The beach

Well, I'm going to give more details about the station where I'm living. The station is near a town called Puerto Viejo in the region of Sarapiquí. This is the town you go shopping or to find tools, etc. The bus from San José takes like 1.5 hours and goes through a mountain range, so there are pretty nice views along the way. My guess is that we are located at 100 km North of San José.

The station has a dinning room where they serve food just like when I was in High School. Food here is super high in carbs, they eat a lot rice, potatoes, fried things, etc. The most common dish for breakfast is called Gallo Pinto, which basically is rice, black beans, red bell peppers, cilantro, and a sauce based on soy, pretty good but not for every day. Breakfast is served between 6-7.30AM which sucks, I'm not a morning person, hahaha. Once you get out the kitchen you need to cross a river to get to the cabin and labs, to cross the river there is an amazing hanging bridge!!

The station has cabins for researchers like me that are staying over a month and cabins for people that is just visiting as nature lovers for a few days. I have my owwn room in the second floor and I share the bathroom with my cabin mate, who is a bat researcher from Germany.

The station has also a lot of lab and office space for researchers. My office is big with enough benches and shelves to put all my equipment. There is also a lounge to hang out with a TV, a stove, and some couches.

So what about the beach??? Well pretty much every other day we go after lunch to natural beaches at the river. The sand is grey-black and is pretty coarse. We hike 3km, then cross the river with a cable cart (will post pics soon!!) and them walk like 100m and hang out in a river beach for a little while. If you stay still at the shore of the river with you feet in little fishes will come and bite you, hahaha, not harmful at all, it's more like tickles I would say. Sometimes we also hike river up and then let the current take us down to the station, it's pretty fun, plus is a good workout!!

Long day...roary end

Well today I woke up early and left the hotel to get some money of the ATM. Currency here is called Colones and the coins are huuuge, they remind me of the coins we had in Colombia back in the 80's. I had enough time so I went to "El museo del Jade" (Jade Museum), pretty interesting pre-columbian handicrafts in stone, gold, clay, and obviously jade, apparently jade was as important as gold as it was for south american indians.

I then met with my assistant at the bus station and left to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí. The road felt like home (Colombia) nice mountains, curvy roads, and reckless drivers jaja. We finally got to the field station after almost 2 hours in the bus. The station is very well organized and is just beautiful. My cabin has a balcony from were I can see the river Puerto Viejo, it's just beautiful, weather is a lot less humid and cooler compared to Panamá, so overall it's pretty comfortable.

We pretty much hiked through the forest trails all the afternoon then went back for dinner briefly and the continued to hike. My assistant is very knowledgeable about insects and has a well trained eye to find the butterflies (too bad she will be here for just a couple of days to show me around, she has been here before). We found one butterfly aggregation tonight!

It was about 9pm and we were hiking in one of the trails, it was all dark. We suddenly hear a roar pretty darn close in the forest patch in front of us. We stepped back immediately, it was either a puma or a jaguar. I never thought this would happen here but yes there are pumas and jaguars here, and they can attack people. It was not a howler monkey, they definitively sound different and they are up in the trees and none of the other large mammals like pecarís, agoutís, etc. would make a roar like the one we heard, it was a wild cat. My guess is that the puma or jaguar was no further than 10 meters from us. We then decided to go back to the station and carefully turned our heads back every other while to make sure that we were not being stalked by the cat. I'm definitively buying a big knife that I can strap to my leg just in case, because I will be hiking alone at night when my assistant leaves in 2 days.

Tomorrow we will go to a different forest I hope we find more butterflies...

Got here safe and sound/llegué vivo

Long trip via Houston, the hotel is not too bad, it's and old house in historic San José...Tomorrow I'll meet my assistant at the bus station and we will leave to the field station!

Field Season 2009!

This will be probably the last field season of my PhD. It looks like it will be even better that last year's one!! So here is a little list of where and what I will be doing:

March 16-April 24: I will be in Costa Rica in a field station called La Selva. Field work, field work, and more field work.

April 24-May 3: I will take a little break and travel around Costa Rica, my main goal here is to find a decent beach where I can stay and hire someone to teach me to surf!

May 4-September 1: I will be all this time in Panama in the same spot I visited last year. 3 weeks of this period I will be at Barro Colorado Island (hope I don't get to claustrophobic because the island is tiny) and the rest will be in Gamboa.

June 16-June 25: Another small break. I will leave Panama to go to Chetumal, a small city 5 hours south of Cancun in Mexico. After the meeting I will spend a few days traveling the Yucatan Peninsula and Northern Belize, yes Belize!!