Adios, Fila Guinea

Sadly, today marks the end of our time in Fila Guinea as we move to Casa Botania for this evening, and then down to Bahia Drake for New Year’s Eve and Day.  We did a short walk, less than three miles, through the upper part of her village, turning around at the upper school.  We got to see the temporary structure built for graduation, and for bingo.  It is still there, despite school being out until February.

It was quiet, almost deserted, and the few people we saw we either preparing for church, or moving around with Sunday ease.  We walked by the now defunct Soda and Internet Cafe, both of which went out of business in the past few months. 

Once done with our nearly three miles, we packed up, Darien did an exercise tape, and we loaded up the car.  We fed the grand-kitty one last round of soft cat food (which she glommed up quickly), left some crunchy food, and headed back to the recycling building to drop off our most current load.  We then did a repeat trip to the Mexican restaurant across from the San Vito bus stop, where we waited for Aaron to return from San Jose.  Sigh.  No more grand-kitty for a while.  =[

From here we went back to the Wilson Botanical Gardens in the outskirts of San Vito.  If you read the blog last year, you know the botanical garden is part of  the Las Cruces Field Station, and it has beautifully diverse tropical and subtropical plants, and offers views of unusual plant families and rare and endangered plants from Costa Rica and other parts of the La Amistad International Park. Today, rather than go the typically marked trail of flowers, we headed instead to the bird watching tower, and then down to the stream (where you should only go if you have permission due to being overnight guests).  The tower seems to max out at over 34 feet, in fact, closer to 45.  We didn’t see many birds, but there was quite a view of the valley and mountains.

From here, it was back to Casa Botania, a bed and breakfast where we had a beautiful meal last year.  Tonight we stay in the two bungalows down from the main building, and enjoyed a three course meal prepared by its owners.  The view from our bungalows is spectacular.

If you read the blog last year, you may remember that Casa Botania is a Bed & Breakfast located about half between the Wilson Botanical Garden/Las Cruces Biological Station and the town of San Vito de Coto Brus.  The B&B is run by Kathleen and Pepe, a young Tico-Belgian couple who have an adorable son named Elias and a furry dog named Loba, and is situated on a mountainside in the Linda Vista neighborhood and enjoys a splendid and spacious view of the valley, as well as the primary forest reserve of Las Cruces.

The B&B stresses renewable resources (we have solar powered lights outside the cabins, and the interiors are very natural), and really has a family feel to it.

Sunset was particularly spectacular.

For dinner, we were treated to a fabulous three course meal - soup or fish appetizer, lamb or chicken tikka masala for the main course, and dessert was a banana flambé or chocolate mousse.  Quite to die for.  Kathleen’s parents are here in San Vito right now as well, her father makes an excellent “digestive” reminiscent of lemoncello for post-meal consumption, and her mother makes jams for the breakfast meal.  I believe that I will be looking forward to that meal, and think I should probably try to burn off another thousand calories or so in the morning.Following the end of our meal, we retreated to the cabins, where the boys will be watching the Redskins play the Cowboys, and I will be writing in the blog, and Darien will be reading on her Kindle.

Tomorrow it is off to the beach and the land of working hair dryers - although I will miss San Vito.  To think that if Darien had not been posted here, we would never have made it to Costa Rica.  For shame!

Sleep tight all, and here’s hoping that the Redskins win!

Touring the communities with Darien

Today has actually been a fairly easy, laid back day.  We were up with the sun (not that that ever changes), and ate early in order to leave the house by 7 a.m.  We were going on Darien’s long hike this morning, which took us down through the lower part of her community, then to Monterrey, then Fila Mendez, where her Peace Corps compatriot Jessie lives.  We revisited the car ditch of last year, and saw that it had been filled in quite well this time around.  Still, don’t think that we will be driving there any time soon.

The house near the lower school had wild turkeys it the front yard!

As we walked along, many people commented on the fact that we were indeed walking, and exercising.  There was no shortage of people either honking hello, or offering a ride to one destination or another.

A lot of improvements in the schools from the last visit, the lower school received a grant of about $8K to build a new greenhouse, and all the other schools we saw also had greenhouses.  The roads have been greatly improved all over as well.  Who knows, perhaps in the next 5 years or so, there will be paved roads as well.  Darien was remarking that Fila Guinea, along with the other communities, seems overbuilt, and she really enjoyed our trip up the mountain the other day.  I must say the views were breathtaking.

Along the road, we were reminded of home a bit as well.

It is so very hard to choose which vista is the most beautiful here, each offers its own breathtaking scenery, rolling hillsides, lush greenery and beautiful skies and clouds.  The clouds can remind us, though, that downpours can be sudden and fierce, and then end as quickly as they started.  We had that happen early in the morning when we put the wash on the line outside.  Oh well, second freshwater rinse never hurt anyone.  And the sound of the rain on Darien’s roof (which is metal) is soothing and peaceful, especially when it’s bedtime.

