La Trocha

Hola!

Somehow it's already the end of June.  Not quite sure how that happened.  I've been here for three and a half weeks now, and I'm still learning so much new information every day.

Life updates:

Happy birthday to both my parents!  My dad celebrated his birthday on June 26th, and my mom's birthday is on July 2nd.  Very much wishing I could snap my fingers and be home to celebrate with them 🎊

This week we said goodbye to Scotty, our little white dog.  It was really hard not to be home for that as well 😢

Costa Rica Updates:

I've finally started leading (or co-leading) my own activities!  Which has been going really well.  So far, I've led a guided hike (with Marisa), a farm tour (with Kody, another naturalist), a night hike (with Riley, another naturalist), and a milking tour (by myself!).  There's definitely still so much to learn to improve each of these, but I'm at least starting to feel more comfortable. 

The weather has been kind of funky the past few days.  When I got here, the norm seemed to be clear in the morning, then rainy for a good part of the afternoon/evening.  Yesterday, for example, it just rained on and off all day...including for all of the morning activity I shadowed.  During which my raincoat was nice and safe and dry inside my backpack in the lab 😞

La Trocha

Last week we walked into Santa Elena.  It's about 5 miles away and takes roughly 20 minutes by car.  Sounds pretty easy, right?  You would think so, except that this route includes "la trocha."  "La Trocha" translates to "the trail."  Which sounds so unassuming but in reality is a stretch of road that climbs a mountain at a ridiculously steep angle.  This portion of road is the only part of the mountain road that's paved, and that process took about 2 years.  It's insane.  It's also kind of a rite of passage to climb it here and there are absolutely incredible views.   

So ready before the climb

So steep

There's a small path on the side of the road that leads to this overlook...it was incredible

Climbing back down that path.  You had to be very careful where you put your feet because the stones weren't all secure. 

You also had to stop to take pictures of the pretty flowers (that's me squatting down on the left)

Worth it. 

There were some views that everyone stopped for

Like this one

Chugging along

Who run the world?

Another stunning vista

A bit past the end of "la trocha" lies the Monteverde Cheese Factory.  Which sells, you guessed it, cheese!  And ice cream.  And more importantly for me, sorbet!  It was delicious and a most welcome treat at the end of two hours walking uphill.

Ice cream menu

Most of their cheeses. Danielle, if you're reading this, I took this one for you!

I got guanabana (soursop) and mora (blackberry)

Our next stop was a small shopping area with three shops: CASEM, Whole Foods and a coffee shop.  CASEM, the Cooperativa de Artesenas de Santa Elena y Monteverde, is "a non-profit artisan cooperative dedicated to enhancing the economic and social well-being of local women artists."  It had some really nice items and I'm looking forward to shopping there. 

Beautiful felted birds

  The Whole Foods in this plaza is not exactly like the Whole Foods we have back home, but kind of a smaller Costa Rican version.  And like Whole Foods stores back home, it had a surprisingly nice selection of vegan options.  Which made my day.

I 💓 produce

VEGAN COOKIES (y'all don't know how excited I was...there's always a dessert option with dinner at UGA, and it's obviously never vegan.  All of the desserts look really yummy, but the cookies are the ones that smell the best during the day and therefore the ones that I want the most.  So having my own vegan cookies to snack on after meals was so nice)

They also had vegan cheese...and butter...

Happy place :)

After that plaza, we continued into town and explored some.

Another example of the destruction caused my Hurricane Nate last fall

We stopped at the Monteverde Beer House for snacks and drinks. These yucca fries were amazing.

I made a friend!

We also went to the supermarket to pick up snacks for campus.  I was super excited (see my face in the reflection) when I saw this sign on one of the freezer section doors.  "Mundo vegano" means "vegan world,"  and then it says "meat substitutes," "dairy substitutes," and "vegan ice creams."  I didn't look too hard for all the options, but I did see some coconut milk ice cream that looked amazing.   

We decided to split a taxi back instead of walking back down "la trocha."  I'm not super keen to find out what that downhill would do to my knees.  After only a few hours in town, the incredible vistas we'd passed on the way there were completely covered in clouds.

Crazy looking out the window on the way back

The food at UGA has continued to be fresh and delicious.  There's a nice variety of fruits and veggies, along with many different types of beans.

I thought my dinner that night looked like a rainbow :)

Thanks for reading, everyone!  I hope you all have fun Fourth of July plans 🌞

Bonus photo: huge shout out to Ray for sending me this DAK postcard!  I miss my other home a ton and it made my day to get this in the mail 😊

Stupid pretty

Happy weekend!

You would think that after four years of university education, I would have better words to describe the beauty of a trail.  However, you would be wrong.  The other day Marisa, Wrenn (water quality intern) and I hiked a portion of the Sendero Pacifico and I just kept saying "This is stupid pretty."  I also kept saying "No me gusta" (I don't like), but that was mostly in reference to the downhill portions of the trail that were super steep. 

As I mentioned before, there is an entrance to the Sendero Pacifico not too far from campus.  So after breakfast, the three of us headed out with packed sandwiches and started on the trail. 

Map of the trail

Close up of the portion we hiked.  If you look, we started at the Universidad de Georgia Costa Rica, walked along the road toward the Mini Super and the Heladeria, and then followed the yellow/yellow-red portion to the first bit of the Bosque Eterno de los Ninos (Children's Eternal Rainforest). 

