Arenal (Nov 14-16)

Our friends, Annie, Sonja, and Sarah, arrived at 11 pm on Thursday night, and early the next morning we left with the Elon group for La Fortuna and Vulcan Arenal. We stayed in a resort there, and I have to admit it was fun to live “high style” for a bit. We had large, but simple bungalows in a gorgeous, well manicured area just at the base of Arenal, with a big pool and water slide, and five thermal pools, heated by the hot springs below. We arrived Friday afternoon, after traipsing about Zarcero, with its lovely topiary in the main square,

passing a demonstration against gold mining that the government wants to begin in this area, and lunching in La Fortuna.

As soon as we arrived we jumped into those pools and had a great time exploring all the water choices, drinking pina coladas in pineapples, and enjoying the volcano waterfall which was lit up in red at night, as well as, of course, the real thing. We left for the real thing at 5:30 pm and joined throngs of others on the other side of the volcano where most of the action is and we were delighted by the fireworks. The sparks of lava shooting out weren’t that frequent and so one had to be patient, but it sure was exciting when it happened, with the bright rich red against a black mountain. After an hour or so we returned for dinner and then bed.

Next morning, up to the Mirador (Look Out) with gorgeous vistas, more exploration of the grounds, including crocodile and ant houses, howler monkeys hanging around, and further explorations by Anthony up the mountain into the lava flow area. Students loved their horseback riding; some of them and Molly went bungee jumping (!) in the afternoon and loved that too. Others of us had more drinks in pineapples or coconuts poolside. Sunday began with a 4 am walk to see the sunrise from the volcano for Anthony, Scott, Anna Ruth, and Sonja. The cloud cover precluded seeing much of a sunrise, but the volcanic rocks and walking the night into morning was very lovely. More relaxation by the pool, occasionally in pouring rain. But thermal pools are hot, even in the rain, and so quite pleasant. We had fondue in a little corner of Switzerland created in Costa Rica, called Los Heroes, which intertwined Juan Santamaria (Costa Rica) with Arnold von Winkelried (Switzerland) as the two heroes. This was most amusing, but delicious, and another treat was milking the cows who provided us with the fondue, and then drinking that two-minute old, unpasteurized, warm milk. All too soon back on the bus, although meeting these coatimundis was a pleasant diversion, and home to San Jose.

Cerro de la Muerte (Oct 31-Nov 1)

The most striking thing about Cerro de la Muerte is how cold it is. It is hard to imagine a place this cold in Costa Rica, but then you have to think about how high this mountain is (the tallest one along the Inter-American Highway in Costa Rica at 11,322 ft). We went as part of the Environmental Science field trip, and so we had a professor and two assistants with us as well. We saw oak forests as they are in Costa Rica, a mountain bog, and paramo, all specialized niches in this mountain location.

Cerro de la Muerte is called Hill of the Dead. The story about the name is that people in the valley would make the 3- or 4-day trip to San Jose, often carrying their produce or products, with only their light t-shirts on, which would be wet from sweating. When they got to the top of Cerro de la Muerte they would lie down to sleep and would ultimately freeze to death. Cheery story, and even with long johns, pants, flannels, jacket, scarf, and gloves on I could definitely resonate to the experience of cold. Here are the students and Anna Ruth and Molly trying to stay warm:


The hummingbird research we did was about how the many sugar feeders put out to attract hummingbirds may affect pollination of the plants in the area. We first collected flowers that hummingbirds are normally attracted to, examined their pollen under the microscope, and sketched the pollen on paper so as to help us remember the various shapes. The next day we set up the hummingbird net, caught the hummingbirds briefly, touched their beaks and neck feathers with scotch tape which we affixed to glass, and then we assessed these for how much and what types of pollen could be found. Very little actually. This suggests that hummingbirds are returning to the feeders rather exclusively, and so pollination may be reduced, as at least these hummingbirds were not doing their job. To fully test this, however, we would need a sample of hummingbirds not caught near feeders to see what the pollination counts would be. The place we would go to do this, however, is even colder, so perhaps another class would be interested. . .

Driving in San Jose

It is always good to know the driving rules for any particular city. Here are some interesting tidbits about driving in San Jose:

Signs: “Alto” doesn’t really mean stop, it just means slow down if you want to, or honk your horn as you enter the intersection. A red light doesn’t really mean “stop until the light turns green”, it just means “stop if you want to”, or “stop, then go”. “Hay en piso” on a residential street might mean “one way” for trucks or buses, but for cars, it probably does not apply to you, especially as one can see at least 10 cars parked in the direction that is not the one way allowed. Some taxis pay attention to signs like these, and others consider themselves more like personal cars, at least for the moment.

