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are that water taxes are too low to support the infrastructure repair required, water regulation policies are old and outdated and general bureaucratic inefficiency.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.