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!!

The end is close...

Wow, it's been almost 3 months here in the middle of the jungle, time has just fly by...Now I'm sort of wrapping up everything, having good bye dinners, parties, and so on...

In my last field adventure we took a jeep to go as deep as we could into the jungle using the old pipeline road. We drove almost 10 km until we ran across a tree fall that blocked the road completely. So we left the car there and hiked for about 1 hour looking for butterfly aggregations. We had no luck, no aggregations, although the hike was amazing as usual.

It is really weird how I feel right now. I feel a little bit nostalgic and almost don't want to leave this amazing place but at the same time I feel that for now it's enough and it's time to go back to the "civilization". I've met wonderful people and have had amazing experiences here, they all gained a place in my heart. Although I will leave with excitement because after discovering this place and obtained decent research results I have decided to come back next summer!!!

Adventure in the Pacific ocean

We decided to travel to an island off the pacific coast off Panamá. One of the closest Islands groups is called the Pearl Islands. One of these is called Contadora. Contadora was said to be used by the Spanish conquistadors as a stop for taking inventory of booty prior to returning to Spain, hence the name (contador means counter or bookkeeper in Spanish). So we got our plane tickets in a small airport at the city and we took a small fixed wing plane powered by two propeller engines. The island had no airport just a very short airstrip long enough for these small type of planes. It was really quiet with some buildings for tourists and a few restaurants. Beaches were pretty good, soft almost-white sand and clear bluish water. The view from the beach was also pretty nice because there are small island everywhere.

A few walks around this small Island (1 x 1.3 km) and not a single of my butterflies, I saw just a few species but nothing outstanding.

We were told that humpback whales were overwintering around the islands so we hired a boat man an set an appointment for the next day to depart at 9 AM from a beach that is just next to the airstrip (yes there is a beach just under a 40 meters from the airstrip!!). Well the next morning came and it was raining just like if a hurricane was on top of the island... it rained until noon so of course we could not go in our whale "hunting" expedition. So after lunch we went to the beach to see if there was any boatman willing to take us whale watching and we found one! He said well I can't guarantee anything it's almost a matter of luck if we find them. So we boarded the boat and left. We looked everywhere anxiously but nothing, some old floating trunks far away played games with our search sometimes but nothing. After 20 minutes or so I saw what I though it was two whales that barely touched surface, I saw their backs I said. The boatman quickly turned his head in the direction I was pointing and he said "they are there". He put full throttle in that direction so we got to the area and slowed down and started to wait. Suddenly we saw one about 100 meters from us, it was huge!! So we got closer and all of sudden they all started to show up to take some air. The column of water they spray when they breathe is stunning I had no words to express my excitement. They were always about 5-10 meters from the boat. They disappeared again and suddenly a huge one emerged just ahead of the boat! We had it at less than 1 meter and our boat was small, it was just amazing... We took pictures until we got tired, hahaha and then we headed back to shore.

On our way back to Panama we took a slightly bigger plane but the best part of the flight was the landing. It was just perfect the pilot approached the airstrip slowly and we barely felt the contact with the ground. Forgive me for this random paragraph but I'm amazed by planes and I will learn to fly them soon!

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