My friend Jaime, master of the ceviche, stopped by late in the morning to tell us the ceviche ordered yesterday is not ready, but that he would be by with this and that at some time.  Have to love how the islands are so similar to here.  And Micronesia.  It makes me long to go back to Ponape, which will eventually happen, to The Village.  But we are relishing our time here.

Back at the house, we did laundry, hung it out, had tamales for lunch, and contemplated a nap in the strong heat of the afternoon.  Tonight will be pasta and some of the dorado Jaime brought yesterday for purchase.  And ceviche! Plus organizing the packing so that we have our checked bags ready and locked away before we start our final five days of adventure at Casa Botania, in Bahia Drake, and back to Manuel Antonio. 

Wishing everyone a great day, and an enjoyable birthday shout-out to Dianne back in Hawaii!

A small side trip

Well, the morning was an early one, but not too terribly early.  We had a breakfast ready to go for us at 6:30, and then the car was packed up and ready to go by 7:30.  It was a difficult night sleep pretty much for all, but we still were energized by the view and the crispness of the air, not to mention Yami’s coffee, made in the traditional Costa Rican sock method.

Then it was a much quicker trip down the mountain to San Vito in order to drop off the Luces for their return to San Jose, and then to Maryland.  It was a good trip meeting them, and we did enjoy the time we spent together.

After a cups of coffee, cocoa or tea, we dropped the Luces off at the bus station, and we headed off to Panama.  My blisters were absolutely killing my heels, so it was my fervent hope to find some first aid tape quickly.  Not quite so lucky.  It took walking the entire (short) town, and going to its largest supermarket.  The town of Sereno is definitely not very large, and it has a dearth of first aid tape.  But not a dearth of Spam.

I got a nice view of Panama as we were headed to the fried chicken restaurant (yes, Wayne was even going to eat fried chicken, sprayed liberally with hot sauce).  Although the restaurant was closed, the view was not.  We left Sereno with relatively little damage monetarily, and headed back to San Vito for lunch.  It is funny how bad the iPhone Map app is, you have to see where it placed us vice where Google Maps placed us.

Once we did that we came back to Darien’s place, did laundry, I wrote the blog, we had a visit from Jaime the local ceviche purveyor (he only had dorado today, no ceviche, but he will bring 3 tomorrow).  Darien said that Jaime almost never comes to the home, but he called out as she went out that he knew her parents were here...I guess he remembered the gazillion cups of ceviche we bought last year.

Wayne is checking out the website for the Bahia Drake Wilderness Resort where we will be headed for New Year’s Eve and Day.  Breakfast sounds totally yum, so we will have to do a lot of hiking while we are there!

Dinner tonight is sausages and homemade tortillas, plus leftover salad.  Should be good, especially since I brought my Gulden’s mustard packets.

Good meals and dreams to everyone!

En La Cerro

That little frog has made blogging and communicating much easier this visit.  In the indigenous language, kolbi means little frog.  In actuality, it is the face of the Costa Rican government-run electricity and telecommunications services provider, Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad.  We have had 3G, texting and voice capability locally since we arrived on site, and were able to secure it (and we could have also rented a smartphone) well before our journey here.

No rest or early morning walk for the wicked today, for we were on the way to Cerro Pittier, the mountain that you can see outside of Darien’s front door each morning.  We were headed up to the Hospedaje Cerro Pittier, which is on the Costa Rican side of the Parque Internacional La Amistad (La Amistad International Park), which is in both Costa Rica and Panama.  The drive took the six of us past the Agua Calientes in which we indulged last year, and all the way up the mountain. Mount Pittier is 8,796 ft high, and it ranks as the 1st highest mountain in Puntarenas and the 27th highest mountain in Costa Rica.

The park is a transboundary protected area, and management is shared between  Costa Rica and Panama based upon a recommendation by UNESCO after the park was included in the World Heritage Site List.

The park area is almost equally split between Costa Rica and Panama, as part of the former La Amistad Reserves of the Talamanca mountain range. It covers 401,000 hectares (4,010,000,000 square meters) of tropical forest and is the largest nature reserve in Central America  It is strategically located in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, and its buffer zone includes coffee and beef producers and indigenous subsistence farmers.  If you choose to enter the park from our location on Mount Pittier, you can hike for 12 days and reach the Caribbean side.

We got the best directions of the trip on the way to Hospedaje Cerro Pittier, a rural tourism lodge.  We had just gone past some troublesome boulders, and were about to cross a rickety narrow bridge, when Darien called the lodge.  It turned out that we were on the right path, and we needed to follow the lights up the mountain.  Which we did.  And we arrived to one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen.

The lodge can host up to 14 guests, has a bedroom with a double, a room with four bunk beds, and a room with 8 bunk beds.  Another 4 people were coming in that night to stay, so we opted for the double and the 8, as suggested by our hosts, Olivio and Yami.  There was a large outdoor area for cooking and serving guests, a corral with two horses, a hammock, and a nice open kitchen area, behind which is a room where the owners sleep.

