This will be one of my last posts because sadly, I leave Costa Rica on the 20th. Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly, but I haven’t been doing a whole lot that is worth mentioning. Turns out I won’t get to work with the local children. They never ended up coming April 25th because the materials for them weren’t ready. So instead, I have been following around the guides here. I go with them on all the tours and observe them to see what they do, and to get a better feel for how the tours are organized. I have observed the chocolate tour (of course), the night hike, the natural history walk, and the two different bat tours. They have 5 main guides here, but also some workers who used to be guides who are now doing other things around Tirimbina that they can use if they need to. I picked a bad time to start observing tours because the rainy season just started and this is the time of the year where the number of tours decline. Not many people want to go into the middle of the rainforest when it is raining. Go figure.
Here are some pictures from some tours.
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| Chocolate tour |
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| Night Hike |
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| Bat program (Cristhian showing how a nose-leaf works) |
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| Bat tour (Wendy letting people touch the wing of the bat) |
In other news, one of the researchers found a baby squirrel on the forest floor somewhere and now we are taking care of it. If it were up to me, I would have taken some pictures of it, and then let nature take its course. But no, the others who live here said that they wanted to care for it, so we now have a baby squirrel. Conveniently, those who said they would take care of it left for 4+ days, and guess who is now taking care of it? Yup. Me. It has to eat every 4 hours, warm milk from a pipette. And it will cry if it doesn’t. AND you have to make it go to the bathroom by massaging that specific area. As much as sometimes I don’t like the responsibility, (you know, like when it is crying at 3am and won’t shut up) it is a pretty cool experience, and the little critter is pretty adorable.
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| Jackie (4 weeks??) |
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| Not Jackie, but a REALLY cool insect (Rhinocerous beetle?) |
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| Also not Jackie, but a really pretty emerald basilisk |
Also, in other interesting news, there were parties in La Virgen (the town that Tirimbina is in) the past 2 weekends (not including the weekend we just had) where there was a ton of dancing! And I mean legitimate Salsa, Merengue, Cumbia dancing. It was a lot of fun to just go out and dance salsa and merengue for hours! (I am completely inept at dancing cumbia). I am really going to miss dancing like that in the states! Oh, and on one of these nights I ran into the guide I had here when I was here 3 years ago, Fito. It was pretty crazy, and he ended up remembering me and my group, so that was pretty cool. Since then, he has shown me some really cool places nearby that I never knew existed!
I am going to miss a lot of things when I go. But, I will probably do one more post before I go back, so stay tuned!
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