Santa Rosa National Park/Naranjo Beach

Hi All! I realize it has once again been a lot of time since my last post, but once I get caught up with things here I tend to get out of the groove of blogging regularly. Either way, here are the details of my trip to a tropical dry forest along the west coast of Costa Rica, in a region known as Guanacaste (it’s close to the Nicaraguan border).

Santa Rosa is very different from the cloud forest and rain forests I had visited before – obviously, it was very dry and the trees were generally a lot shorter. There were also loads of scorpions and ants. It sort of reminded me of a more densely forested Texas.  

During this excursion, we camped in Santa Rosa National Park and hiked down to Naranjo Beach to hear a guest lecture about the state of sea turtles in Costa Rica and then watch them hatch that evening. The next morning we would hike back to Santa Rosa and have field lectures about dry forest management and ecology.

Here is what really happened: We woke up early to hike to Naranjo Beach as planned (it was about 13 km or 7 miles). Once we arrived at the beach, we heard about the Tsunami in Japan (which at this time had occurred the night before). They anticipated a potential event on the Costa Rican Pacific Coast (where I was) at around 4 pm. So, we had to turn around and hike back to our campsite, which was at a much higher elevation. Obviously, this was sad on several levels. We had hiked really far, we wouldn’t be able to see sea turtles (my favorite animal), and we had to hike back in really intense afternoon heat. But of course, the real tragedy (the other things I listed aren’t really tragedies at all...) was that such a horrible thing had happened in Japan. It was a strange feeling to know that something so significant had occurred while we were sleeping just the night before, and that we may not have heard about it for a day or two had it not been a threat to us.

Aside from that, everything went as per usual (field lectures, bug bites, more bug bites).  Here are pictures with more detailed captions (there are monkey pictures!!!):

Walking through the park

Spider Monkey

I stalked him for a while...

View point over looking the rest of Santa Rosa National Park

Trying to jump for joy. These sorts of pictures have improved over the semester, as you will soon see.

A look out point on the way down to Naranjo Beach

Naranjo Beach!

Sun set back at the Santa Rosa look out point after returning from Naranjo Beach, the clouds were crazy. 

My Town

Okay, I believe this will be my third and final post for tonight. I’ll write a little bit about the acutal town I’m living in, which is called Atenas.

Atenas is about 30 minutes outside of San Jose and is considered your basic small town. It has a pretty mellow atmosphere, and overall I have really been enjoying it here. Although there are some issues in Atenas, as in any town, the crime rate is relatively low. The heart of the town is the park, which is next to a big Catholic church.

Alright, here are pictures (I guess my descriptions of Atenas were shorter than I thought they’d be…)

Pretty church in the center of town.

The park where everyone goes to socialize

More of the park

Down a side street, note the mountains in the distance.

Poas Volcano

Alright, tonight is marathon posting night – this next post is about my time visiting Poas Volcano.

Poas is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Costa Rica – it recieves around 200,000 to 300,000 visitors per year. Our stay here was fairly short, but it may have been one of my favorite spots. It was at a higher alititude (obviously, I was on top of a volcano after all) so it was cooler and slightly windy, which is the type of climate I love.

While we were there, we mainly had an assignment for Sustainable Economics – we had to distribute ten surveys (five in English, five in Spanish) that asked questions about visitor’s opinions about sustainable tourism, their demographics and their expereince at Poas. Later, I worked with a partner to analyze the responses from all the student’s surveys in the context of a demographic characteristic (this was one of the assigments that kept me away from my blog for so long…).

Okay, that is really all there is to say about Poas. Below are pictures:

Really funky plant that grows abundantly in Poas National Park - casually known as the "Poor Man's Umbrella"

Me posing under a Poor Man's Umbrella - before I had a chance to make a funny face. 

The volcano!

Close up - to give you a sense of scale, my professor said that when he has seen Volcanists down there, they are just tiny, tiny dots. 

Lake Arenal, which is also in Poas Volcano National Park

Back from my Hiatus!

Hey all -

Sorry for my long absence! I've been really busy for the past two weeks - I had a lab report, immediately followed by a weekend home-stay, followed by midterms, followed by a weekend of travel.