The area itself has only four families who live there, most moved away many years ago.  I think that’s because power was only brought up to the mountaintop about 3 years ago.  The lodge itself only opened 2 years ago.  Yami told us that next year the municipality would be paving the roads, or at least improving them.  Who knows how long a year really is in Costa Rica....and yet, despite all this, the lodge has a satellite dish, and the boys were able to watch soccer (British), basketball (Spanish) and “Gangnam Style” that they could handle.

After a snack, we headed out on a hike into the preserve.  We had the opportunity to go uphill to the waterfall, or to take the more moderate trail to the stream.  It’s a good thing we took the route to the stream.

We saw jaguar tracks, wild boar tracks, the rootings of a tapir (but none of those animals), and we actually saw white faced monkeys, which are kin to spider monkeys, jumping along the trail.  As we were about 40 minutes into the hike, Olivio said that there was about a 30 minute hike to take us down to the stream.  An hour later we stopped and assessed, and there was a vote (won’t say by whom) to tie a certain someone up at the stream bed if we didn’t get there soon...it was about a kilometer away, so we went.  Wayne and Darien crossed the stream to get to the warm springs, and the rest of us waited.

From there, we headed back up, albeit a little tired.  Wayne did a good deed as we were about halfway there, and ran the rest of the way back to the lodge to bring back water.  When he got back, many were happy, and he was very sweaty.  We were a short way from being back, and enjoying a fabulous meal cooked by Yami (who did all the cooking and most of the cleaning, from what I could see).  Total reward!  The trout was fresh, the bananas fried, and red beans and rice were seasoned with mustard leaves and local limes.  Oh, and when we returned, Yami asked Olivio where we had gone, and expressed great surprise that we had all ventured down to the stream....hmmm.....and poor Darien and I, who had bravely become tica hikers (aka barefoot in our boots), suffered blistered heels.  They should eventually heal.  I have to say that I missed the friendly Ranger, Harlan Kredit, as our guide here did not stop and have us ask questions in order to catch our breath.  Instead, he waited for the group to catch up, and then took off again.

After this, we took turns using the shower and cooling off.  The shower had the same heating unit as the one Darien installed in her home.  It was nice and warm, even after five people.  And as we finished getting ready for dinner, there was the most spectacular sunset.

Breathtaking.  And the moon was just as lovely.

We finished our “grilled meat” dinner, and trudged off to bed.  I was more apt to retire early, as I had managed to knock my head twice on the stairs following Darien.  Only I could do that.  Apple, tree and all that.

Wishing everyone pleasant dreams!

So where are the two turtle doves?

We did hear several Tucan, though.

Wow, another night of vivid dreams last night.  This time, the dreams revolved around Elaine’s stories of her time teaching English (the bit about the boy on the bicycle) and Harry Potter.  And no Panamanian sec to blame this time!  It seems as though I am catching up on some much needed sleep.

Even my voice is finally next to normal.

This morning’s walk was decidedly shorter than yesterday’s, only about an hour instead of nearly three, but we covered over 2 miles, so it was worthy.  We walked down the back of Darien’s hill, down the road and to the bridge, and then back up again to the pulperia. 

Once back, I was on a mission for Lizano salsa and an electric Baygon mosquito wall plug-in.  It took walking to two different pulperias, but the mission was successful, and we are now prepared for future foreign travel in lands with mosquitos.

From here, we began the mission of going to the recycling center - Darien has to burn her trash here, so she winds up burning paper products, some tinfoil and some other products, but the majority needs to go to a recycling center in San Vito, Asociacion Inclusion Sin Exclusion.  We separated the products, loaded up the car, and headed into San Vito.  First stop was the bank teller, second stop was the local Mexican restaurant (which Darien calls Mexican/Costa Rican, and Wayne termed MexiRican), which had some wonderful food.

The recycling center was amazing - they are taking in all the products, and either using them to create new plastics, sending papers to China to build walls, grinding up plastics to make other items, or sending product to Guatemala for reuse.  A Japanese company sponsored sending over machinery to help break apart the plastics, and to do fine machinery tooling once the refuse is broken apart.  They reap 1,000 Colones for each kilo of plastic that is broken down and sorted.  There is also an IMAS project for students who have to do community service hours, and the service would include 100 hours per month at the reclamation facility.  That would help with making more, and generate more revenue.  They are also recycling and using all plastics, 1 - 9.  They make the plastic benches using a combination of numbers 1 and 9.  Imagine this - they do this very well in CR, it is a shame that they cannot translate it to places like Hawaii.  In some ways, our “developed” country is far behind emerging countries.                              

Last stop of the afternoon was to the grocery store for some cooking supplies, and to the liquor store for a gift for Manolo and Maria-Emilia, good friends of Darien who definitely watch out for her.  Maria-Emilia is a teacher at the high school, and a very good friend.  Go figure what we found there…Spam!

Tonight we dine on leftover chicken, pasta and sauce, and will spend a relaxing evening prior to going to Cerro Pittier for an overnight with Aaron’s family prior to their return to the cold east coast.  Sleep well, all!