Nuances: One way streets that are thoroughfares are usually understood to be one-way streets. However, driving in reverse when you miss your turn is understood as necessary, and no one honks at anyone for driving backwards. Given how very hilly this city is, we find this a very interesting practice. Also, the direction of the thoroughfare only applies to cars or trucks (unless as per above, they need to be driving in reverse back to the turn they missed); however, servicio express (take out) motorbikes go in whatever direction they want. We have learned that we enjoy our walks much more when we look both ways before crossing the street. Additionally, some streetlights only show the red/green lights in three directions, and thus, the fourth direction just has to guess, or take their chances. Also, the lanes painted on the streets are really only guidelines. No one really expects you to stay in your lane if something is in the way of your progress; cars just keep moving over, including those coming right at you. Finally, drivers must attend to the street itself, as there are deep potholes everywhere.

Honking: Unlike in many cities in the United States, honking is not considered rude or unfriendly. In fact, if you didn’t beep your horn to say hello, that would be rude and unfriendly. Taxis and other cars beep to say hello all the time. IN fact, if a taxiste sees you and he drove you somewhere the other day, he will beep to say hello; he doesn’t need to be your best friend. And, if a taxiste doesn’t know you, but thinks you might like a taxi, or should want a taxi, he might beep to let you know the great opportunity you have for a ride. Also, if you are female, all cars will beep to say hello and other provocative things as well. Since half the population is female this adds substantially to the tooting of horns. Finally, all vehicles also use their horns preventively, so if they think a situation might be developing they will toot their horns too, to warn you they are coming, they are turning, someone else is coming, someone else is turning, etc etc. School buses also honk their horns to let students know they are there (many students can’t see the buses because of the gates); one of them is actually my alarm clock. I think there are probably other reasons for honking as well, but I haven’t broken those codes yet. Suffice to say there is a lot of traffic noise in San Jose. Now that I understand that this is all communicative and mostly friendly, it is more amusing than bothersome. And, in striking contrast, last week for the first time I actually saw one seriously angry person blast another driver, and it was unnerving in that it just is not done here.

Tortuguero (Oct 25-26)

We met out bus at 6:30 am and drove again through the fabulous Brauilo Carillo Parque National. This time we had a guide who enthusiastically pointed out various volcanoes, changes in ecological niches, riverside sedimentation, etc. This was so interesting that although this part of the trip was about two hours, we never got a chance to read. We also stopped at a banana plantation for a quick examination of the banana trees and the factory in which the bananas were sliced off the stalks, sorted, washed, bundled, etc. Also saw a huge Rhinoceros beetle there happily munching on some sugar cane.


We arrived in Tortuguero by boat along the very long canals, with many beautiful herons, spoonbills, mangrove swallows, anhingas, and of course, the ubiquitous howler monkeys. The town is amazing. Although Puerto Viejo and Cahuita were small, Tortuguero is smaller, with exactly one road. Well, not exactly a road either, as there are no cars. I guess we can call it a paved path.



In the afternoon, Amy and Anthony were on the beach at just the right moment to see a nest hatch out, and the last of those baby turtles waddle off to the ocean. They were incredibly cute!

Survival rates for babies are something like 1/100. Thus, there is a strong focus on not disturbing mother turtles from egg laying, and trying to protect the nests from scavengers.

In the evening we had to find internet service in this tiny town in order to send one of Ruthie’s college application files to her school counselor. We finally found it, in what had been the parlor or a bedroom in someone’s house. The child who helped us had been doing his homework at the kitchen table. Definitely feels like cottage “industry” here!

For the late night turtle tour, we went again by canal to reach the beach. We had to wear dark clothes, not bring cameras or lights and be very quiet. We were lead by a guide who had a flashlight with a red filter in it, so as not to disturb any turtles, and almost immediately a mother was sighted. We were not allowed to go near her until she had dug her nest and begun to lay her eggs. Although mothers are sensitive to interruption while coming on shore or digging, once they start laying eggs, nothing stops that process. So we were able to get very very close, and see the glistening eggs, which was pretty marvelous. When she was finished laying, she covered up the hole very well, and then lumbered back to sea. These turtles are huge (around 300 pounds) and it is amazing to see them return from sand to ocean.

In the morning, Anthony went for an early morning walk and found many tracks of other mother turtles who had come ashore. His walk was interrupted by a huge thunderstorm, which fortunately cleared before a day of searching the canals for more wonderful flora and fauna (see below). Home in time for dinner and another 5-day week in San Jose.

Water Follies

I think I have been sharing a bit about how much water comes from the sky here during this season. We are now in the Temporales, which is the time of changing. There is less rain (that means there is still rain almost every day, just less of it), and more wind, so that clothes dry on the line in a day. (Before this, our clothes could easily take up to 4 days to dry). This entry, however, concerns water from below. . .

