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...