Finding Nemo

Well, I'm back.*

Crawled home to Heredia yesterday afternoon, after about nine hours on a bus that was alternately hot and sweaty and cold and foggy. I guess that's what happens when you travel from sea-level tropical beaches up through mountain ranges and back down into a large valley in the same day. Costa Rica is kind of like Washington. You can hit pretty much anything within a five hour drive (though the deserts are a bit scarce, here).

Break was good but incredibly hot. Up until this point, my hottest traveling experience was southern Spain in July. I'm not sure the temperature down on Osa actually beat out Sevilla but the humidity sure did. The finalized trip entailed a taxi out of Heredia at 4:25 am to a bus out of San Jose at 5:00am to a taxi out of Palmar Norte at 1:00pm to a riverboat out of Sierpe at 2:00pm after which my friend, Anne, and I finally arrived in Drake Bay where we found our hotel and met up with our four other friends at about 3:00 in the afternoon. It was a long day.

Drake Bay is a one-gravel-road town that follows various beautiful beaches along the northern part of the Osa Peninsula. Well, actually, I lie. Drake Bay is the body of water that the town of Agujitas sits on. But everyone just calls it all Drake Bay. We spent a couple days there being beach bums, I spent one being a hammock bum as I managed to let myself get fatigued and dehydrated (it's this thing I do for spring break...) and one day we hired a boat out to Isla del Caña. The trip out to the island was probably the best part of the whole trip.

It was a forty-five minute ride out, during which, we saw dolphins, flying fish and sea turtles. Flying fish are now on my top ten list of ridiculously awesome creatures. I'd never been impressed with them before, but it's a very intriguing thing to be cruising along in a motorboat and have a fish keep pace with you, in the air, about a six feet away. I mean, really...a little bit confused about what sort of animal it wants to be, but cool nonetheless.

After we got close to the island and over top of the reef, Nemo (no really, that was the name of our boat captain/guide, I couldn't make something like that up) dropped us in the water to do some snorkeling. I didn't see a lot, the water was deep enough and I am blind enough that much of it stayed a very lovely blue blur. I did see some fun tropical fish and others saw parrot fish, jellyfish (sea jellies, for you biopolitically correct nerds out there), and we spotted a couple white-tipped reef sharks. It was pretty cool.

After snorkeling, we headed up to the island where Nemo dropped us off to eat lunch and do some hiking. It was a culinarily creative week as we were living out of communal hostel kitchens and trying to save money and spend it on more interesting things. Anne and I discovered the joys of Lissano (delicious Costa Rican sauce) beans in a bag on bread with tuna. Sounds terrible, yes, but you'll eat anything if you're hungry enough and this actually wasn't that bad. The rest of the crew ended up with good ol' pb&j (which, as noted prior, is not as cheap and easy as our US instincts tell us) and we cut up a pineapple and split it six ways. All in all, it was a strange but tasty picnic.

Afer lunch, we hiked up to the top of the island where there were supposedly, at one time, huge, granite spheres left from pre-Columbian inhabitants. Now there are only a few very small spheres, measuring about a foot and a half in diameter as the rest were apparently removed by some wealthy man who possessed a lot of machinery and a very large boat some years back. It was, suffice to say, a sort of anticlimactic hike during which, I got bitten or stung by some anonymous Costa Rican creepycrawly that seems to have done no lasting damage. After that we headed back down to catch our boat ride back to our temporary home in Drake Bay.

After three days in Drake, we headed to Puerto Jimenez. It is a slightly larger town with a few more tourists and expats and it was hot enough that we spent a lot of our remaining time expending as little energy as possible; this included finally taking a look at my homework. Our second day there, though, we hired a guide to take us out to Corcovado National Park. The national park is home to some of the last primary growth rainforest north of Panama. I was so excited to see this! Unfortunately, I got ripped off. Our guide decided that the highlight of any trip into the park would be getting face to face with a real-live, nearly extinct, taipir. So that's what he set out to make happen. And it did. He found us a taipir and it was cool, but it wasn't what I really wanted to see. We walked between six and seven hours (a total of 18 km according to our guide, but I'm not sure I believe him) along a trail in the park that ran north along the western coast of the peninsula. As a result, we never got into any deep jungle and I never got to see any terrain that was vastly different from what I've seen before. Pero, asi es la vida, that's life. I guess I'll just have to go back, right?

Anyway, we got up at 3:30 Saturday morning to make a big breakfast of all the little bits of food we had left over from the week and caught the bus out of Port Jim at 5:00am. After nine sweltering/chilly hours on the bus we made it back to San Jose and then Heredia. It was a good week. In retrospect, I ended up sacrificing seeing what I really wanted to see (the mountains of Monteverde) for some more social interaction (a group of six instead of what would have probably been a week by myself) and it was worth it. I'm just not an endless heat and beach sort of person. Sand drives me up the wall but I can stare at mist-covered mountains for hours on end and never get bored. Thats my next trip, hopefully, outside of the excursion ISEP has coming up in a couple weeks, though it will probably also be my last considering what time I have left.

But I have rambled on quite long enough for one post. My mid-term reflections will have to go in another. I'll write just as much, but perhaps this way, it will be easier to pick and choose what is of interest. Hope everyone is doing well and that you all have an amazing Easter weekend. Pura vida!

*A gold star to anyone who recognizes that particular quote. Though, the longer you've known me, the easier that task becomes.