La Selva: The Most Humid Place on Earth*

*this is my guess, but I haven't been everywhere on earth.

 We spent the first week after Spring Break back with our homestay families in San Jose and we had lots of field trips to hospitals and labs and markets. It was a good week and it was nice to see my homestay family and to speak some Spanish. We came to La Selva, the hot, humid field station in the northwest of Costa Rica, on Saturday and we've been busy with classes and field trips all week.

The bridge crossing the river in La Selva. Every day, I walk across the bridge to get to class and see gigantic iguanas and sloths in the trees, plus lots of fish in the water below. I promise to bring my camera along more often.

 Our first trip was to visit a Dole banana plantation. I really enjoyed the trip because I really miss agriculture and because I'm obsessed with anything having to do with production lines. Seeing the bananas floating in the water conveyors to be cut and checked and labeled and packaged was so interesting. And don't worry, the water is recycled. We finished off the tour with a shot of banana liquor, which I actually really enjoyed (unlike most hard alcohol). It tasted a lot like bananas and only started burning once it reached my esophagus.
 On Wednesday, we went into a nearby shanty-town to interview people about their knowledge of Dengue fever and to look for mosquito breeding sites. Dengue is a mosquito-borne virus that causes no symptoms in some, a few days of really painful muscles and fever in some, or a hemorrhagic, life-threatening disease in others. We went door to door and asked people a few questions to gauge their knowledge about Dengue symptoms, transmission and control methods. Once we spoke with them, we asked if we could walk around their yards and gardens to look for bike tires and bricks and other little pools of stagnant water. We found a few nasty little puddles and took samples back to the field station to identify larvae. It was a great (hot, sweaty) day and I really enjoyed speaking Spanish and meeting people and learning more about a disease that has huge repercussions in the tropics.
 The last cool activity of the week was a scavenger hunt for medicinal plants. Our professor went into the jungle and marked some trees that may have fungicidal properties, and marked all the points on GPS units. This morning, we were given the GPS units and sent out to the collect samples. My group got lost (and walked 5km in the boiling heat) and ended up with only one sample, but it was a lot of fun and good exercise.
  That's it for now! I'll be back with more news next week.

Colombia!

I just got back to San Jose after one of the best weeks of my semester and one of the coolest trips I've ever taken.  I finished up midterms in Costa Rica, then spent Monday visiting some museums with a friend and trying to change Costa Rican colones to Colombian pesos because my flight to Cartagena, Colombia was Tuesday evening!  Gabe and I arrived in beautiful, hot Cartagena Tuesday night and stayed until Sunday evening.  We stayed in a little hotel, where the people at the front desk learned who we were and whose roof was outfitted with three Jacuzzis and some hammocks.  We spent two days on the beach, which involved the evil trio of sun, sand and sunscreen, but I really, honestly enjoyed the beach.  The waves were beautiful and the water was warm and it was nice to be able to relax and talk and nap.  My one complaint about the beach was the "entrepreneurs."  We were constantly being bombarded by people who wanted to sell us something (anything).  We were wearing sunglasses, but people would try to sell us sunglasses.  We were eating lunch and people would try to sell us these odd coconut-dessert things.  And though I thought I looked pretty relaxed, women were always trying to give us massages!  At one point, a woman actually grabbed my foot and started rubbing this soapy stuff all over it before I could grab it back and, with the most serious look I could muster, tell her I really didn't need a massage.  She kept saying I was so tense, and I couldn't help but think that may just have been because she grabbed my foot without consent.  But it was a memorable experience and we loved the beach, even with all the attention.

We spent another day visiting a mud volcano- the crater is 28m deep, and full to the brim with lukewarm mud.  We got to float around in the mud for a while, then rinse off in the river.  Once again, there were people trying to give us massages, but we fended them off.  And my skin was so smooth!  We spent that afternoon going on a tour of some mangroves in a little canoe (Gabe and I have both done a lot of canoeing in Latin America).  I promise to get a photo of the mud up here, but Gabe has those.  It was a really great day, and we got to know our tour guide pretty well.  To top of the busy day, we spent that evening riding around the city of Cartagena in a Chiva.  Chivas are open-air buses and, in our case, have live bands playing Rumba music!  We rode around the city for a few hours, with a stop at one of the forts in the city to dance with all the other Chiva-goers and a stop at a night-club, where Gabe tried in vain to teach me to salsa.  I prefer walking.

Finally, we spent a day and a half walking around the old city.  It was so much fun to be in a city with such a rich history.  San Jose, Costa Rica just doesn't have an "old" section and I've forgotten how cool monuments and ruins and history are. Cartagena was a Spanish fort city and we spent a while walking on the "great wall of Colombia" and checking out the forts.

