Bus Observations

Razor wire topped fences

Cell phones and digital cameras

Old manual shift cars that spew emissions

Beautiful vistas, mountains, and beaches

HONESTY’S THE BEST POLICY: One thing our blog abroad blogger Jeff in Prague said in one of his first entries was that he was going to strive to be completely honest. So far, I don’t think I have quite done that. I have a tendency to be politically correct. So I’m going to try to give you the unrated version of my study abroad experience including poopy, machismo, El Pueblo, trash, roads, Spanish, equality, and SFS. (Hopefully, this little entry won’t hurt my chances for some import political office later down the road!)

POOPY: So here at the School for Field Studies, we love to talk about poop, pee, Dengue, Malaria, flatworms, and other potty talk. In fact, there is even a poopy scale from 1 to 10; 1 being liquid and 10 being so hard that you might as well grab a copy of War and Peace and go sit for a while. Many students suffered tummy bugs when adjusting to the diet of fresh fruit, vegetables, beans and rice.

But I’m a vegetarian with an iron stomach--not even college dining hall food can phase me--so I didn’t earn any good war stories. This sounds really strange, but I tested my stomach with hopes of a crazy reaction. (Note: I was the weird child who wanted braces, glasses, freckles, stitches, and a cast on my arm because I thought they were cool and I more importantly I didn’t have them). I purposely ate fresh fruit without washing it, ordered drinks with ice, and filled my water bottle up from a fountain at Braulio Carrillo National Park. No use. My stomach was fine…that is until I tried the fried, battered plantain. I bit into it and oiled oozed down my hand. I should have realized that was a bad sign, but I didn’t want to waste food. So a finished it. It tasted like vegetable oil. About a half hour later I felt queasy and had to make a quick trot to the communal bathroom.

Another thing about poopy; because of bad piping, we are not supposed to throw away any toilet paper. Instead, all the dirty toilet paper gets put in a plastic bin and then transported outside to a giant metal barrel for Jorge to burn. Back to diarrhea, it’s quite a distracting experience that makes it hard to focus on writing an Econ paper because of the frequent trips to the ladies room. On the 1-10 scale I think I had a 2.5. I feel like everyone should experience diarrhea in order to empathize to a small degree with the “400 children below age 5 [that] die per hour in the developing world from waterborne diarrheal diseases.”*

*Gadgil, A. 1998. “Drinking Water in Developing Countries.” Annu. Rev. Energy Environ. 23:253-86. (I can email you the pdf file if you are interested).

MACHISMO: Ah, Machismo; Great for self-image but kinda annoying. I think some Latino men hoot and whistle at anyone/thing that could potentially be female. I’ve got a big nose, stick-out ears, thick eyebrows, my clothes don’t match and I didn’t bring any make-up to Costa Rica, but that doesn’t matter. I have still heard plenty of cajoling. The best are the drive-by catcalls because it just sounds like a nonsensical noise maker. You’re supposed to just ignore it, but it is a culturally shocking and it bothers me because through the lens of my American culture it is very degrading and disrespectful.

EL PUEBLO: This nightlife center is like machismo cubed. What I left out in my entry on San Jose is that the guys there will go as far as you let them. They will grab you and try to clutch you close to them…I blush at trying to type anymore details. Essentially, if you are female and want to have a good time there you have to know how to say no and/or how to slap someone silly. Walking between the bar and the dance floor is always fun (sarcasm) because you turn around to slap whoever grabbed your tush and you have 4 faces smiling up at you so you don’t know who to hit. Personally, I can’t handle El Pueblo and I have no desire to return there. Two of my friends were robbed there and it is one of the few places where the fear of rape seriously crossed my mind.

TRASH: As you know, trash is an issue here. People don’t seem to care. I’ve seen people just drop their garbage in the street. It has been hard to restrain myself from rabid attack. Although, I don’t feel powerless because while at the Municipal Forest I picked up some trash and students and parents around me followed suit without me having to say anything. Indeed, actions do speak louder than words. I urge you to declare war on litter wherever you are!

In a later entry I’ll give you the lowdown on other topics such as roads, speaking Spanish, equality, and the School for Field Studies. For hanging in there and reading this, you get to see a slide show of pictures from beautiful Cahuita National Park.

Clockwise from left: Alex, Alli, Lizzie, Maggie, Lauren and I snuggle into soggy sleeping bags under a pavilion next to the beach under the pouring rain. It was the best music I have ever slept to. Steve took the pic using my camera.

So you probably want me to get to the part about environmentalists illegally camping by endangered Leatherback Sea Turtle breeding grounds and being mistaken as poachers. Yah, yah, I’ll get to it. Just be patient, first I have to tell you how we got there. The eight of us, Rachel, Steve, Lizzie, Alli, Maggie, Lauren, Alex, and I had decided that we wanted to go camping because it’s a cheap, exciting way to explore the country. Gerardo, our professor, told us about this wonderful, peaceful point off Cahuita so we decided it would be a fun place to go.

Four-striped Whiptails (Ameiva festiva) were all over the drift wood on the beach near our campsite. I used a guidebook in Poas Volcano National Park giftshop to figure out the species names for the Caribbean creatures.

