Day One

Morning Vistas . . . . .

After a four hour flight to Liberia yesterday (where for the first time in my life I landed in an open-air airport!), we travelled by van for four hours to reach the San Luis Research Station (UGA Costa Rica campus) in the "cloud forest" of Monteverde. The last hour and a half of the bus ride was up a steep winding "road" of large gravel and rock. To navigate the road, the driver had to weave back and forth to avoid the biggest rocks and potholes. I would estimate our top speed at 10 mph, and even at this pace the jostling was an unprecedented experience. Since it was dark when the plane landed, we really didn't see much of Costa Rica until we awoke this morning--and the pictures don't even come close to capturing how breathtaking it is here.

We had an amazing breakfast of fresh papaya, pineapple, and watermelon, a delicious sweet bread with pineapple marmalade and "natilla" (a cross between sour cream and cream cheese-but a little sweet too--made from the fresh cream from the dairy cows here on campus), and beans and rice--which so far has been served with every meal I've eaten here. After breakfast, our first trek was to an amazing waterfall--which once again just can't be caputered in a photograph . . .

The waterfall is actually about three times as high as what I could fit in one frame--so use your imagination a little bit here! The hike up was the most difficult hike I've ever done in my life--complete with rickity, slippery wooden planks for bridges and rocky inclines requiring the use of rope lines in order to scale them successfully. Most of the trail required too much concentration and careful footing to take many pictures along the way, but it was an exciting challenge for which we were richly rewarded in the end. The water was beoyond frigid, but we weren't about to pass up the opportunity to jump in!

After hiking back to the Ecolodge for lunch (where I drank starfruit juice for the first time--yum!), we visited Finca de Bella, or "pretty farm"--part of a 25-family co-op of farmers in the San Luis area. Gilber, the man in the picture below, shared with us the history of the co-op and how the farmers work together as a community to farm in a sustainable, responsible way without pesticides or herbicides and minimal use of fertilizers. Given the ideal rainfall and elevation, the main crop here in the cloud forest is coffee. The picture below to the right shows some of the coffee beans, which are green at this time of year. The beans are ripe when they turn a bright red color. Through the co-op, the farmers are able to sell their coffee for export at fair trade prices. Still, to give you an idea: One plant yields about a half a kilo of beans, and for 46 kilos the farmer will earn about $100. That's about 90 plants. Now, each kilo of coffee will brew about 80 cups of coffee. From 46 kilos of beans, about 3,686 cups of coffee will be made. Starbucks sells a cup for about $1.50, totaling $5,529.00 for the 46 kilos of coffee for which the famer earned $100.00. Crazy.

Also from Gilber's farm . . . . . .. Red platanos, or bananas and papayas.

You'll notice the last picture--the papaya tree--is a little cloudy. And it is, literally, "cloudy." While we were visiting Gilber's farm, the clouds descended and it looked like this in a matter of minutes:

This was naturally followed by a torrential downpour which continued for about the next five hours, off and on.

I'm headed off to my bungalow to catch some sleep. Tomorrow we will be visiting two schools in San Luis and then I'll meet my homestay family. I'll be staying there for two days, and I'm really nervous about my Spanish since I'll be on my own . . .

Buenos noches!