right at the edge of the sand. Every morning and evening we all had to line up on either side of Chato and Mario's boat and push it with all our strength either into or out of the water, rolling it over tough bamboo poles that we would have to keep hauling back in front of the boat to keep it moving. We had no choice but to learn all about one another, and bond through our struggles and amazement at our living situation. It was hard to leave. But as sad as it was saying goodbye to Don Miguel we were all anxious to see what was next on this trip.