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!!