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