This post will be about a trip I took to the Tarcoles River, which is close to the coast of Nicoya Bay. There were parts of it that were very beautiful, but it is horribly polluted. Upstream are lots of farms and industry, both of which withdraw a significant amount of the clean water from aquifers, and then dump a lot of wastes into the river. Consequently, the Tarcoles has 5,000 times the amount of chloroform allowed for irrigation for crops (let's not even talk about potable water standards...). Despite this and all of the trash that was washed to the end of the river/opening of the Nicoya Gulf, there were still many birds, crocodiles and mangroves growing on the river.

This pollution was espeically sad because later in the trip we went to a neighboring town along the coast of the ocean that the Tarcoles feeds into (which, obviously is also highly polluted) and there were children who routinely swam and fished in this water. I'm not sure if it was because of a lack of information, care, alternative choices or a combination. Despite this instance of horrible water pollution in the Tarcoles, Costa Rica's water policies are progressive in comparison to the global status quo for water provisions. Most people have access to water and most places I have traveled to have had potable water. The main issues with the Costa Rican water supply is that there are still places that do not receive adequate water supply for a variety of reasons. Some of the primary reasons are that water taxes are too low to support the infrastructure repair required, water regulation policies are old and outdated and general bureaucratic inefficiency.

It is actually quite the coincidence that I'm posting about water management in Costa Rica tonight because today we were without water at the center. All the students and I returned from our weekend of travel to find that nothing was flowing from our faucets. Luckily, the staff were able to supply us with potable drinking water for the night and all day today. We also have back-up water tanks, so today there was water flowing from the sinks that we could use to flush the toilets and wash our hands, but it is not potable and the supply is limited. To bathe, we jump into a small swimming pool we have here, which does a surprisingly good job. Apparently, this sort of shortage happens occasionally during the dry season because, obviously, there is a naturally reduced water supply, and the town I live in is at the bottom of the water pipe line, so all the towns located above us receive and use up the water first.

Even though I was supplied with potable drinking water and was not too greatly inconvenienced, it gave me a little bit of insight in to what it is like to be without access to clean water (or any water for that matter), which afflicts over one billion people. You realize that there really is nothing you can do when you try to turn on the faucet, you hear a faint gurgle and then nothing happens (and you quickly realize how much you casually use water throughout the day).

Anyway, here are pictures of Tarcoles:

View down the river - we were cruising down on a boat to an area where we would have a field lecture for my Natural Resource Management class. 

More views down the river. So pretty, but so polluted.

One of the many crocodiles we saw along the way...

Bird along the way - forgot the name. 

You know, just waiting on the boat for this crocodile to move so we can have class where he was hanging out...

Where we had our field lecture where the Tarcoles River met the Pacific Ocean/Nicoya Bay. This is where all the trash ends up. 

More views of the trash/debris

This is the seemingly beautiful beach up the coast from the Tarcoles river, which is also sadly polluted.

Monteverde

Okay, here is the dish on my trip to Monteverde last week:

After the windfarm we trekked over to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. So far, this has definitely one of my favorite spots.

As I mentioned before, Monteverde (as you can guess by the name) is located along a mountain chain Costa Rica. It is a tropical rainforest that is usually very moist because there are frequently clouds hanging right above or on top of the canopy. The vegetation is so thick that 38% of moisture never reaches the forest floor, but instead stays in the canopy and on trees. This really moist condition (along with dirt that has settled in the canopy and on tree trunks as well) allows a lot of epiphytes to grow. Epiphytes are plants that grow on top of other plants without needing to extend roots into the soil. Orchids and mosses are examples. I had no idea such things existed until this trip – there are some crazy, sci-fi like things that happen in tropical rain forest…in a later post I will tell you about the strangler fig (I didn’t manage to take a picture of one while I was in Monteverde).

Academically, the biggest project I had at Monteverde was a Tropical Ecology Field Exercise. Basically, my partner and I created a study to conduct at Monteverde. The study was by no means ground breaking (or supposed to be – we ended up investigating whether the odor of wild black pepper plants affected herbivory), but it was very cool to be doing scientific data collection in Monteverde instead of just doing touristy things. Although, sometimes I wished I had had more time to take my time walking through the forest.

