2019 FFT Fellow - Costa Rica

I left Monteverde on an Interbus to San Joaquin Flores, Heredia. I received a great "Costa Rican Massage" on the bus ride. A previous bus driver had described the benefits of riding a bus in their country and said he gave great Costa Rican massages. The roads around Costa Rica are not always of the highest quality. Coming down the mountain was extremely rocky and filled with huge bumps and ruts. Therefore I received a bum massage as I jiggled and bounced along the way. Ha, ha!   I am staying with Elsa in an upper apartment that has my own bathroom! It’s the little things that often make life great. She lives in San Joaquin Flores which is a 10-minute walk from CPI. She is the cook at CPI. Elsa lives next to many of her extended family members. Her two daughters, two granddaughters, two brothers, an uncle, and their families live in the surrounding houses. My apartment has a great view of the mountains surrounding the area.   The noise level is quite high here...

To live a life untamed and unafraid it the gift I’ve been given, and so my journey begins . — Catwoman Even though my journey to Costa Rica started three weeks ago, I still feel this quote fits perfectly. Start each day fresh and ready to learn from your adventures. Always keep learning and exploring.   The Selvatura Tour was a fantastic way to top off my visit in Monteverde. I started the morning with a fabulous hike across eight different hanging bridges. These bridges were not the rickety bridges that require a death grip and a prayer to cross. Rather, they were metal suspension bridges of various lengths. The longest bridge was 515 feet across. The highest was 34 meters above the ground. Three people could walk side-by-side (a width of 1.5 m). Walking across the bridges was actually fun. It was as if I were walking across a trampoline with a little sway and a bounce. Several people walking near each other at the same time would make it a bit more challenging to w...

On Friday night, a group of six women and one seven-year-old boy from CPI went on a two-hour night walk together. The Monteverde Night Tour is on a private reserve in a transitional forest only 1.5 km below the cloud forest. The transitional forest was a different world, one where epiphytes and moss did not cover the trees and the precipitation was less. Much of flora and fauna were different. The lack of epiphytes surprised me the most.   We walked on dirt trails that crisscrossed and meandered throughout the lush woods. Some of the trails were marked only with letters and numbers. There were three different guided groups that went out on the night walk at the same time each with their own guide. The guides had walkie talkies and would announce if they saw a particular creature in the woods. When a guide announced their group could see a sloth, we retraced our steps to go back and see it. We were able to see it, but the third group arrived too late and was not able to ...

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, I walked about 15 minutes to the Bat Jungle. I did a self-guided tour and discovered some amazing facts about bats. Yes, I know bats eat a lot, but I did not appreciate the vast amount they eat daily. At the Bat Jungle, there were three different scales I could step on. The scales showed how much I would have to eat, as a human-sized bat, in order to survive, depending on whether I ate fruit, insects, or nectar. If I were a fruit bat, I would have to eat 475 pounds of chopped bananas a day! If I consumed insects, I would have to go through a 3.75-gallon bucket of bugs. If I drank nectar, I would need to down 180 liters (47.5 gallons) every 24 hours.   Just think about having to drink 90 two-liter bottles of sweet nectar each day! A person my weight should drink 80 ounces of water a day, which is about 2 1/3 liters. Sometimes drinking even that much seems like a lot. The photo shows what my ears might look like if I were a bat. I could definite...

As my last week at CPI comes to a close, I am very wistful. I truly love it here. I love the people. I love the landscape. Returning to Monteverde in the future is definitely in my plans. I feel a part of the community in just the two weeks I have been here.   Monteverde means Green Mountain. The landscape is lush, green, and beautiful. The view across from campus changes by the minute, but it is always breathtaking. On clearer days, I can see the Pacific Ocean. Other times, the clouds dance through the trees or come rolling in above the mountains.   Monteverde was originally settled by Costa Rican farmers. In the 1950s, a group of Quakers from Fairhope, Alabama, settled here. They left the U.S. to avoid being drafted into the Korean War and to avoid paying taxes that support the war. They selected Costa Rica because it does not have an army. The Quakers were the first people to realize the importance of the cloud forest was and to preserve it. They donated the land ...

Mom, close your eyes for the first part of this blog. I will tell you when it is safe to open them again. I visited Herpetarium Adventures right in Saint Elena on Sunday afternoon. I was the only person on the guided tour and learned about snakes, frogs, lizards, and turtles. I can now visually identify if a snake is venomous or not. That is, if I stuck around long enough to look closely at the snake.   There are many snakes in Costa Rica. The Fer de Lance is probably their most infamous snake since it is so deadly. My guide told me that if a person was bitten by one particular Fer de Lance and administered the antidote immediately, he would have about a 20 percent chance of surviving. Not great odds. The Eyelash Pit Vipers were kind of pretty in a weird snake way. They were different colors and had a variety of markings. They have little extensions above their eyes which is why they have eyelash as part of their name. They only had two tanks of the poisonous frogs whi...