In order to save time in getting there, we decided to try to catch a bus from alongside the road by Braulio Carillo National Park instead of heading 45 minutes to San Jose, waiting for a bus, and then riding 45 minutes back to the Braulio Carillo. The trick to our time saving strategy was figuring out how to get a bus to stop. Every time a bus came by, we would jump up and down to try and get the driver’s attention. The first couple bus drivers just waved at us and beeped their horns. I guess they thought we were just being crazy gringos. We did look pretty silly. Maggie had on a big, green poncho over her backpack, mat, and sleeping bag so she looked like a dinosaur. I think the bus stopping tactic that finally worked was to have Alex step out in front of the bus. (This was not an SFS approved action).

Giant piece of driftwood being weathered by the surf at Cahuita National Park.

We couldn’t get one of the buses heading to Puerto Limon or Cahuita to stop but after about 2 hours we finally got one heading to Guapilles to stop for us. There were no seats available so we had to stand for the duration of the bus ride. I felt a little rude because we were wet, dirty, and smelly and our packs hit against the seated passengers. Once we got to town we bought tickets for 4:30 PM to Limon, the point north of Cahuita. At the station, I bought a creamy, chocolate-peanut butter ice cream cone for 250 colones which is the equivalent of 50 cents. (Low prices are one reason why it’s great to study in a “third world” nation.)

These snails were on the dead tree pictured above in Cahuita along the Caribbean.

From Guapilles, we took a bus east to Limon and missed the last bus to Cahuita by 5 minutes. The ticket vender called up his friend, a 19 year-old mechanic with a van, to drive us to Cahuita. While waiting for his friend I noticed that the Caribbean definitely has a different feel. Reggae music was playing and there was a man with beautiful waist length dred-locks and another with a huge dred-lock filled leather hat. While waiting in the light drizzle, we were accosted by a swarm of cabbies eager to make a buck. It was a relief when the mechanic finally made it. Although his pot hole dodging was a little nerve-racking. When the mechanic dropped us off, a teenager offered to sell us ganja (sp?) to which we politely declined. We ate at Restaurante Tipica which is run by a Jamaican named Winston. The place had a great beach mural, the tables were all cross-sections of giant trees, and the lights hanging from the ceiling were enclosed in spheres of thin paper with dried flowers. I liked hearing Winston call me “lady;” it felt like when a Baltimore waitress calls you “hon.” For dinner, I had a salad and rice with vegetables along with a yummy, fresh guanaba (sp?) smoothie.

Alli lays out her wet clothes to dry on some driftwood. Everything was soaked by last night’s storm.

Winston told us that we couldn’t camp in the National Park but that he would let us camp in his backyard instead. As a generation that was raised not to trust strangers, we figured he was just looking for a way to make money. In our search for a taxi to the park, Steve talked to the kabob lady and she volunteered to take us. She drove us up into the park and beeped her horn at the ranger station. Nobody came out so we played games for a while under the awning of the ranger station. When the rain let down a little, we decided to check out the campgrounds and ended up being escorted back by the team of international researchers. The next morning at 10:30 PM Lizzie and Lauren were interrogated by Jorge and Carlos, MINAE (Costa Rica’s Department of the Environment) administrators who were distressed to find us there because no one had been allowed to camp in the park since 2004. They softened when the girls showed them the page in the 2005 Lonely Planet Guide that listed the park as a great campground. When they realized it was a sincere mistake they made us all breakfast for a mere $4 each!

The MINAE (Ministerio de ambiente y energia) rangers, Jorge and Carlos, prepared us a breakfast of beans & rice, eggs, pancakes that tasted like funnel cake, and delicious coffee. Qué suerte!

I was extremely confused by their kindness. Back home we would have been kicked out, no questions asked. I couldn’t believe that they let us stay. We had the most beautiful beach I had seen in my life all to ourselves! Quiet isolated beaches with coral reefs, lizards, butterflies, pretty shells, and black sand are heavenly. It felt like a dream.

A fallen coconut tree, that Steve, Alex, and I tried to grab coconuts from.

We hung out on the beach until close to noon and then we took a walk through the woods that parallel the Caribbean Sea. I’m getting sleepy and this entry is getting long so I will let my photos do the story telling from here on out.

A Central American Whiptail (Ameiva festiva) rests on the path that runs through the woods parallel to the beach.

Scary: This poisonous Golden Eyelash Pitviper (Bothriechis schlegelii) was sleeping in a tree close to our campsite.

A white-faced capuchin (Cebus cupucinus) tries to explore the contents of Lauren’s bag.

Before we reached them, a local guy practiced their English and said, “Hey girl, you want to see some monkeys?”

One of these white-faced capuchins touched my leg. I never thought I would ever shriek, “Get off me you bad little monkey!” to a real monkey!

The monkeys were close to Rio Perezoso which means “sloth river”- I’m guessing it got the name either for its velocity or the mammals it is home to.

Looking in holes is rewarding when you find cute crabs like this one!

A baby Howler Monkey clings onto his mother’s stomach as she swings from branch to branch. In the morning, the howlers sound like lions.

Bad news: After an unforgettable, exhausting weekend, I fell asleep on the bus ride back to San Jose. I wasn’t quite awake when I got off the bus so I accidentally left my Dad’s sleeping bag connected with a pink karabiner to Carrie’s air mat on the bus. No more sleeping outside in a hammock for me! Carrie, I am so sorry. I can either give you money or buy you a new one. All the rest of your gear is safe and sound. If anyone feels like sending me mail, a karabiner would be greatly appreciated! By the way, Katie seriously rocks for sending me the CD with happy music and postcards from Spain – and a major thank you to Eric, Lee, and Charlene for their awesome letters, and to my boyfriend Mike for the white-faced monkey stuffed animal.