Week of Adventures

Sarah: Whew! What a week. I’ll try to summarize everything that’s happened in the past week, with the hopes that this doesn’t get TOO long. We started the week by traveling back into San Jose last Monday. We were able to visit the LASP office and even sit in on one of their guest speakers (a homosexual pastor, very interesting). That evening we went out to eat with Trevor and Laura, and more of the staff came along too—the intern Christina (who happens to be from Spokane), and Krystal. Trevor and Laura treated us all to a great Italian dinner and ice cream for dessert. We spent the night at Trevor and Laura’s—they live in a beautiful house on the edge of the city, and have 5 baby kittens to play with.

Tuesday we got up EARLY to leave for Nicaragua. After a long day of travel and meeting interesting people, we made it to the beach town of San Juan del Sur. For the next 2 days we spent chilling in the small town and hanging out on the beach. We met even more interesting people, and took a trip to a nearby beautiful beach known for good surfing. It was a major surf crowd, complete with the long hair. For us, it was great to be back in Nicaragua. Though it’s so close to Costa Rica, it’s a completely different country. In this particular small town, there were plenty of people living in poverty, and there were also tourists with lots of money, some who were already purchasing property to build big houses on. Friday morning we got up early to catch the Transnica bus back to Costa Rica. We even found some of the same people on our bus back, who had done the same thing by crossing into Nicaragua to renew their visas. We met people from all over—the couple from Israel, a couple from New Zealand, a couple from England, a guy from Quebec, lots of other Canadians, and a guy we named “old man crazy”. He was our most memorable travel buddy—from New Orleans, and very quirky.

Friday we got back after a long day of travel and headed back to Trevor and Laura’s to spend the night again. Saturday we got up and they had a big breakfast prepared, and Alex came to join us. Alex was a professor when we were students, and we hadn’t had a chance to catch up with him yet. He was one of our favorites—an Afro-Costa Rican who is one of the most suave guys ever. It was fun to reminisce about our semester, and to chat more with the staff from a staff prospective. We spent the rest of the day running errands in San Jose, waiting for our first guest to arrive. Stacie flew in late Saturday night, and it was so fun to see her! We went back to the sabbatical house and stayed up late talking and catching up. Sunday morning we got up to finish some Christmas shopping in the city, and then headed back out to the airport to pick up the rest of our guests.

Micah, Kevin, and a guy named Paul who is friends with the other two flew in midday on Sunday. We packed the Volvo completely full, squashed in, and set off to our first destination. We made it to La Selva, which is a biological research station on the Caribbean side, in time to take a hike before dinner. It was absolutely incredible there. The facilities are great, and the wildlife was unbelievable. After dinner we took another really fun hike in the dark—and being in the jungle at night was like being in the 100 Acre Woods with Winnie the Pooh, complete with all the jungle sounds. Monday we got to go on a guided hike with Max for 3 hours, which was really fun since we were all or are currently Naturalists to be in the reversed role. Monday it rained the entire time during our hike, but that made it even more adventurous. Overall, some of the highlights we saw were: blue jeans poison dart frogs, a 2-toed sloth, toucans, an agouti, iguanas that jump into the river, a white bat, a snake, leaf-cutter ants, lots of parrots, peccaries, and we heard howler monkeys off in the distance. The birders of the group were in paradise, since there are about 450 species of birds in that one area. Everyone loved being there and it was fun to experience it together.

We started to head back into San Jose after a good trip, and when we were about a half hour from the city, the Volvo all of a sudden quit working. It happened to be in a bad spot—right along the highway, and of course we didn’t have cell phone reception. A nice guy pulled over and David and I got a ride to the nearest restaurant, about 15 kilometers away, while the others stayed back with the car. We called Anthony, since it was his car, and he ended up driving out to pick us up and pull the Volvo back in. Unfortunately, we were planning on making it back to QERC that night, and we were delayed enough that we had to stay in San Jose for the night. The whole thing took hours, and we made it back to the sabbatical house late for a short night of sleep. Monday was a very long day!

Tuesday we got up early and headed back to QERC. We got here to find sunshine—we are now officially in the summer. After sleeping and being nice and lazy for a while, we took off for a hike late in the day. We made it to the top of the trail just as it was turning dark, and hiked down the trail in the dark. It was fun to do a night hike, and we even had a sparkle party (an activity from Mission Springs night hikes). It’s been good to have a home base and do laundry and catch up on sleep.

Today is Wednesday, and we are planning on taking off soon to spend a few days beach-hopping. We’ll keep you posted…