Okay, picture time:

Epiphytes growing up a tree

At the continental divide, meaning the ridge of the mountain where on one side the rain shadow effect occurs and a different climate occurs on the other

Another suspension bridge overlooking the canopy. Slowly but surely conquering my fear of heights. 

Wind Farm

Hi everyone,

Sorry it has been a while – I had a lot of school work this week.

Last week I went to Monteverde, which is probably one of the most popular places in Costa Rica to go. It is a rainforest located at a relatively high elevation (about 1,8000 meters about sea level) along a string of mountains roughly located along the center of the country.

I will talk more about Monteverde in my next post because, like last time, we made a pit stop. This time at a wind farm.

Compared to the States, Costa Rica gets an immense amount of their electricity from renewable sources. 90% of electricity is renewable, breaking down into 80% hydroelectric, 15% geothermal, 5% wind and ~1% solar. Energy in general, however, is not quite as impressive. About 33% of all energy in Costa Rica is renewable. Like many countries, the Costa Rican  transportation sector relies almost exclusively on oil. Despite this, I was so surprised that Costa Rica got so much of it’s electricity and energy renewably. Moreover, Costa Rica is only producing ¼ of it’s renewable energy potential. The U.S. , which is the second largest energy consumer (China recently passed us, but remember how much larger the Chinese population is than the U.S.’s. So, not something to be proud of since per capita Chinese consumption is much lower than the U.S.) only generates about 8% of their energy from renewables.

I would like to discuss more about energy, but for now I will just put in some facts about wind energy (which you probably already know):

Pros to wind:

Obviously wind energy has very low/negligible greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. Also, of all energy sources, wind has the lowest operating and construction costs

Cons:

However, wind is intermittent and per unit area is not nearly as powerful as a coal fired power plant. The wind farm we saw generated about 3 MW, while a coal power plant generate several hundred MW over the same time period.

I’m especially interested in energy and hope to maybe do my Directed Research on Costa Rica’s energy sources. Unfortunately, this post is getting a little lengthy, so hopefully I will return to this topic soon.

Okay, here are pictures!

Views from the wind farm

Me gazing in wonder...with my super cool hard hat. 

Views of more wind turbines in the distance

More views from the wind farm. You can see a hydroelectric dam in the distance. 

La Tirimbina

After leaving the Chiquita Farm, we made it to the La Tirimbina National Park on the eastern side of the country. La Tirimbina and the surrounding area is climatically pretty different from Atenas – it's much more hot, humid and the mosquitoes are slightly relentless. Nevertheless, it was a great trip. We all stayed at a lodge (this includes professors and faculty), went for a hike through the National Park and had classes in an outdoor classroom near the lodge. La Tirimbina National Park is your classic tropical rainforest – lots of thick, diverse vegetation. I’ve included lots of pictures with captions:

Views from the lodge we stayed in at La Tirimbina. There is a little green roof at the bottom of the picture, this was another lodge we occupied. 

My Tropical Ecology professor holding a bird. He set up nets that biologists use to safely catch birds during the night, and he showed us this one in the morning. It looks like he is holding the bird tightly, but he was actually very gentle and was able to show us very interesting aspects of bird anatomy. He let the bird peck him saying something (half-jokingly I think) along the lines of "I think it's better for their stress level if I let him just attack my finger".  That night we went to a forested area by a creek and looked at frogs. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera. I also wasn't able to hold any because I had put on insect repellent that day, which will kill the frogs when you touch them. I wasn't too bent out of shape about it - it was something I might rather watch than do. Hopefully later in the program I will feel better about touching amphibians. 

Our outdoor classroom at La Tirimbina. I took this during a break. I didn't post a picture, but there is a beautiful creek behind me. 

Us in La Tirimbina National Park. Yes, that is me clinging for dear life on the huge suspension bridge. I believe it is one of the longest ones in Costa Rica, and possibly Central America. The river pictured flows from Costa Rica into Nicaragua.

Big leaves - something you get a lot of in Costa Rica. This is actually by the outside classroom, not in the park. 

In the understory of La Tirimbina National park - Note how much light the canopy blocks out. I just learned today that it blocks or reflects 99.5% of incoming solar radiation from reaching the forest floor. 

Unreal vines that grow in the forest. 

A mediocre picture of a Howler Monkey.