You can see why "stupid pretty" fits, right?

Some parts of the trail looked like fairies belonged there

Some of the trail went right through/along people's land, so we passed several pastures with cows.  It kind of blew my mind, seeing the cows in fields that had such steep hills

We made it to the Children's Eternal Rainforest! We didn't really have any distance goals when we set out, we only knew that we would have to turn around before it got too late to avoid hiking back in the rain.  

Kind of hard to capture in a photo, but an example of how steep some of the sections were.  We just went very slowly and carefully down.  

Lunch with a view

Another example of the destruction caused by Hurricane Nate last year

I think we hiked in total about 8.5 miles.  You can go much farther on the trail and there are places to stay along the way, so I hope I get another opportunity to explore more.  Overall, it was a great day of hiking with friends :)

Bonus photo: this is from our walk back after Zumba last week.  We got lucky and not only was it not actively raining, but the sky was incredible. 

Happy Father's Day! (plus tours)

Happy Father's Day!

To all dads and grandfathers out there, but especially to mine.  I love you both and I'm sorry I'm not there to celebrate today.  I hope you have an excellent day (with lots of good naps 😊).

We've finished most of our formal training at this point (we = Marisa and I, my roommate and the other new naturalist).  We are by no means ready to lead activities just yet, but we've at least seen most of them.  In the coming weeks, we'll continue to shadow other naturalists until we're ready to lead groups solo.  

The other day I got to go on two tours for the first time: one of San Luis, the town in which UGA is located, and one of a local coffee farm/processing area.  Martha, the head naturalist here and our coordinator, drove Marisa and me around town to see everything.  The coffee tour was led by the people who grow and process the coffee and translated by James, one of the other naturalists. 

Things I learned during the San Luis tour:

• San Luis the town contains three different neighborhoods/areas: Alto San Luis, Bajo San Luis, and Invu
• A town in Costa Rica is a town if it contains three things: a church, a primary school, and a soccer field
• Hurricane Nate came through this region last fall and caused a lot of damage, the results of which can still be seen

During the tour Martha pointed out different buildings/homes in this area that we'll need to know.  I mentioned in my last post that naturalists are responsible for home stay drop offs, so our map shows us not only the roads and town buildings but also who lives in which house.  We translate for tours of the coffee farms nearby, so we saw those.  Guests staying at UGA can sign up for cooking classes and to have dinner with a local family, so Martha pointed out the homes that usually host those too. 

The vegetation used to come a lot closer to the stream before the storm

Primary school in Alto San Luis

An entrance to the Sendero Pacifico right down the road from campus

The view while driving around

A more extreme example of the effects from the storm last year

Coffee processing plant

San Luis Community Center.  Town meetings are held here, there's a very small library, and Martha teaches Zumba classes twice a week!

We still had time before we had to be back to campus after seeing much of San Luis, so we continued through Monteverde (one of the bigger towns nearby, with restaurants and hotels) into Santa Elena (another bigger town nearby; also has restaurants, hotels and shops).

View on the way into Santa Elena.  Apparently sunsets here during the dry season are incredible (too cloudy/likely to be raining here during this season)

Mall in town!

Do the people in those "stock photos" look familiar?

Appropriate for today: Happy Father's Day!

View on the way back to UGA

Fun fact: the drive for this tour was so bumpy that my Fitbit tracked ~9000 steps by the time we were done, and I had done barely any other walking during the day.

Later in the day, we shadowed James as he translated a coffee tour of Eliza's farm.

Coffee plants -- Eliza's farm has ~1200 plants

Eliza talking to the group in front of sugar cane

A trapiche, used for processing sugar cane 

The pitcher has the juice that came out of the trapiche from the sugar cane.  The bottle of dark liquid contains sugar cane syrup, the next step in processing the sugar cane.  They call this liquid miel here, which translates to honey (even though it's not actually honey).  The cake/block looking thing with a knife on top is a tapa de dulce, the final processing step.  It's basically a block of cane sugar that can be used in recipes/anywhere you'd use a sweetener. 

Eliza sells her coffee beans to another family in the area.  After visiting her farm, we visited Oldemar's home, where the coffee is processed.

The various stages of coffee processing: the red coffee bean (or cherry), the seeds from inside the fruit (the yellowish pieces), grano de oro (the smaller pieces next to the yellowish ones, literally translates to "golden grain") and the finished coffee beans.  Oldemar sells medium and dark roast coffees, the only difference between which is that the dark roast beans are roasted for an extra five minutes. 

Basically a giant mortar and pestle used to separate the outer layer to get to the grano de oro

Oldemar invited us into his home to try the coffee.  I figured if there was ever a place I would enjoy coffee, it would be there where it had been freshly made from beans picked in the neighborhood and processed right there.
...I still didn't like it   

It was really cool to get to see more of San Luis with a map and have a better idea of where I was.  I also really enjoyed getting a glimpse of the processes that happen here to get some of the items we consume. 

I hope everyone had a good weekend!

Bonus photo: There were empanadas for lunch the other day, which everyone was excited for.  I was too, until I saw there were only cheese and meat options.  When I got my food, the women who work in the kitchen told me they had bean empanadas for me. So I went back into the kitchen and they'd made me two bean empanadas that were delicious and made me so happy :)