December 23

Continued... Repelling down a waterfall was a little unnerving at first because I was in control of my speed.  As I neared the bottom of the falls, the water was pounding hard on my head.  Standing at the bottom in the falls with water crashing on your head is quite exhilarating.
I did two nature walks at the Bosque Resort.  My favorite was a night time walk with a resident biologist.  We observed spiders, frogs, snakes, scorpions, and all kinds of creatures of the night.  I learned there are geckos that are all females.  There are frogs that give live birth (skip the tadpole stage).  Banana frogs with the deepest croak attract the most ladies so soprano males hang around the bass section in hopes of getting the wingman advantage.  Scorpion shells show up fluorescent in blue light.  If you hold your flashlight at eye level, the light will shine directly into the eyes of little creatures so the sparkles that you see in the grass may not be dew.  They may very well be little eyes staring at you.

After four days of decadence at Bosque, we flew back to San Jose, rented a car, then drove to a valley southeast of San Jose.  We thought we could navigate using maps.  Big mistake.  We drove in a big circle through San Jose.  There are no street signs even for major streets and highways.  GPS got us to our destination at Cachi.  We stayed in a small resort where we were the only guests.  There were over three hundred species of birds in the valley.  Dave's goal was to photograph the motmot.  No luck, but we did see the other 299 species.  The valley was a virtual garden of Eden.  There were small pastures on the hillside.  I think the cows were velcroed to the slopes.  Crazy!  The resort had a series of small trout ponds oxidized by the flowing water from the mountain streams.  Of course, we had trout for dinner.

The next two days were spent in the central highlands in a biological reserve near Dota on the El Savegre River.  We had to descend several hundred feet on a switchback road to the valley floor.  Again, the lodge was quite posh and swarming with birders dressed in khaki cargoe pants, Columbia shirts, and pocketed vests lugging huge cameras and tripods.  The holy grail they were all searching for was the resplendent quetzel.  Look it up.  It really is resplendent.  I skipped the birding tour on this one because my belief is: one should be sleeping at 5:15 am.  I awoke at a reasonable time, enjoyed some delicious Costa Rican coffee, meditated, journaled, and went for pleasant walks. One evening, Dave and I went to a pizzeria 6 km up the hill in a tiny village.  There were two tables, everything was made from scratch, and the hummingbirds provided the entertainment (no TSN).  The owner, cook, and bottle washer, Viktor, made a delicious pizza and prepared a blackberry juice for us. Memorable.

We made our way back to San Jose on the last Thursday of our trip.  On the way, we stopped at a Carpentira Ziplining where I had booked a ziplining adventure.  I was the only patron that afternoon so I had three guides (Juan, Manuel, and Ebby) looking after me.  We laughed, hooted, hollered, sang, and yodeled like hyenas.  There were 11 zip lines and two long repels.  One zip line was 500 meters (short by Costa Rican standards).  Best experience of the trip.  I felt totally alive.

On our last day, we had to be in front of the hotel for 5:20 am because we were being picked up for white water rafting.  We drove over the great divide to the Caribbean side of the country to the Pacuare River Forest Reserve.  The guide was a pro.  He said he had not capsized a raft in ages.  Well, we capsized in a set of Class 4  rapids that day.  After 30 seconds of terror, I made it through the roiling water and between the huge boulders into the pool at the bottom of the rapids with a banged up elbow and a scraped knee.  Merely flesh wounds.  A meal was provided at each end of the journey.  First class treatment with a near death experience!  The trip back to our hotel was a long and arduous one.  There was an accident on the main thoroughfare in San Jose.  The highway was closed so buses and semi trailers were snaking their way through side streets that were as wide as our back alleys.  Our return trip to the hotel took four and a half hours to travel 72 km.

On Saturday, December 15, we flew back to Canada after sitting on the runway in San Jose for two hours with a mechanical issue.  It's all part of the deal with travel...delays, getting lost, and capsizing. Short story...I had a great trip to Costa Rica.

December 19

Ho ho ho.  It's only 6 more days until Christmas Day.  Really snuck up on me this year because I was in Costa Rica for the first two weeks of December.  The holiday was the trip of a lifetime.  Dave, my traveling partner was a wonderful companion.  He had been to Costa Rica five times before; therefore, he knew his way around.  We had long, thoughtful conversations, lotsa laughs, ate healthy meals, imbibed a little, and observed the abundance of nature.  Dave has a zoology degree and he is a birder so I was introduced at a variety of wildlife that I had not witnessed before...pacas, pazotes, Jesus Christ lizards, chacalacas, curusous, peccaries, toucans, red macaws, red eyed tree frogs, cari caris, coo coos, four varieties of monkeys... the list goes on and on.
We arrived in San Jose late in the evening of December 1 then flew to southwestern Costa Rican city of Puerto Jimenez on the morning of December 2.  We spent the first four days at an eco lodge ( Iguana Lodge) on Golfo Dulce.  The days were spent boogie boarding, taking long hikes along the beach, walking nature trails, and of course, enjoying siestas.  There was a group of 12 yoga experts having a retreat at the lodge.  They were from all parts of the US...very friendly and entertaining.  Our accommodation was a casita with a large deck, hammock,screen walls, and lounge chairs.  We were 100 m from the beach so I fell asleep each night to the sound of waves breaking on the shore.  Beautiful.  On our last day at Iguana Lodge, we went on a twilight luminescence kayak tour.  We paddled deep into a mangrove swamp, returned to the Golfo Dulce, paddled until to a remote beach, learned the proper way to crack a coconut, ate fresh pineapple, and then we donned snorkeling masks when darkness fell.  If you swish your hands in the water, the plankton light up like fireflies because of enzymes in the plankton.  We finished the tour by slogging about one kilometer over mudflats to the shore.  Walking calf deep in mud pulling a kayak in total darkness is an adventure in itself. The next four days were spent at Bosque del Cabos on the southern tip of the Osa Peninsula.  Bosque Lodge was quite posh.  No yogis at this lodge...there were 12 photographers participating in a workshop led by a famous National Geographic photographer.  Each photographer was sporting a camera with lenses the size of a stove pipe.  Then there was me with my iPhone 7.  Our casita was perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  The staff were super friendly.  They learned my name and it was, "Senor Alveen, can I get you a coffee?"  There aren't many Alvins in this world that aren't chipmunks, but there was a cook at the resort named Alvin so we had our picture taken together.  While at the Bosque Lodge, Dave and I rode horses to the top of a mountain and repelled 105 feet down a waterfall.  What a rush!  To be continued.