Chitwood-Hille reunion

Sarah: This past week and a half, Matt Chitwood has graced Costa Rica with his presence once again. Matt is David’s best friend, who also studied through LASP a year after David and I did. He is currently living in China, after living in Taiwan for almost 2 years. It had been 2 ½ years that we have seen Matt, given the fact that with all of us traveling and living abroad, our visits home haven’t coordinated very well together. Matt started off his trip here in CR by meeting up with a friend in San Jose, Chino, whom he met in Taiwan. Matt also is starting up an English teaching program here in CR, setting up recent grads with a teaching position and a host family for a year. He already has the program up and running in Taiwan, with 4 graduates teaching, and kicked off this year with one student teaching and living in San Jose. While Matt was in San Jose for the first couple days of his trip with Chino, he set the recent graduate up with his new family and started seeking out a place to teach. After a couple days in the city, we met up with Matt and brought him out to QERC. Unfortunately we had been having some crazy weather patterns and some heavy rain hit us hard for a couple days. It was nice to lay low and relax and catch up, before heading out for a beach trek.

We left Sunday for our beach time and started off the week at Dominical, a lazy surfing town only a couple hours from QERC. David and Matt tried out their mad surfing skills, and we enjoyed some time to throw the Frisbee around on the beach. Next we headed down to Uvita, another beach along the Pacific coast. We spent one day inside Marina Ballena National Park, where we walked along the beach out to the Whale Tail, only accessible during low-tide. We experimented a bit with snorkeling, though the water was pretty cloudy, and threw around the Frisbee some more, playing 500 a few times. Our national park pass allowed us entrance into other beaches, so we explored a few other beaches around the area as well, while David and Matt body-surfed the waves at each place.

After Uvita we headed even further south to Golfito, stopping in Palmar Norte to have a quick lunch with our old housekeeper Liseth, her son Diego, and Liseth’s in-laws (also Ana’s in-laws) Vera and Francisco. On Thursday morning we went into Piedras Blancas National Park to hike around. The national park was bought by Austria and given back to the Costa Rican government, and after visiting their research station near the entrance of the park (Tropenstation, best said with a thick German accent), we were given a map and some rubber boots. We took off for a hike and passed a waterfall, found the trails to be shorter than we realized, and decided to do the longer loop. Though the signs were maybe a bit confusing, we continued on the trail we were convinced was the right one. After about 2 hours of hiking…we started to second-guess ourselves. All of a sudden we came up with the idea that this trail could be a longer trail that would somehow lead us all the way to Corcovado National Park…which would have been bad news. We made the decision to turn around and make our way back to the confusing signs. Once there, we figured out that we were indeed on the right trail, and could have been within minutes of the end of the trail. Instead we hiked yet another hour to make it back to Tropenstation, passing Caiman Pond on the way and seeing a few caimans nearby.

Thursday evening we drove a short distance north to Sierpe to stay the night, so we could get up in the morning and kayak through the mangroves. This was a real highlight of the week, as we spent 4 hours out kayaking in search of wildlife. Matt saw what he was looking for – crocodiles, including 2 baby crocs that we were able to get very close to. And David saw a new bird, a hummingbird found only in the mangroves. And I found a snake – not the desired fer-de-lance, but close…a boa constrictor! It was a great morning. Friday afternoon we made our way back to Dominical to spend the night so Matt and David could get some last quality time in boogie-boarding.

And finally, after a good week of adventures, we made it back to QERC Saturday afternoon – just in time for community Bingo up at the school. Matt won a prize, a set of nice cooking bowls. And David…almost won a prize. It was a big box of a variety of stuff up for grabs, and once David got his beans 5 in a row, he stood up and yelled “Bingo” as Matt and I were going crazy at our table. Wendy, who was reading the numbers, then proceeded to read off the next number. So we yelled even louder, assuming she didn’t hear us. And it was then that we realized we were on the last round, which was a Blackout round. OOPS. Most people were laughing (hopefully with us rather than at us!) and especially our Costa Rican friends at our table were laughing very hard for most of that round. Good times with the community. :)

Quetzal parties

Sarah: Surprisingly for this time of year, we’ve been extremely busy this past week. Last Tuesday afternoon, Efrain came over for a quick visit and ended up telling us about the inauguration of Los Quetzales National Park that was going to happen on Wednesday morning. He was wondering if we had some of our butterflies in good shape that we could set them up on sort of a display. The more we talked, the more he came up with ideas of other stuff we could display for the ceremony. The Savegre Hotel had rented a space to have their own display, and Efrain decided there would be enough space for us to set up a couple of tables and show off some of the work QERC has done over the years. We spent the rest of the day sprucing up some butterfly and moth displays, put together a bat display with a couple of stuffed bats we had, put some homemade frames on a bunch of pictures we had taken in the valley, set aside all of the research books we had bound together, and gathered together the jars containing the lizards and snakes and frogs collected last year. We made a large sign, borrowed tablecloths from the hotel, and decided we were ready.

We showed up at the inauguration ceremony early, saw a couple of other hotels that had booths set up, and got to work with the help of Efrain to make ours look as professional as we could. Turns out it was a great idea for us to be there – there ended up being probably at least 300 people for the ceremony, and most stopped for a while at our display. The kids and the adults alike enjoyed seeing the bats and the jars of specimen from here in the valley, and everyone was interested in the work that we do here. Efrain and a few of his sons would grab people out of the crowd that they knew (usually important people) and proudly show off our stuff, so we felt like it was a great way to continue to build a good relationship with the hotel and have them take pride in having us on their property. Los Quetzales National Park also backs up to the Chacon Reserve, which is where we are located, so we are hoping to build a good relationship with them as well.

The next day the activity started up at QERC as well. First we had a couple of girls show up who were going to stay the next few nights. One was a former LASP student who was here last fall, and she was back visiting her host family in the city. When one of her friends came to visit her in Costa Rica, they decided to spend a few days out here with us. Later that day, another couple of people showed up. David’s friend Alyssa from college, and her husband Ken, are on vacation in CR for a couple weeks and came to spend the first few days with us as well. It has been great getting to know them, and catching up on their lives since college too.

The next day we had a couple more visitors come. Gary Keller, who has been here at QERC plenty in the past, is the Director of the Hispanic Research Center from Arizona State University. He was in Costa Rica for a conference and came just for one night with another professor to experience QERC and the quetzals. Also on Friday came a couple of girls who are here in Costa Rica for 8 weeks studying at the Firestone Restoration Ecology Research Center. They were on a short break and came to explore the cloud forest for a couple days.

Besides those who stayed, we have had an abundance of visitors who have come by to check out the building and see what we have going on here. Besides that, our aguacatillo tree right outside our building has hundreds of fruit on it right now, and the quetzals are going crazy. Every day we have 1-2 dozen quetzals flying right by our window and hanging out for a long time in the tree. The toucanets are also hanging out, and every now and then we have 3-4 quetzals and a couple of toucanets in the tree at the same time! That in itself has increased the number of people in our building, because many tourists come over just to check out the quetzals and take pictures.

One of the most exciting people we have had visit is a muralist. We have been trying to get a muralist interested and willing for the right price to paint a mural of the cloud forest in our museum for a long time now, and it’s looking like we have a winner. We got this guy’s contact information from a photographer who stopped by a month and a half ago, and he is pretty excited to get going on the project. We are thrilled that it’s looking like this will work out!