Last week I discovered my flash drive at the bottom of the washing machine. Woops. It still works great though, a portent of good news to come. . . On a Tortuguero canal (see next entry), Thomas, our guide, sped up the boat to get through a tree-congested area. Unfortunately, one of those tree branches caught hold of my camera and dunked it into the river. We thought it was gone, totally gone, but then someone spied it hanging from the branch, half in the and half out of the water! We backed up the boat very very slowly and snatched it up. Four days of drying it out and hurrah! A working camera once again! For those in a similar predicament, indirect sun is best. Don’t try the “put your camera in rice method”, however. This method reduces moisture but then your camera is covered in more rice dust than imaginable. More on the fabulous Tortuguero canals coming next. . .

Cahuita and Puerto Viejo (El Caribe) in October

Molly, Ruthie, and Anthony were all off from school at the same time for a few days and so we took the bus heading east to the Caribbean, passing through the very gorgeous Brauilo Carrillo Parque National (a mountainous cloud forest with spectacular views named for the first president). Four hours later we arrived in Cahuita in the dark in the middle of a downpour (truthfully the downpour had begun before we left San Jose, and just continued with us). As the bus pulled away, we noted that we were in the tiniest of strip malls, after closing time. Amy finally found a taxi driver in a video arcade around the back of the mall, which was entirely empty, except for him, and after he finished his game, he agreed to drive us to our hotel. Our hotel was maybe 200 meters away, but he somehow managed to get lost, so we had a tour of the entire town, which is all of 3 streets, depending on how you define “street”.

At the little restaurant (and I mean little, as in 5 tables) associated with our hotel (also little, as in 4 rooms) there was exactly one family dining (also little, as in 2 people). And it turned out that we knew them from synagogue. We joined them for dinner and ended up spending quite a bit of delightful time with them through the weekend.

In the morning, we got to see the resident iguanas (everywhere of course), parrot, and caimans in the creek behind the hotel, and then we spent the day in the fabulous Cahuita National Park, with capuchin and howler monkeys in the jungle and warm gentle waters and beach.

That night we slept in Puerto Viejo, again in mosquito-netted beds, and discovered we had landed in vegetarian heaven! One place to highlight was Miss Veronica’s. She is a Seventh Day Adventist who cooks macrobiotic, organic vegan meals, Caribbean style. So if the hotel restaurant the night before was little; this restaurant was tiny. In fact, this restaurant really was Miss Veronica’s wee porch, which held our table of 7 (including 2 Swedes and a German) and no more. But what a meal!!! Also, here is a photo of a favorite place we went to for breakfast. There is a big difference between the places owned by the locals versus either out of town Ticas or folks who have settled here from elsewhere, in size, but not taste!

We met Emily and Isa again at the Manzanillo National Refuge, and the 3 older and 3 younger persons promptly got separated from each other. Molly and Isa had the art materials in their pack and so they made drawings on their rocky beach, while Ruthie ran up and down the various paths searching for the older persons. The older persons eventually backtracked, knowing that the younger persons would not have walked to Panama without them. With a sufficient amount of running, shouting, calling, and a bit of luck, we all discovered each other, had a lovely late lunch, a visit by the howler monkeys and we were able to hike back to the trailhead before dark.

Another great delight of this weekend was the discovery of three Elon students also in Puerto Viejo for the night. They knew we were there, and when their turtle protection project on the west coast was rained out, they decided to head to Panama. What joy for all when they spied us across the street and ran behind us shouting “surprise!” Ruthie and Molly joined them for another disco party. Anthony and I went back to our hotel, after noting for the students and our kids that the disco was totally surrounded by cops, in fact, more cops than we had seen in our entire time in Costa Rica. We figured it was a drug bust and we just hoped no one would open fire with the entire town of Puerto Viejo present. That was how relaxed the atmosphere was. In retrospect, what were we thinking?! Pura vida, I guess!

This weekend we had a wonderful time, eating, relaxing, meeting old friends and making new ones. Between the howler monkeys and the roosters who did not know to wait for dawn, however, we did not get much sleep. Great place though, and we would be very glad to return!

Nicaragua!

Although Costa Rica is sometimes a third-world county and sometimes not, Nicaragua is definitely a third-world country. There is a lot of charm, and there is a lot of poverty. The roads in Nicaragua are said to be "fairly decent, but then there are only two." In our experience this was somewhat true in that the others were dirt roads. . . I will also say that even when we were traveling on one of those good roads, I was chronicling our stay by on my laptop, and within 20 minutes, my keyboard had a serious layer of dirt on it. Oops.



Granada is a beautiful quaint city with old-Spanish charm, but also very rundown, which is not surprising given the poverty of the country. The colors are fantastic, and even though people have so little, almost every house and building is painted a different color, which adds greatly to its charm. There were very few cars in the streets, with the exception of the occasional tourist bus or taxi, and during the day time lots of people on foot or bicycles, often tandem regardless of gender and age. Helmets? No! People are friendly everywhere, and seem respectful to each other and certainly to us.

