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.