We felt like we were in Europe for much of our walk through the old city.  The streets looked European, our hotel thought it was in Italy and there were a ton of international restaurants.  But then someone would try to sell us a passion fruit (granadilla) or a mango and we remembered where we were.

It was a really great week, not only because Gabe and I were able to spend so much time together, but because we got to see a beautiful, different city.  Now it's back to San Jose for a week, the hot, sticky field station for two weeks, three weeks of a research project, then, unbelievably, the end of the semester.

Panama, Carnaval, Chocoloate and Boats

This week has included Panama, Carnaval, a chocolate factory, and a lot of traveling.  We left Las Cruces (the biological station) on Tuesday morning and headed for Panama.  We crossed the border near the Panamanian town of David, which is in the northwest corner of Panama.  We got to the border and had no trouble getting our “you’re-leaving-Costa-Rica” stamp, but we needed to wait four hours to get the “ok-show-us-your-credit-card-welcome-to-Panama” stamp.  It was a long wait that was not made any more fun by the perpetual smell of urine, the immense numbers of people and the heat.  We finally got to our hotel in David and I ate my weight in arroz con pollo, while my considerably larger professor managed to eat just half of his serving.  It was an important moment because I proved that there is almost no limit to how much I can eat when I’m hungry. 
The next morning, we drove all the way across Panama, from West to East, to visit the Naso Territory.  The Naso are an indigenous people who have, unlike indigenous groups in Costa Rica, never been displaced and still live in their traditional lands.  Also unlike groups in Costa Rica, Panama has not recognized the Naso and their land is not considered an indigenous territory.  A huge hydroelectric dam is planned for their river and we were there to live in the community and hear about the problems faced by indigenous populations in Panama, which are quite different from those in Costa Rica.  We arrived in a tiny town and climbed down a cliff where our dugout canoes were waiting.  These canoes fit about six people and had outboard motors in the back and a guy with a bamboo pole in the front for the areas that were too shallow for the motor’s rudder.  The hour-long ride up the river was really incredible; it was so nice to be on the water and the few sections of rapids and the times I got to help bail out the back of the canoe were memorable to say the least. 
We spent two days living with the Naso in a re-appropriated army camp.  Panama used to have an elite jungle force that trained in the Naso territory, but they abolished their army and the land was turned back over to the Naso, so they use the barracks to house guests like us.  We took “showers” in the river, being careful not to let our shampoo bottles float away and we took a boat trip each day to visit and learn about a different part of the community.
On Saturday, we left the Naso, again by boat but this time with the current, and drove to Bocas del Toro.  Bocas is a very touristy archipelago in the northeast corner of Panama and we were headed there for a day and a half of R and R.  We arrived in a tiny, run-down town and got on (another) boat, this time a slightly more modern marine taxi and took at twenty minute, high speed ride to the main island where we stayed.  We spent that night enjoying the sights, sounds and tastes of Carnaval, the Latin American version of Mardi Gras.  All the students and I, plus our TA took a bus to one of the more remote beaches on Sunday.  Starfish beach was a half-hour bus ride and a twenty minute walk from the main street, but the water was crystal clear, the starfish were huge and we even got to see two wild(?) pigs emerge from the forest.  That morning, my friend Allison and I made two loaves of bread’s worth of PB&J, so I ate four and a half sandwiches, played in the water and got bitten by ants.  It was a nice day that ended with dinner and a bar with our professors.  Monday morning began with yet another boat ride back to the mainland and a bus ride to the border.  This time it took us less than fifteen minutes to leave Panama, cross a bridge and enter Costa Rica.  We were shocked and very pleased and continued on our way to visit the Bribri indigenous community in the southeast corner of Costa Rica.  We arrived, realized that the lowlands of the Caribbean are a zillion times more humid than the Pacific mountains we’re used to, and got acclimated to our fifth “home” in seven days.  We spent the afternoon visiting an indigenous cacao farm and a factory run by a group of women to produce and sell chocolate.  We all saw the whole process, from tree (cacao fruit is really sweet and delicious and nothing like chocolate at all) to bean to chocolate.  It was, as you can imagine, really dark chocolate so I was sneezing my fool head off, but I tried it anyway.  It was really interesting to learn about a very matriarchal society and the ways in which women there have taken the lead and created a stable economy from the cacao production.
Today we had a visit to a Bribri ceremonial center in the morning (in boats again), then one last four hour bus ride to La Selva, the other, larger biological station I have not yet seen.  We’ll be at La Selva until Saturday and we’ll write a huge paper and take midterms there, in addition to some jungle exploring.  Then back to San Jose on Saturday to kill a couple days with my host family and Cartegena with Gabe on Tuesday!  These few weeks are certainly busy and so exciting!  I'll post photos soon, but it's just too overwhelming right now.  Talk to you all soon!