Homes in the city have windows and doors only in the front, and as in row houses the sides are always closed. Inside is dark and sparsely furnished with wood chairs, table, sometimes a rocking chair, and sometimes an armoire of some kind. That’s it. Most people seem to hang out outside their homes or near the doorway, and one can see why; that is where the light is and people too. The exception is when there is a TV, in which case it is the center of the room, and the chairs are set up around it. The homes tend to be very small and completely functional. We saw no children with plastic toys or stuffies or anything other than functional items or items they were carrying for work related reasons. In the city there were plenty of very poor children, often begging, and when the students returned from dancing late one night, they saw them gathered together to sleep at the base of the church. When one of the students brought pizza leftovers from dinner the next morning to them for breakfast they were very happy, and kept saying “share, share!” to each other. It was a meager offering, six pieces of pizza for about 10 kids, but it took us a while to realize how grave the situation really was. We learned that unemployment in Nicaragua is about 50 percent. . .



In the countryside, the houses are just like the ones in the city, and although they could have windows on all side, they still don’t, with windows just in front and probably in back. Other homes that are not concrete, look more piecemeal and shack-like, with reused materials and more precariously structured. (see the middle picture above. This house which is quite tiny, and probably does not have plumbing, has a living room with one table and 4 chairs, but central to the room is the TV!) Occasionally, single cows graze outside of homes near the road and they seem to provide the means for keeping grass cut... (IN the side yard in the photo to the right is the family pig.) In the country side, children occasionally have a hammock or a tire swing, and sticks and outside activities for play. There are trees and flowers growing pretty much everywhere near country homes, with sort of a dirt-based front area for chairs and play. Again these tend to be one or two rooms forward to back, and sometimes four rooms in a square. In the pulperias you can see the living space to the side, and maybe a tiny bedroom behind that. (By the way, pulperia means “octopus” and a person in a pulperia needs 8 hands to grab all the different things on the customer’s list.) In these little stores, you can see the laundry hanging to the side of the building, sometimes the chickens around, and sometimes a pig in the backyard.


Near Catarina we went to a potter’s shop and they did not have running water. There was a well with an electric pump that people in the town used, and then carted it to their homes. They may have had a different house that they live in now, but the part with the pottery shop had a large concrete base and then they cooked meals on top of the concrete base, using wood for the fire, and pots that sat on top of the wood. They cracked their eggs, and cut up foods on another concrete slab nearby. Very simple pots, knives, and space for cooking, and a simple small table with a few chairs for eating. That’s it.

At this shop, we saw a pottery demonstration and then tried our hand on the manual wheel (without a gutter for the water), made a big mess, and were so happy when they shared their water shared with us (we had potting mud all over our hands), and then we thoroughly enjoyed their shop in appreciation for the time they had spent with us. We also went to two markets, each of which had fabulous crafts and for considerably less money than in Costa Rica, though wow, it does still add up.

We also went to Masaya Volcano, which actually includes five craters, one of which is still emitting large quantities of sulphuric fumes, and tried a boat ride on fabulous and huge Lake Nicaragua (we got rained into a fortress that was very fortunately near by!). Along the way, we had lots of opportunities to talk with children on a school trip, merchants, and other folks so we had good practice talking in Spanish.



One of the great pleasures of being with the students is getting to try new things with them. They invited us to a club in the evening. Although we have been going to sleep at ridiculously early hours in the high elevation of San Jose, here we managed to have enough energy to stay up till 11:30 before going clubbing. And we all had so much fun! We learned from one of the students how to do the Mapeche, and we danced and danced and danced. At first I could not stop laughing because we are were all like sardines with elbows on a very crowded dance floor, so I felt like I was close dancing with at least four people all the time; they just keep changing in height, and colors of hips and elbows. But as the hours passed, there were fewer folks on the dance floor. The students and Ruthie, and Molly sampled three clubs through the night; Anthony and I were content to stay with the Latin band until we walked back to find our hotel closed down for the evening. There was a moment of surprise, but when we knocked on the door, it was just a moment or two before we regained entrance and returned to the comforts of our very large and thankfully air-conditioned room.

In the morning, Anthony had a painting date with another artist he had met in the square, and they each did a drawing for the other and exchanged little gifts. The children slept, and Amy walked around the square and had one last shopping encounter.


Then off to the Pacific, to San Juan del Sur, where we stayed at Las Cascades, a little bed and breakfast which we filled to capacity. There we enjoyed gorgeous views from the nearby hill, got doused once again just before getting into the water (third time in three days), met the capuchin monkeys who hang out with the family there, a very large macaw, a parrot, and a superb masseuse. Very relaxing. Monday we finally got into the surf at the beach which was great! And then customs and the long bus ride home.